tries to meet loss in the eye, not just the loss of the lover but also that of the self and the others gripped in the chaos around her. Razi’s decentered, fluid narrative perfectly matches the mood and experience she is trying to capture. It, however, sometimes feels too much: too many shifts happening, in time (as well as verb tenses) and in perspective ; too many people and events that are touched upon without becoming flesh and blood for us to be able to grasp them; and too much philosophizing that after a while can feel empty. You might find yourself yearning for more concrete grounding. If you are patient and willing to tackle the confusion, though, you will be able to think and feel so much within the distressed, exploded reality that is the beautiful inquiry of Vis & I. Poupeh Missaghi New York City Hala Alyan. Salt Houses. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 312 pages. For a debut novel, Salt Houses is a sophisticated one with an interesting plot and welldeveloped characters. It deals with one of the world’s most complicated and continuing problems, namely, that of the Palestinians suffering from the loss of most of their country to Israel and attempting, as refugees , to reconstitute their lives elsewhere. It is written in a lyrical style by an award-winning author of three poetry collections, Hala Alyan, a teacher at New York University and a practicing clinical psychologist. Dr. Alyan is also an impressive performer with several talks and appearances to her credit. Salt Houses tells the story of four generations of a Palestinian family, the Yacoubs, who originally lived in a villa in Jaffa on the Mediterranean seashore until the 1967 SixDay War forced them inland to Nablus as refugees. When in 1963 mother Salma reads the future in the dregs of her daughter, Alia’s, coffee cup on the eve of the latter’s wedding, she sees her forthcoming uprooted life and her children’s; she does not tell her of that, but it comes to pass in the 1967 war. Alia and her husband, Atef, who moved to Kuwait and had three children, are uprooted in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invades. They lose their home—again— and scatter to Boston, Paris, and Beirut, where they and the grown-up married children start new lives in foreign cities, mostly apart from one another, with painful problems of assimilation, though with some occasions of better opportunity. In this novel, Hala Alyan has effectively portrayed half a century of the Palestinian diaspora with much of its agony and human suffering that daily newspapers do not narrate when reporting on current events related to the Palestine-Israel conflict. Her novel should be read by all those who, with a sense of responsibility, need to know real people’s feelings and predicaments. Issa J. Boullata McGill University Omar El Akkad. American War. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2017. 333 pages. Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, envisions a twenty-first-century United States that has been literally and figuratively Akinwumi Isola Treasury of Childhood Memories Trans. Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith Pan-African University Press Akinwumi Isola steps back into his childhood in Yoruba to recount thirteen stories of the antics and adventures of the adolescent boys with whom he spent his youth. His lyrical prose re-creates the memories of friendship and community that have been buried underneath the passing years and changing times, teasing out a better understanding of his world in the process. Omar Robert Hamilton The City Always Wins MCD / Farrar, Straus & Giroux During the 2011 revolution in Egypt, Mariam and Khalil are at the core of the action, fighting for their ideals, their city, and each other, but all that becomes jeopardized when the regime begins to unravel. Omar Robert Hamilton crafts the crackling atmosphere of being at the cusp of a dramatic, historical change. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 77 reshaped by such forces as the climate crisis and globalization. Literally: as a map at the beginning of the book vividly illustrates, by 2075, major portions of the US have been submerged by rising sea levels. Figuratively : in the midst of a second Civil...
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Open Access
Jan 1, 2020
Xianghan Wang + 2
