Enter Ghost, though contemporary, is thoroughly infused with Palestine’s past — and thoroughly haunted by Sonia’s. Hammad, who is both a delicate writer and an exact one, intertwines the two, taking care to give Sonia as many personal ghosts as she does historical ones ... In Enter Ghost, concealment and subterfuge end poorly, as the title — and Hamlet — would suggest. Indeed, the novel seems to argue, real growth and connection, both political and personal, cannot begin until everyone’s ghosts have emerged from hiding. Art is, if nothing else, a powerful tool for coaxing them out.
Fiction has an uneasy relationship with politics, and American writing in particular tends to avoid the Palestinian issue — a problem identified in the text as 'largely a case of preaching to the deaf and to the choir.' It’s an obstacle Hammad negotiated in her 2019 debut, The Parisian (about British Mandate Palestine), which established her as a writer with an uncanny combination of skills. She is at once able to trace broad social and historical terrains without losing her grasp of particulars, giving a surgical finesse to her writing about the human personality ... You don’t, however, need to be a Shakespeare buff to appreciate this reimagined classic — Mariam and her cast explicitly discuss how malleable the play is in its West Bank setting. The novel is aware of its fourth wall without seeming coy, and the occasional writing in script format is unexpected and exciting. It succeeds, too, in rising beyond a specific ekphrasis to a wider meditation on the exchange between a work of art and its context ... succeeds as that rare fictive project that invites several audiences to pay attention.
Assured and formidable ... The cast’s banter—sometimes hilarious, sometimes aggressive—is a vital counterpoint to Sonia’s tendency to Hamlet-esque handwringing. Scenes of rehearsals rendered as play scripts provide anticipated respites from her smart but gravely serious (at times somewhat stiff) narration. And as the play becomes more and more the thing, Sonia’s tone warms considerably.
Powerful ... Hammad is a pretty flawless writer who, despite her harrowing and often intellectually complex subject matter, produces easily readable, human, generous work. Young adults and mature intellectual readers alike will get behind Sonia’s struggles with relationships, work, family and self-image, which are instantly recognisable and perfectly parsed. The excitement of travel to new places and the heady buzz of forming sudden, intense relationships with new friends strangely makes this novel of war and trauma work quite well as an upmarket beach read ... Hammad gives us many pages laid out like a play script, not only when the actors are speaking their parts but when they are talking among themselves. It’s only lightly experimental, and neither gets in the way of nor particularly adds to the story ... Hammad’s prose and skill at creating characters is so natural and complete that, unlike most novels with this heft, you barely feel as though you’re reading.
Focused - if partial ... While some of her most powerful lines are the simplest, Hammad is capable of long, searching sentences that capture the novel’s sense of yearning ... Enter Ghost is a novel to savour rather than steam through — not least because it feels completely different to anything else being written right now in English, a heartfelt meditation on the relationship between art and politics. The story unfurls with a slow delicacy and Hammad sustains tension without resorting to cheap suspense. Instead, the novel circles around a series of mysteries: about the end of Sonia’s marriage, and that of her parents, as well as the family’s involvement in the Palestinian resistance ... The effort it takes to parse the characters, the political nuances and the parallels between Hamlet and Hammad’s story is rewarded. What Hammad is asking of the reader is participation. When you surrender to her writing, everything else falls away.
Hammad refracts her philosophical inquiry through an elegant assemblage of metatextual layers, filling her novel with plays within plays, works that comment directly on the uses of art ... Clever ... A novel or play might, just possibly, produce a moment in which fate seems unsettled, and leave us there with the doors open and the wind blowing through.
Enter Ghost takes you deep inside the protagonist’s experience while opening a wider window on to life for Palestinians and their exhausting day-to-day struggles ... The result is a dense read, but once Sonia fully commits to doing Hamlet the pace begins to pick up and the complex world-building pays off, producing a richly layered novel ... A deeply satisfying climax to an intelligent novel.
Compelling ... There is a certain opacity to Enter Ghost; geopolitical and linguistic clarifications are scant or obscured, adding to the sense of being locked out of the country, not always for the good of the storytelling.
Hammad is not only a talented novelist; she is also a rigorous researcher, and she paints an authentic picture of Palestinian life, whether it takes place inside Israel or in the West Bank … At every point, as Hammad details the exhausting day-to-day struggles that Palestinians have to endure, she finds humanity and complexity in their responses. Contrary to what one might expect, the bloody events taking place in the West Bank do not prevent the theater troupe from going ahead with their performance of Hamlet. In the oft-heard justification by Palestinians trying to keep cultural activities alive despite the turmoil taking place all around them, Mariam says, ‘If we let disaster stand in our way we will never do anything. Every day here is a disaster.’ Such a statement could be made about Hammad’s novel, too: She has found a way to tell a story that is artful, and humane, in the midst of disaster.
[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.
Provocative ... Enthralling ... Exquisitely illuminated by the author's tender writing, Sonia's experience of the daily tectonic strain between occupier and occupied...leads to a new, deeper appreciation of her ancient heritage and her natural place in it.
A thorough and thoughtful exploration of the role of art in the political arena unfolds as Sonia and the troupe work through rehearsals toward performing a tragedy with contemporary resonance ... Hammad provides a brutal update on a classic theme.
A soul-stirring and dramatic tale of a Palestinian family’s exile and reconciliation ... The layered text, rich in languages and literary references, dives deep into Sonia’s consciousness, illustrating her hopes for what art can accomplish. This deeply human work will stay with readers.
