The sensuality of his fiction is frequently related to olfaction. Few living writers pay as much attention to smell as Khalifa does ... A tension between faith and reason plays out in each of these stories. This is a secular novel about religious madness. Lives are at stake ... Nadine Gordimer said in her Paris Review interview that she didn’t mind being puzzled when reading a novel. I don’t either, generally. But Khalifa goes to great lengths to frustrate his readers. This narrative shifts back and forth in time ... The intricacies of Khalifa’s plotting, and his occasional vagueness, have led critics to compare him to Faulkner. But Faulkner’s characters feel more real than those in No One Prayed Over Their Graves. They’re earthier. Khalifa’s too often flop between stereotypes — saints or sinners, lovers or fighters ... Khalifa buries his story under a late-Rushdie-like muchness, with embellishment upon embellishment. There are prophecies and rising souls and forbidden loves; every tear is bitterly wept. There are conversions and renunciations of conversions. Your eyeballs begin to glaze over, as if they were ceramic plates. Everything is desperate, to paraphrase the old Adam Ant song, but somehow not serious.
Lush, elegiac ... So much of Khalifa’s work explores varieties of survivorship, and his characters are frequent victims of irony, sudden loss of power and bad luck. The bleak absurdity that mocked Syria’s dysfunction in Death Is Hard Work is distant here, though, exchanged for a fabulist, sometimes maximalist style that bears the stamp of Khalifa’s cited influence ... A novel of abundance and generosity ... Contemporary Syria haunts the novel from beyond its last pages, and as the book skewers the inadequacy of ritual and religious belief, it also asks how to witness and memorialize tragedy.
Spacious ... The novel reads at times like a love letter to the Syrian city where Mr. Khalifa grew up, and at times like a eulogy ... A gallery of side characters gives the book its amplitude ... It is, even so, a beautiful novel, and Mr. Khalifa’s partnership with Leri Price is one of the most fruitful writer-translator pairings in literature today.
Richly compendious ... Polyphonic ... In Leri Price’s finely controlled translation, a river of stories meanders and loops with a sometimes bewildering profusion of characters. Yet this compelling novel, which partly concerns the power of narrative for both good and ill, demonstrates how manipulative storytelling, partial histories and sloppy journalism can reinforce bogus identities and ruin lives.
Meditations on death—of people, selves, cities—permeate the novel. Sometimes death hovers above the characters; other times it is sought after and spoken about like a dear friend gone missing; and at other times it is simply a reality ... The characters’ grapplings with love, death, and change are intimate, rendered in sensitive and piercing prose, evoking emotions that linger in the atmosphere of the novel ... The characters, city, and plot are vessels for meditations about the heaviness of time in an era of transformation, unfulfilled loves and expectations, and the inevitability of death in all of its glory. But at times, the construction of the novel itself can be a hurdle to clear to access its strengths ... Something to savor and ponder on each page, whether rich portrayals of Aleppo or heartfelt meditations, so patience with the novel will yield the best reading experience.
A vast, sprawling saga ... Khalifa eschews a chronological telling of his story in favour of one that flits between different periods. One of the challenges of the book – and something that is characteristic of his other fiction – is the density of the exposition, the sheer number of minor characters, and the reluctance to settle within any single character’s point of view for more than a paragraph. To make things even more complicated, the largely third-person, omniscient narrative is broken up with other fictional forms ... There’s no doubt that the complexity of the book’s form, the restlessness of its narrative voice and welter of detail are taxing. The reader has to work pretty hard to make out the larger shape and purpose of the novel. Oddly, given that Khalifa is also a screenwriter, there are relatively few scenes in the book and almost no dialogue.
Erupts from catastrophe and follows well-nigh every last reverberation outward ... Such oscillations between ecstasy and agony, I must add, set a daunting translation challenge; the rhetoric could easily spill over into silliness. Nonetheless, Leri Price brings off such small miracles repeatedly.
A lyrical if laborious story ... Though the ambitious narrative doesn’t always cohere, it’s carried along by Khalifa’s ornate writing, often in the style of Middle Eastern classical poetry and lucidly translated by Price, and by such recurring themes as the supremacy of love over sensual pleasure, power, and religion. Though baggy, there’s beauty on each page.
