RaveNew York Review of Books[A] complex, suspenseful story of Palestinian homecoming ... Hammad does a wonderful job of depicting the dynamics of rehearsals ... Hammad’s novel depicts a strikingly rich and complicated spectrum of Palestinian identity and experience.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah
RaveThe New York Review of BooksTo read it is to be impressed, over and over, with the writer’s combination of honesty, originality, and humility. It is to be amazed by how often Abd el-Fattah is right, not in the sense that he knows what to do, but in the sense that he so often sees the truth of each messy, polarizing, often hopeless juncture. His writing is sharp and funny, passionate and vulnerable, straining generously to find something useful to say ... an invaluable record of events in Egypt in the past decade, of the evolution of a leftist, humanist, internationalist thinker, and of the efforts of a remarkable person not to come undone in the face of overwhelming injustice.
Leila Slimani Trans. by Sam Taylor
MixedThe New York Review of BooksSlimani has said that she writes about what she fears. In Adèle it is the gaping emptiness under the veneer of a perfect life and the danger and sloppiness of sex. Adèle is a queasy story in which everyone is miserable and unlikable. The protagonist seems to get no pleasure from her addiction; the cycle of her encounters, lies, regrets, and backslides is at first gripping and then becomes, perhaps intentionally, a joyless slog. Adèle’s pathologies are nebulous and her psychology purposely opaque. Her husband, who is besotted with her but uninterested in sleeping with her, comes to seem equally, mysteriously unbalanced. The writing about sex is graphic without being erotic; in fact it is often overwrought or confounding.
Alessandro Spina, trans. by André Naffis-Sahely
PositiveThe NationAn unjustly-neglected Libyan novelist captured the twisted logic of colonialism, past and present ... a deep and singular account of the great historical fractures that preceded the establishment of Moammar El-Gadhafi’s Jamahiriya in 1977 ... Spina saves his sympathy for those who wish to force their way into Libyan culture, even as they know their wish to be foolish and culpable ... Spina’s prose itself is theatrical. He can set the stage quickly ... His stories have great beginnings and endings, the curtain snapping open and shut upon dramatic scenes; his characters make memorable entrances ... Spina’s descriptions are sharp and elliptical, but his dialogue can belabor the point ... For hundreds of pages, time stands still.
Ahmed Bouanani
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksSome of The Hospital’s strangest and most moving passages are those in which the narrator, in what seems to be a fever dream, slips back into the skin of the child he was ... Sometimes these conjurings are achieved with remarkable ease ... At other times, Bouanani suggests that communing with the past and the dead comes at a steep price ... One of the remarkable characteristics of The Hospital is how masterfully it weaves together high and low registers, wistfulness and violence, the lyrical and the scatological. Bouanani’s writing—which in The Hospital, and especially in the original French, uncoils in long, barbed sentences—mixes melancholy, fury, wild visions, and humor. Some of this is lost in Vergnaud’s translation, which although generally faithful and graceful breaks the long French sentences into shorter declarative ones in English, sometimes changing the order and therefore the emphasis of their parts. Bouanani’s language still has its force but it loses some of its rhythm and lands fewer of its blows.
Leila Slimani, Trans. by Sam Taylor
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksI was both impressed and put off by how perfectly calibrated it was for commercial and critical success ... it is a voyeuristic literary thriller, a bourgeois nightmare about being harmed by a social inferior in the worst way imaginable ... Slimani has a gift for hooking readers with sensationalistic premises delivered in a chilling, matter-of-fact tone. Her clipped prose strikes me—despite its determination to shock—as cautious, confined to a narrow but effective stylistic band ... a tart portrait of the smugness of middle-class Parisian liberals ... Slimani highlights their condescension and self-interest; they do not really want to know the person they depend on so intimately, and they are ready to pull rank when Louise displeases them. The book steadily and ominously reveals the dependency and struggle for domination at the heart of family relations—between spouses, between employers and domestic staff, between children and their caretakers. Slimani enjoys startling her readers, and one of the ways she reliably does so is by voicing women’s deep disillusionment, bordering on rage and despair, with their responsibilities as wives and mothers.
Riad Sattouf
MixedThe NationThe Arab of the Future is drawn in a simple, confident, expressive style. A caricaturist’s hand animates faces distorted by fear, anger, or rage. As the plot moves between Libya, France, and Syria, each country is given its own wash of color: yellow, blue, or red. It’s when the family lands in the red zone that the story also arrives at its emotional center.
