THE WEIGHT OF PARADISE

Name: THE WEIGHT OF PARADISE
Author: Iman Humaydan
ISBN: 978-1-56656-055-9

by Iman Humaydan ; translated by Michelle Hartman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 29, 2016

Humaydan’s newest novel is an engaging, if sometimes-clunky, portrait of life in one battered corner of the Middle East.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

bookshelf

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.