The Walking
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Two brothers from a small Iranian mountain village-Saladin, who has always dreamed of leaving, and Ali, who has never given it a thought-are forced to flee for their lives in the aftermath of a political killing. The journey is beset by trouble from the start, but over the treacherous mountains they go, on foot to Istanbul and onward by freighter to the Azores.There, after a painful parting, Saladin alone continues on the final leg, on a cargo plane all the way to Los Angeles. He will have a new life in California, but will never be whole again without his beloved brother and the living heritage that has always defined him.
The Walking is the second novel in a trilogy about Khadivi's homeland of Iran, a country poised between the ancient and the modern and tossed by political winds that have buffeted the entire globe. Here, Khadivi tells the story of exodus from homeland, an experience that hundreds of thousands of Iranians underwent, and which millions of others, from different places around the world, have also experienced. In the story of two brothers, Khadivi brilliantly explores the tension alive in all immigrants, between the love and attachment to the place they must leave, and the hopes and dreams that lie in the places they are headed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lyrical and restrained, Khadivi's second novel (after 2010's The Age of Orphans) spotlights the universal undercurrents of immigration through the exodus of two Kurdish brothers, Saladin and Ali, in the midst of the Iranian Revolution. She introduces a collective voice that repeats throughout the work, its cadence true to the fitful mindset of Iranians as Ayatollah Khomeini replaces the Shah. Shifting between reflections of those who chose to stay and those who fled, Khadivi's groupoverview sections assume the function of an omnipotent chorus, orienting brothers' struggles within the greater philosophical and psychological framework of immigration. The chapters devoted to their journeys soar on oft-haunting, always precise imagery, such as when several Kurdish men's bodies fall puppet-like "as somewhere in the sky, a million threads were cut." After these Kurdish men fall, Ali leads his younger brother away before they can be killed for refusing to follow orders. Khadivi moves with some grace between the brothers' scramble farther from home and the near future, which sees Saladin adjusting to his new home his dreamland, Los Angeles fighting his way through the freshlystirred American distrust of Iranians. This second of three novels brings a delicate touch to the emotional intricacies involved in both leaving one's homeland, and in staying behind.
