RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksDespite its unmistakable investment in (and affinity for) Palestine, Against the Loveless World isn’t what I would call a political novel. It’s a meditation on love and alienation in a setting that is by nature political, or imbued in multilingual politics, facing the West in audacious vulnerability. Its poetics can be harsh and its heartbreaks can be soothing. Such is the burden and blessing of the Palestinian novelist ... a tense but readable novel. The language alternates between exhilarating and contemplative. It relies almost completely on the strength of its narrator, but she is up to the challenge, guiding readers through histories fraught with tragedy and dispossession. I don’t view it strictly as a novel about Palestine; it’s more like a Palestinian statement of purpose ... We are given the opportunity to read Nahr’s life in a language foreign to American mythologies of progress and civilization. The entire book is a glossary ... Abulhawa provides a dynamic and challenging exploration of political violence, one that spans multiple geographies and periods of time ... Abulhawa delivers these cadences in prose that at first seems too beautiful for what it describes. In time, though, the reader comes to understand that the juxtaposition of beauty and suffering is essential to the novel’s geography — both the tiny cell from which Nahr narrates her life and the occupied country surrounding it. In the end, beauty prevails. We’re pushed to understand that the same fate awaits Palestine, which is, after all, the novel’s greatest affirmation of love.
