No One Prayed Over Their Graves
From the prizewinning author of Death Is Hard Work
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £8.99
-
- £8.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping tale of life and death, set in the Syrian capital at the turn of the twentieth century from the International prize winning author of Death is HardWork and In Praise of Hatred.
"A soulful and perfectly unsentimental writer." Hisham Matar
-
December, 1907: one morning after a night of drunken carousing in the city, Hanna and his friend Zakariya return home to their village near Aleppo-only to discover a scene of tragedy. A devastating flood has levelled their homes, shops and places of worship, and their neighbours, families and children are nearly all dead. Their lives will never be the same.
Tracing Hanna's life before and after the flood-when he embarks on a search for the meaning of life-No One Prayed Over Their Graves is a portrait of a wider society on the verge of great change; from the provincial village to the burgeoning modernity of the city, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews live and work together, united in their love for Aleppo and their dreams for the future.
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Award finalist Khalifa (Death Is Hard Work) returns with a lyrical if laborious story of multicultural Aleppo, Syria, that spans from the 1880s to the 1950s. In 1881, Hanna, a wealthy Christian boy, is orphaned at age eight when a revenge killing claims all the other members of his family in his small village. He is spirited away by a loyal servant and taken in by his Muslim friend Zakariya's family in Aleppo. In 1907, Hanna and Zakariya, who have both married, are visiting a brothel when a flood wrecks their homes. Hanna loses his wife and son, while Zakariya's wife survives, but is a mere ghost of her former self, grieving their drowned child. Tormented by guilt, Hanna turns to a life of asceticism. Because of his visions and miracles attributed to him, a messianic cult grows up around him, to his consternation. Through famine, plague, and the Armenian holocaust, which Hanna and Zakariya become aware of after encountering refugees during WWI, the main characters and their descendants persist. 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.
