Humaydan’s newest novel is an engaging, if sometimes-clunky, portrait of life in one battered corner of the Middle East.
A suitcase found in an old Beirut building changes one woman’s understanding of her city, her life, and the world at large.
The fourth novel by Humaydan (B as in Beirut, 2007, etc.) alternates between the war-ridden Beirut of the late 1970s and the same city some 20 years later, now beset by reconstruction crews. As in her earlier works, Humaydan is concerned here with the lives of women: their losses, struggles, and victories. She interweaves the stories of a few women separated by time and circumstance. She begins with Maya, a writer and maker of documentary films, who has recently moved back to Beirut after years spent in Paris. In the midst of researching a film about Beirut’s ongoing reconstruction, Maya comes across a suitcase hidden in an old, abandoned, bombed-out house. Inside the suitcase she discovers the diaries of a woman named Noura Abu Sawwan, a journalist who apparently died in a car bombing in 1978. Tucked in with the diaries are letters from Noura’s lover, Kemal, as well as photographs and other documents. Maya becomes obsessed with the cache, piecing together Noura’s story by way of the various documents. She even finds one of Noura’s old friends, Sabah, still living in Beirut, and goes to interview her. Through these three women, Humaydan is able to present a kind of mosaic of women’s lives in Beirut as well as in Damascus and a small Turkish village from which Noura and Sabah emigrated. She shows the various degrees to which these women have and have not escaped oppression. Her portraits are sensitive and frequently moving. Unfortunately, Humaydan can also be heavy-handed, prolix when her meaning was already implicit. Her handling of the narrative is sometimes-clumsy, with chapters that seem to lurch open and closed. A little more finesse, or at least fine-toothed editing, could have improved the pacing of the prose. The end is rushed. Still, Humaydan writes incisively about her characters and their fears, frustrations, and, most importantly, their hopes.
Humaydan’s newest novel is an engaging, if sometimes-clunky, portrait of life in one battered corner of the Middle East.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56656-055-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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