Susan AbulhawaAgainst the Loveless World

0 a place of contradiction, both morbid and full of life, like a sick but noble animal. Underneath the monochrome skyline packed with Renaissance masterpieces, a sulfurous lagoon bubbles away, eroding the very foundations of the city. When Nooteboom watches support poles being “extracted like rotten teeth” from “mud the color of death,” another writer might feel encouraged to question the future of the city when the very thing keeping it afloat—tourism—is one of the main catalysts implicated in the rising waters threatening its existence. But Nooteboom is more concerned with memory, both personal and communal . Already confident that tourism has done more to harm the city, more than its sinking ever could, he does little investigation . Instead, he prowls the streets, conjuring up emblems of the past in statues, paintings, and gardens, seeking answers to questions that are more like riddles: Are we still who we once were? and Were we ever who we once were? Late in the book, he considers a gondola as it shunts by, crammed with faceless tourists snapping pictures: “Once upon a time they did not merely transport people who wanted to sit ignorantly . . . but also those who really knew something about the city . . . people who were there for their love of the city . . . a better kind of tourist.” It’s clear into which camp Nooteboom places himself . He may feel miserable about the mass onset of visitors to his beloved city, but his deep knowledge and love of Venice’s past provide the suitably pleasurable Venetian contradiction. J. R. Patterson Gladstone, Manitoba Susan Abulhawa Against the Loveless World New York. Atria Books. 2020. 384 pages. SUSAN ABULHAWA TITLES her latest work with the words of James Baldwin. One book at a time, she continues to personify the Palestinian story in masterful prose. This third novel draws on her roots as a child of refugees in the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. Mornings in Jenin (2010), translated into thirty languages and now in development as a television series, brought the tale of Amal, born in a Palestinian refugee camp. The Blue between Sky and Water (2015), now in twenty languages, follows the Barakas family in the Palestinian diaspora after Israel’s 1948 creation. This time, Against the Loveless World introduces Nahr, a resilient but exhausted woman trying desperately to survive forces sweeping her from place to place—Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine—and it may be Abulhawa’s strongest book yet. All three novels share similarities. What’s different here is the fascinating method. Gray-haired Nahr begins: “I live in the Cube.” Articulating her memoir is difficult , however, since the Cube is an Israeli solitary-confinement cell where she’s been for years. She talks to prison walls until a sympathetic guard brings her two pencils and a notebook. Feeling “an irrepressible instinct to account for life,” she fills three thousand pages. Starting with her birth in Kuwait (“a country that abandoned us”), Nahr describes girlhood in a patriarchal society —followed by arranged marriage and swift abandonment. She’s blackmailed into well-paying escort work, but after the US invasion of Iraq, her family flees to Jordan, where they become refugees again. Seeking divorce, Nahr travels to Palestine (no easy task). There, in her ancestral homeland, she falls in love. Slowly, Abulhawa reveals secrets, building her story around a hexahedron, perhaps a metaphorical nod to both Black Cube (the Israeli private intelligence firm) and a psychology-insight game popularized by Annie Gottlieb’s 1995 book The Cube (based on kokoro, a Japanese concept of mind or spirit). Alternating Nahr’s backstory with present -day Cube chapters, Abulhawa applies geometric properties as well as architectural principles. Subtitles represent each square side of six faces: East, West, North, South, Up, and Down, plus The Space Between. Abulhawa brings a cube’s ancient symbolism to bear on what she’s rendering. Facing sides are parallel, all equal, with three-dimensional stability. One of five Platonic solids, representing earth, a cube as prison cell separates public and private spaces—yet Nahr has no privacy. Architects consider the sun’s path across the sky when orienting their buildings. Abulhawa locates the Cube’s window high...

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