THE BLUE BETWEEN SKY AND WATER

Name: THE BLUE BETWEEN SKY AND WATER
Author: susan abulhawa
ISBN: 978-1-63286-221-1

by susan abulhawa ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2015

While a folk tale–like spirituality infuses the storytelling, readers’ enjoyment will mostly depend on how they react to...

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Abulhawa (Mornings in Jenin, 2010) mixes magical realism, family melodrama, and politics in her storytelling about several generations of Palestinian women trying to survive in Gaza before and during the Israeli occupation.

In 1948, soldiers from the newly established state of Israel attack the village of Beit Daras, raping and killing without remorse. Among those killed is Mariam, an unusually gifted child who has been taught to read and write by her friend Khaled. Mariam’s sister, Nazmiyeh, assumes Khaled is imaginary until his picture appears in a photograph. Khaled is somehow reborn or transmitted into Nazmiyeh’s grandson Khaled, born in 1998. By then, Nazmiyeh’s brother, Mamdouh, has moved to America. His son, Mike, marries a Castilian-American, with whom he has a daughter, Nur. After Mike’s death, Mamdouh wins custody of Nur but dies before he can return with her to Gaza. As a child, Nur experiences one travail after another, including an unloving “narcissist” for a mother, sexual abuse, and a string of foster homes. But she makes it through graduate school to become a therapist. Eventually, drawn by her Palestinian roots and her attraction to a Palestinian doctor, Nur ends up in Beit Daras, where she studies the case of a young boy who has fallen into a “coma-like" condition since an Israeli attack. The boy is Khaled, but Nur is at first unaware of their family ties. Nur’s personal drama intertwines with not only her family's story, but with all of Gaza’s struggle against the Israelis. In italicized sections, Abulhawa not only explains events in the narrative through Khaled’s perceptions, but also gives what seems to be her own take on key moments in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

While a folk tale–like spirituality infuses the storytelling, readers’ enjoyment will mostly depend on how they react to Abulhawa’s violently anti-Israel and slightly milder anti-American perspectives.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-63286-221-1

Page Count: 305

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
EVERY MOMENT IS A LIFE
edited by susan abulhawa & Huzama Habayeb ; translated by susan abulhawa & Kay Heikkinen

- BOOK REVIEW
MORNINGS IN JENIN
by susan abulhawa

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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...

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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
TOM'S CROSSING
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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.