Joukhadar plunges the Western reader full force into the refugee world with sensual imagery that is immediate, intense, and...
The story of a contemporary girl's flight into exile from the Syrian civil war is deepened by the parallel tale of a 12th-century girl whose journey of discovery covers the same geography in Syrian-American writer Joukhadar's ambitious debut.
The poem in the shape of Syria that opens this novel—“O / beloved, you are / dying of a broken heart”—sets the tone of deep-rooted melancholy for the story that follows. Twelve-year-old Nour was born and raised in Manhattan by immigrant parents, her mother a cartographer and her father a bridge designer. Shortly after her father’s death from cancer in 2011, her mother moves Nour and her two older sisters, Huda and Zahra, to Homs, Syria, where they have relatives to help out. But soon bombs are dropping in Homs. As the family takes flight, Nour comforts herself with a fairy tale–like story her father used to tell, and Joukhadar weaves it into the narrative. "Everybody knows the story of Rawiya," she writes. "They just don't know they know it." The heroine, 16-year-old Rawiya, left her home in Ceuta—a Spanish city in North Africa where Nour’s parents once lived—to avoid starvation. Disguised as a boy, she apprenticed herself to al-Idrisi—an actual 12th-century mapmaker—as he traveled around charting trade routes. The route of Rawiya’s story corresponds with Nour’s as she finds and loses refuge in Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria. Passing as a boy for safety’s sake, as Rawiya did, Nour endures cold, hunger, and red tape. Though she lives at the epicenter of world crises, what affects her day to day are more personal crises experienced in bus terminals, small groceries, and dusty streets. More dramatically, her sister Huda is injured by a bomb and sexually attacked by a gang of boys; a family friend drowns when a ferry to Egypt catches fire. While Rawiya had a romantic adventure, Nour experiences the terrors of being a refugee. Yet both are fatherless girls growing into young womanhood, and they share a similar search for the meaning of home, both physical and spiritual.
Joukhadar plunges the Western reader full force into the refugee world with sensual imagery that is immediate, intense, and at times overwhelming.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6903-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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