Rabai Al-Madhoun

In the first half of the book, the author goes after the Israelis. Then, with that out of the way, he is able to go after the Palestinians before bringing it all home at the end. But don’t misread this interpretive summary - the storytelling here never goes the way one expects.

The Lady from Tel Aviv is simply told. At the beginning of the book al-Madhoun manages absolutely stunning imagery and craft with the language, doing things with English that are easier to do in Arabic, or even Spanish, but almost impossible in English. This beautiful and simple telling means that the unexpected twists come not from over-constructed storytelling gimmicks, but from reality. The book reveals the difficulty of telling a story about Palestine: how can it flow like other plot lines and be worked like other narratives by its telling, and yet also be about this place now? Saleem Haddad’s Guapa, incredibly, finds as much of a way as possible - but he takes twice as many words, a more generic story, and a more narrow focus of message to pull it off. It is not an easy feat to replicate without possibly unrealisable ambition to expand the boundaries of the art-form and maybe even time. “Politics” is as inevitable as the checkpoints and border controls, if the story is to be authentic.

Al-Madhoun finds a way to weave this frustration into the telling, writing that “no matter the lengths to which a narrator goes in order to imagine something, he will never reach the shore of truth. If your understanding of an Israeli border crossing is limited to what you hear or try to imagine in your mind, you will only ever glimpse the outlines of a shadow - which could be shorter or longer depending on how much light you cast on it. But the truth itself: that is a bitch on the imagination and on anyone who wants to tell a story."

So, despite its constant narrative arc, The Lady from Tel Aviv becomes a story of stories and stories told within stories. And what could better transmit the sense of this place than the embedding of stories within other stories? This approach reflects and celebrates the ancient pleasure that remains in our people, a pleasure capitalism has not yet conquered and made its own, a free pleasure of our shared time together. What some call an "oral tradition” is a great human pleasure of telling little stories that somehow embraces an ability to agree and disagree, placing life’s troubles and disputes into a larger frame. Thus, we are reminded of our joyful connection to each other without robbing our stories of the emotions they carry.

So The Lady from Tel Aviv suffers from its simplicity, its - for lack of a better word - ramblingness. But at the same time, this is also the source of its strength, its honesty, authenticity and originality. It could only have been this way. We are a fragmented people and our lives have been made into al-Madhoun’s random and often Kafka-esque scenes by colonialism. This common theme cannot help but express itself in all art from this corner of the world, whether in the literature of Rabih Alameddine, or the art of Emily Jacir, or the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. This book is light and short - a quick, beautiful pleasure - and yet despite, or because of this, it draws out the inhumanity wrought by colonialism (by both colonial and coopted native protagonists) and the humanity of anti-colonialism (by both native and ex-colonial protagonists). And it is this nuanced and genuine approach, a narrative politics that focuses on systems of injustice instead of identity politics, that is a final winning factor in favour of The Lady from Tel Aviv.… (lisätietoja)

A beautiful, engrossing novel about Palestine, set shortly before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. It follows a sixty-something-year-old writer, Walid – who would seem to be based on the author himself – as he returns to Palestine for the first time in thirty-eight years, having been forcibly separated from his family by the occupation, and observes the ways in which his homeland, his family and his friends have changed, mostly for the worse. The Khan Younis where he spent his childhood has been lost, and many of his loved ones have met tragic ends. The novel is naturally scathing of Israel, of the daily humiliations meted out on the Palestinians, of the violence of the occupation, and the theft of the land in the first place, including Ashdod, where Walid was born.

It's not a novel that dehumanises Israelis though, which is the role that the titular "lady from Tel Aviv", Dana, has to play. Honestly I was expecting Dana to play a bigger role in the novel, what with the title and half the blurb being given over to her, but she is what she is. She's someone fed up with the conflict, who wants peace, but isn't political beyond that. I don't really want to spoil her subplot, so I'll leave it there…

The best part of this novel is the little things, in the observations of occupation. I get the sense that Walid is a thinly disguised version of al-Madhoun, that the novel Walid is writing represents this novel, and so on. Walid's difficulty simply entering Israel was compelling reading, and rang true; I once knew someone, a Palestinian who'd grown up in exile, who tried to visit home but was interrogated at Ben Gurion airport for twelve hours and sent back to Australia. Al-Madhoun makes sure to contrast the difficulty Palestinian exiles and refugees have accessing home with the ease that all Jewish people in the world have, and so he should.

The main problem I had with this novel is that the plot didn't seem very cohesive or unified; it was more like, "this happened, then this, then this, then this". Admittedly, this makes more sense if you think of the novel as a fictionalised retelling of the author's own experiences, but… it was narratively unsatisfying. Therefore I can't say I "really liked it" (which is Goodreads' definition of four stars) but I heartily recommend it.

EDIT: I'm bumping my rating up to four stars; in retrospect I was too harsh on it for how much I liked it! Maybe the plot is a bit thin, but it it has many more compelling qualities. (Apr 2014)… (lisätietoja)

Although we are far from Israel and Palestine here in the US, the ongoing problems between the two are never far from the nightly news. But what we see on tv very often feels removed. How can we possibly understand the root of the conflict from these nightly dispatches? How much of the hatred and violence finds its way into everyday life of people in Israel and Gaza? Only by peering into the lives of those who live with the violence and suspicion and low (and sometimes very high) level fear, can we hope to reach some sort of authentic understanding, even if it is still the understanding of an outsider. So it was with great interest that I picked up Raba'i al-Madhoun's novel, The Lady From Tel Aviv, thinking that it would give me a window into not only the heart and mind of a Palestinian returning to his family and homeland after an exile of almost 40 years but also into the heart and mind of a regular Israeli, the titular lady from Tel Aviv, as well.

Unfortunately, the novel is misnamed and there's relatively little time spent with Dana Ahova, the Israeli actress that main character Walid Dahman meets on his plane ride from London to Tel Aviv. Instead the bulk of the novel focuses on Walid's experiences both as a young man when he could no longer come home from school in Egypt, exiled because of the Occupation, to all that he experiences as he arrives home and spends time with the family he hasn't seen for decades. The reality of being a Palestinian coming into Israel and trying to get into Gaza is dehumanizing, even with Walid's British passport, and the situation in which his family finds itself living is cramped and oftentimes scary. Walid's visit back certainly highlights some of the horrifying treatment of regular Palestinian citizens in Gaza but in terms of a plot, the novel meandered without much focus besides presenting everyday life, much of which is fairly miserable.

As is to be expected, the tale is fairly one-sided, which doesn't make it an untruthful depiction, rather it just feels unbalanced although it is far less politicized than it could be. There is a lack of an intriguing cohesive story here despite the hope that it would chronicle the meeting of two people who find the ability to see each other as individuals beyond their nationality. And while they do see each other as human beings, the whole of it didn't have enough impact or meat to make it engrossing reading. In fact, I found the novel to be rather underwhelming over all, which makes me wonder if I missed something in the translation that made it worthy of shortlisting for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010.… (lisätietoja)