... deftly translated ... Well-developed plotlines help readers easily unravel the complex puzzle of why Saeed and Palestine left home and why he has been prohibited from returning until now ... Though gently told, this story has great depth and is broadly appealing, allowing readers to consider how the smallest actions, linked to the power of the written word, can adversely affect the future.
If you’re game for a novel about just how sad, fractured and tricky cultural identity can get, Arab-Israeli author Sayed Kashua’s Track Changes is the book for you ... [a] mournfully shape-shifting novel, deftly translated by Mitch Ginsburg.
That Kashua's protagonist is a nameless 'I' who shares considerable biographical overlaps suggests, perhaps even implies, the so-called truth of Kashua's first-person fiction. Yet his character, whose job is to transcribe others' memories onto the page, repeatedly reveals his elisions from and additions to strangers' memoirs-for-hire, often inserting his own memories as their own, thereby erasing his life in scattered pieces. The narrator's confessions are hardly reliable, making every level of his storytelling suspect, which Kashua further visually underscores by 'track changes'-style crossed-out text. For savvy, curious readers, that interplay of parsing fact and fiction proves to be a lively, interactive experience.
Saeed is not always an inviting narrator. He often withholds the most essential parts of his story, sprinkling them in fragments throughout the novel, sometimes without context. He is unabashadley self-pitying and self-loathing, and on the whole, not willing to put forth any effort to improve his situation. This stillness, as one might suspect, inevitably results in stagnation. But for all his faults, he means well ... With its focus on storytelling, Track Changes reads as a love letter of sorts to the imagination and the act of writing ... a dark read, one that offers a detailed look at a man stretched too thin and the demons that weigh him down. But what Kashua brings to the page is well worth experiencing. The novel’s structure and language bring gut-wrenching beauty and unimagined complexity to a life that may have otherwise seemed stripped of it.
The first few chapters of Sayed Kashua’s latest novel, Track Changes, didn’t impress me much. For those acquainted with the most common tropes of immigrant fiction, the setup is familiar ... However, as the multi-layered narrative unfurled, piece by piece, like the skin of an onion, I was surprised and satisfied to see all my expectations overturned. This inventive structure drives readers, deliberately and yet subtly, into the core of a larger, abstract question regarding the nature of fiction.
It’s Saeed’s mistake, whatever it was, that Kashua is primarily concerned with. He circles around it, revealing details only gradually. If he meant for this strategy to hold the reader in suspense, he isn’t entirely successful: The result feels too drawn out, as if we’ve been strung along for too long, with too little to show for it ... it’s unfortunate that his wife, whose name is Palestine, never emerges as a fully-fledged character. Saeed has nothing more insightful to say about her than that 'she’s beautiful, so beautiful,' and she never gets to speak for herself. The most moving parts of the book, in fact, don’t have to do with Saeed’s mistake at all. These are the descriptions of the prejudice and discrimination Saeed faces at the hands of his Jewish colleagues, a topic that Kashua has already written about, more effectively, elsewhere ... A rambling novel about regret strays too close, too often, to self-pity.
