2 and 2

This week brings M. Lynx Qualey’s warm review of Adania Shibli’s Touch at Rain Taxi’s summer online edition:

Stories about the past often mislead: in order to create a satisfying whole, most writers carefully arrange history and memory, inventing links and causal connections. Sometimes, this results in good storytelling. But sometimes the task of an author—particularly one who writes about a hyper-symbolized terrain—is to un-narrativize, to pull things back apart.

Adania Shibli is up to this task. Touch brings us the fragmented worldview of a narrator at the cusp of understanding her world. The 72-page novella could be described as five interconnected prose poems, a historical fiction about the Palestinian territories set in 1982, or a coming-of-age tale in which maturation is marked not by a loss of innocence, but by an ever-growing loneliness and alienation.

Keep reading here—

In The National, a lengthy, highly laudatory review of Touch and discussion of Adania Shibli:

… Touch purrs along like an extended prose poem – all words and sounds and images – as Shibli picks up the glinting fragments of the girl’s experience, then turns them over in her hand to see how they refract the light of a world so radically constricted and reduced. …

[T]he translation of Touch feels fresh, signalling the arrival of a young stylist who writes like no one else.

Read in full here—

This week brings a starred Publishers Weekly review of Adania Shibli’s Touch:

Touch
Adania Shibli, trans. from the Arabic by Paula Haydar, Interlink/Clockroot, $13 paper (72p) ISBN 9781566568074
Celebrated young Palestinian writer Shibli—a playwright, author and essayist now located in the UK—makes her American debut with an exquisite, powerful novella that transports readers to her West Bank homeland. In spare prose, Shibli follows an unnamed little girl, the youngest in a large Palestinian family, as she examines her world and tries to understand her place in it. Though focused on the finest details—flakes of rust against skin, the softness of grass—Shibli takes readers to the center of a family and a culture, using the same careful, dispassionate observation to report everyday events like the father’s shaving as she does to depict the death of a sibling in area violence. Like a great volume of poetry, Shibli’s first novel (her second is forthcoming from Clockroot) has rhythm and unexpected momentum, and cries for re-reading.

… And a wonderful review at the Electronic Intifada (in full here):

Whatever it is—a dream, memory fragments, poems folded into sun and grass—Touch is both remarkable and difficult, beautifully lucid and yet also mysterious. The book is divided into sections entitled “Colors,” “Silence,” “Movement,” “Language” and “The Wall” …. Within this framework the little girl comes of age, her ordinary experiences of first love, school mishaps and sibling rivalries rendered extraordinary by the sensuous prose, and intensified by the heartbreaking backdrop against which they occur, a death whose impact tears apart the fabric of her family’s life. …

This is not a book to be shelved once finished. It calls to you softly, insistently, until you pick it up again and allow yourself to be tugged back in… [P]erhaps this is what Touch can be called, a question, rather than a novel — that place from where all searches begin.

Adania Shibli, whose wonderful Touch Clockroot released in March, seems often to have such pithy, precise thoughts on translation (see here)—its limits, its futility, its urgency.  We regret not being able to head to London ourselves to see Adania at the Free the Word/International PEN festival, but you can find a write-up of one of her events here—a co-event with Ala Hlehel, who as we noted the other week, was the other honoree of the Beirut 39 unable to attend the festival in Beirut.

… what could be more uplifting than Adania’s answer to the final question about what Arabic literature influenced her. ‘To me, all literature is Arabic literature, because I read it in Arabic and therefore I feel it is Arabic. Tolstoy and Shakespeare – they are Palestinians!’

As per our earlier post, and this update, Adania Shibli cannot be in Beirut for the Beirut 39 festival, but she is participating in a number of wonderful events surrounding the London Book Fair. Those of you in the UK, be sure to check them out:

Join Adania and many other superb festival writers at International PEN’s Free the Word! literary lunch, Sunday, April 18, at the Young Vic.

And on April 19 at the London Book Fair, see the panel “Why Does Translation into English Matter?”, with Adania, Bill Swainson (senior editor, Bloomsbury), Amanda Hopkinson (professor, University of East Anglia), Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, and Marlene Van Niekerk, moderated by Ros Schwartz:

What does it mean to an international writer to be translated into the English language? An increased readership, certainly, and a moment of recognition. But what are the wider artistic implications?

How do translators interpret their role and responsibility? What are the rewards of translating literature into English, and how central is contemporary literature in translation to the cultural consciousness of this country? What is its significance for the UK publishing industry?

English PEN brings together an international panel to discuss the literary, personal, and cultural importance of being translated into English.

After flying across the country and arriving in Denver for one big gathering of writers, we just learned the distressing news that Adania Shibli and Ala Hlehel, both Israeli Arab writers, won’t be allowed to travel to Beirut next week to participate in the Beirut39 festival, where their writing is being honored. (They’ll receive their awards in London instead, on April 15.)

This isn’t the first time this has happened to Adania. We’ll post later the wonderful essay she wrote the last time this happened to her —it seems to have been taken off the web. Not to attribute anything sinister.

Now we’ve got a bookfair to attend, where  our complaints about sketchy internet connections and smashed cartons of books now seem small.

Adania Shibli, whose Touch is forthcoming very soon, is part of the “Beirut 39″—39 writers from the Arab world who are under 39 years old, and will be featured at a festival in Beirut in April. Here’s “Not an Interview” with Adania on the Beirut 39 blog.

If you’ve got a copy of the January 25th Publishers Weekly: Touch by Adania Shibli is featured as one of ten “first fiction” titles to be excited about this spring.  We agree!