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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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