2 and 2

In the past few weeks, a gap has truly opened between blog posts I’ve intended to write and those I’ve accomplished.  But for now, let’s note simply that last week’s Publishers Weekly brought a review of Blue Has No South:

… With more than 100 short-short stories (many no longer than a few lines), there’s a frenetic buzz of activity, with recurring themes including chess, mythology, rain, angels, suicide, animals, muses, time machines, tragic love, aging, and painting, all sewn together in a Borges-meets-Kafka style. Some pieces slip into metanarrative, as with “Gibraltar, a Love Story,” a brief bit in which the author comments on the flaws in his tale about an elephant escaped from a zoo. Other pieces don’t tell stories at all, such as “The Flawed Symmetry of Romeo and Juliet,” which offers a critique of “the only lovers who see each other dead.” Often it isn’t the scraps of story that make the pieces work as much as the poetic language, as in a story involving the murder of a chess-playing writer. These deceptively simple snapshots certainly can deliver on a fast reading, but slow, close attention reveals layers of thought and complexity.

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.

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!