PARADISO 17

In a sweeping, deeply personal novel based on the life of Assadi’s father, a Palestinian exile roams from the Middle East through Europe and America, picking up and discarding identities, always yearning to find his true home.

But what is home? That is the idiosyncratic Sufien’s central question, one he still struggles to answer from his deathbed while recalling his life journey. In 1948, 5-year-old Sufien flees Palestine, first to a Syrian refugee camp, then to Kuwait when his father gets an engineering job. At 17, he goes to Italy to study, renaming himself Franco Leone, but lack of money cuts his schooling short. He ends up in New York City driving a cab. He marries, has a daughter, and relocates to Arizona, where he remains until returning to New York for medical care. The outline of Sufien’s experience fits within the conventions of Palestinian diaspora fiction, but the particulars of his life will surprise readers. He loves life in the refugee camp. In Italy, he hangs out with radical anti-Zionists but also meets his lifelong best friend, Bernard, who happens to be a wealthy American Jew. So is Sufien’s eventual wife. With each move and each new relationship, Sufien believes he's found his home, until he changes his mind. While he confronts external disasters—the loss of his family’s 600-year-old home, his father’s financial ruin, prejudice, cancer—he has a safety net in Bernard, who pays his way to New York and bails him out of every crisis. As rendered in Assadi’s dreamy, lyrical, sometimes over-the-top prose, Sufien is thoroughly beguiling—charming, smart, funny, and spiritual—but suffers from melancholia. With age, his charms lag. He drinks too much, commits adultery, takes out loans he shouldn’t and makes terrible business decisions. Nevertheless, family and friends never stop loving Sufien. Neither does the reader.

With a generous vision, Assadi has created an unforgettable character in a multidimensional world.