A potent debut.
Audacious, no-holds-barred account of a Palestinian family’s suffering during 60 years of Israeli occupation.
In 1948, Yehya Abulheja, prosperous farmer and patriarch of a family that for 40 generations has occupied Ein Hod, a village near Mount Carmel, worries only about the coming olive harvest and his son Hasan’s marriage to an unsuitable Bedouin girl, Dalia. All is forgiven when Dalia bears sons Yousef and Ismael. Dismissing rumors that Jewish immigrants plan to establish their own state, annexing Palestinian lands, the Abulhejas are stunned when Ein Hod is shelled and its residents herded into a refugee camp at Jenin. During the forcible eviction, baby Ismael is snatched by an Israeli soldier desperate to help his despondent wife, a Holocaust survivor rendered sterile after repeated rapes by the SS. The couple renames the child David. Hasan and Dalia’s daughter Amal, Abulhawa’s protagonist, is born in Jenin. Ismael’s kidnapping has cost Dalia her sanity; Yehya is shot for trespassing on his former land; and Hasan disappears during the Six Day War in 1967. Yousef encounters David, an Israeli soldier whose facial scar resembles Ismael’s. After repeated beatings and torture by Israeli soldiers, including David, Yousef joins the PLO resistance fighters. Following Dalia’s death, Amal’s scholarly bent propels her from a Jerusalem orphanage/school to college in Philadelphia. She reunites with Yousef, his bride Fatima and their daughter Falasteen in Shatila, a Lebanese refugee enclave, where she teaches Palestinian children, marries Majid, a young doctor, and becomes pregnant. As Israel’s attacks on Lebanon mount, Amal returns to the States, intending to arrange for her family to follow. Soon, though, Majid perishes in the bombardment of Beirut and Fatima and Falasteen are slaughtered by the invaders. Yousef, a suspected terrorist, vanishes. In a fog of grief, Amal struggles to nurture her infant daughter, Sara. David reaches out in remorse to Amal, and a precarious healing begins.
A potent debut.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-046-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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