Death Is Hard Work
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Average rating3.9
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.
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This one deals in small inner journeys during a larger but somehow almost less significant journey as well as in the small indignities and degradations of dealing with things that are both cruel and somehow absurd. If you're not looking for grandiose revelations and adventures but for the horror in the details this one might work for you. I know that it'll stick with me for a while.
This may not be the most cheerful book with which to start a new year, but with repeated reminders of death, thanks to the pandemic, it seemed a fitting read.
In war-torn Syria, Bolbol's father dies, after making a final wish to be buried in the family plot near Aleppo. It is only a two-hour drive away but war has made such long journeys treacherous and possibly fatal. Bolbol recruits his brother Hussein and sister Fatima to grant his father's dying wish, and the three of them transport the body of their father in a rusting van to his hometown.
The journey is fraught with danger, from soldiers and militia, falling bombs, and festering family hurts and painful memories.
In less than 200 pages and often with black humour, the author (who lives in Damascus despite the war) paints a vivid portrait of the ravages of war - not just of the lives it takes but also the life that it leaches out from the living, and of the complicated and often treacherous terrain of family relationships.
A five-star read, for its emotional punch and dark humour.
A silent funeral is a funeral stripped of all its awe, Bolbol thought. Rites and rituals meant nothing now. For the first time, everyone was truly equal in death. The poor and the rich, officers and infantry in the regime's army, armed squadron commanders, regular soldiers, random passersby, and those who would remain forever anonymous: all were buried with the same pitiful processions. Death wasn't even a source of distress anymore: it had become an escape much envied by the living.
37/198 – Síria
