Publishers Weekly
05/08/2023
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. (July)
From the Publisher
Praise for No One Prayed Over Their Graves
“A gorgeous new novel from Khaled Khalifa, one of Syria’s most celebrated novelists . . . Lush, elegiac . . . Márquezian . . . A novel of abundance and generosity . . . At stake is the act of storytelling itself: gossip, religious narrative, war photography, any narrative in which bigotry can reside . . . The pain of witness surfaces across the story.” —Sarah Cypher, The Washington Post
"A beautiful novel . . . Khalifa’s partnership with Leri Price is one of the most fruitful writer-translator pairings in literature today. The recent destruction of Aleppo provides unspoken context, charging the exploration of ruin and aftermath with further heartbreak." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Love stories—thwarted, tragic or ecstatic—help bring a many-stranded plot together . . . Richly embroidered . . . [Khalifa's] galloping narration restores life and soul to a city that has become a byword for devastation. Leri Price, who also translated Death Is Hard Work from Arabic, has produced an English text of grace, pace and gusto. Aleppo’s 'immortal' monuments may have been bombed to rubble, but, thanks to Mr Khalifa, those 'great stories' endure." —The Economist
"From the first, the Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa scores his latest for full orchestra . . . It summons every instrument, from tuba to triangle, in a rising crescendo of sorrow . . . [This is] historical fiction scrupulous in its detail yet breathtaking in its scope, and altogether magnificent." —John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail
"Through its intimacy and grace, No One Prayed Over Their Graves is a heart-wrenching and beautiful exploration of change in Syria." —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books (a July must-read)
"Elegantly written . . . the extraordinary closing pages, poetic and prophetic, speak to the possibility of building a “kingdom where life is fresh and tender and the fish never die” . . . A small epic that blends magic realism with grim realities, always memorably." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Lyrical . . . [the book is] carried along by Khalifa’s ornate writing, often in the style of Middle Eastern classical poetry and lucidly translated by Price . . . There's beauty on each page" —Publishers Weekly
Praise for Death Is Hard Work | Finalist for the National Book Award
“[A] brilliant, blackly absurdist road-trip novel, a restaging of As I Lay Dying in the thick of the world’s most brutal civil war . . . Khalifa skillfully condenses the trip’s detours and delays into a breakneck narrative that seems unstoppably tilted toward tragedy . . . Unforgettable.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Searing . . . Khalifa is a soulful and perfectly unsentimental writer . . . Leri Price [. . .] is alive and faithful to the Syrian’s unadorned and direct prose, sentences that often bring together the poetic and the horrific . . . Robust in its doubts, humane in its gaze, and gentle in its persistence.” —Hisham Matar, The Guardian
“Masterly . . . Novelists like Khalifa are so critical in these times . . . With Death Is Hard Work, Khaled Khalifa has, intentionally or not, also laid claim to [Faulkner’s mantle].” —Elliot Ackerman, The New York Times Book Review
“Astonishing . . . Khalifa employs a shifting array of voices and reflections, moving from perspective to perspective, present to past and back again. The effect is a persistent deepening, as stories are introduced and then revisited, details added through the play of memory . . . The power of the novel—of all Khalifa's novels—is that it unfolds within a human context, which pushes against and resists the prevailing social one.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-04-24
An elegantly written multigenerational novel set in 19th- and early-20th-century Syria.
Khalifa, the most prominent Syrian writer at work today (albeit in exile), opens with a scarifying moment from history: a 1907 flood that swept away a small town along the Euphrates River. There are few survivors. Two are friends, the Christian Hanna Gregoros and the Muslim Zakariya Bayazidi, both of whom were away at the time; of those at home, only Bayazidi’s wife, Shaha Sheikh Musa, and Mariana Nassar lived through the flood. The destruction is total, and both friends lose their sons. For his part, “Hanna felt like the flood hadn’t just drowned his wife and son; it had drowned all his sordid and uproarious past, his entire life.” Sordid it was, and Bayazidi, less inclined to repentance, was only too glad to take part in the brothel visits and drunken nights that, even before the flood, Hanna was tiring of, although he had committed to building a citadel of sin with, as Bayazidi says, “a stage especially for suicides.” With a star-crossed artist friend named William Eisa, their Xanadu on the Euphrates grows until the disaster changes everything, whereupon Mariana takes a more central role in the story. It’s not the first catastrophe to have struck the village, as Khalifa writes, taking the friends to their childhood a quarter-century earlier and a massacre of Christians by the Ottoman government; nor will it be the last, as plague and famine strike and religious fundamentalism hardens, foreshadowing the horrors that have beset Syria in our own time. The Syria Khalifa evokes is one where Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs overlook their differences to forge friendships and family ties; and although his storyline sometimes wanders between seemingly disconnected episodes, the extraordinary closing pages, poetic and prophetic, speak to the possibility of building a “kingdom where life is fresh and tender and the fish never die.”
A small epic that blends magic realism with grim realities, always memorably.
