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Record W4206303149 · doi:10.1353/wlt.2021.0141

Susan AbulhawaAgainst the Loveless World

2021· article· en· W4206303149 on OpenAlex
Lanie Tankard

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueWorld Literature Today · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicJewish and Middle Eastern Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTourismEmblemContradictionPaintingHarmHistorySkylineThe RenaissanceArtSoulNothingAestheticsArt historyVisual artsLawPhilosophyArchaeologyPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.886
Threshold uncertainty score0.975

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.279
Teacher spread0.262 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it