{"id":430362,"date":"2020-04-16T09:40:40","date_gmt":"2020-04-16T13:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=430362"},"modified":"2020-04-16T09:40:40","modified_gmt":"2020-04-16T13:40:40","slug":"death-is-hard-work-by-khaled-khalifa-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/04\/16\/death-is-hard-work-by-khaled-khalifa-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Death Is Hard Work” by Khaled Khalifa [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Tony Messenger<\/strong>\u00a0is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in many places including\u00a0<\/em>Overland Literary Journal,\u00a0Southerly,\u00a0Mascara Literary Review,\u00a0VerityLa\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Burning House Press. He blogs about translated fiction and interviews Australian poets at\u00a0Messenger\u2019s Booker<\/a>\u00a0and can be found on Twitter\u00a0@Messy_tony<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Death Is Hard Work<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Khaled Khalifa, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Khaled Khalifa\u2019s fifth novel, Death Is Hard Work<\/em> is the first Syrian novel to make the Best Translated Book Award longlists although another Syrian book, Adrenalin<\/em> by Ghayath Almadhoun (translated by Catherine Cobham) made the poetry longlist in 2018.<\/p>\n

Khaled Khalifa\u2019s four previous novels include In Praise of Hatred<\/em>, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of this City<\/em>, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013. He continues to live in Damascus and writes in cafes despite the obvious dangers. Despite offers for overseas university postings he remains in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing civil war.<\/p>\n

Death Is Hard Work<\/em> has a simple narrative: Abdel Latif al-Salim dies on the opening page. His dying wish is \u201cto be buried in the cemetery of Anabiya\u2026beside his sister Layla (also known as Nevine<\/em>).\u201d His son, Bobol, gathers his siblings, Hussien and Fatima, to undertake the long journey, \u201chundreds of miles away,\u201d to the ancestral village.<\/p>\n

A literal and figurative journey back to simpler, safer times.<\/p>\n

Although simple in plot, Khaled Khalifa uses the journey to explore many themes. Syria, like the corpse, is in decay, the matter of fact approach to death in a decimated country, the reconciliation of familial bonds as they are forced to share a minibus together, and a whole lot more.<\/p>\n

From the opening pages, there is a blend of horror, tinged with bureaucracy, Bobol cannot remove his father\u2019s corpse without the Director\u2019s signature, but the morgue is quickly filling:<\/p>\n

Death is a solitary experience, of course, but nevertheless it lays heavy obligations on the living. There\u2019s a big difference between an old man who dies in his village, surrounded by family and close to the cemetery, and one who dies hundreds of kilometers away from them all. The living\u00a0 have a harder task ahead of them than the dead; no one wants to see their loved ones rot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once settling the father\u2019s corpse in Hussien\u2019s minibus, and plotting their way out of Damascus and the roadblocks, and oncoming vehicles filled with corpses, the trio work their way out on the open roads towards the ancestral village. Soon they have to leave the highway as there\u2019s a sniper hiding. Beside the road lie the bodies of \u201ca man, a woman, a young man and a girl\u201d victims of the sniper. These repetitive experiences of death reinforce the horrors besetting their nation: \u201cThe exceptional had become habitual, and tragedies were simply mundane\u2014perhaps that was the worst part of this war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Endless checkpoints and delays hinder their journey, and slowly the corpse begins to decay: \u201cDriving along in the dark, the siblings hadn\u2019t noticed the changes that had overtaken the body.\u201d<\/p>\n

This a parallel to the decay of their country, Syria slowly rotting and becoming unrecognizable, storage in local morgues is interrupted as the bodies of soldiers killed in battle take precedence, you can only stall the inevitable decay for so long. And, finally, what once was living and vibrant has now rotted to become unrecognizable. In an interview, at Electric Literature, Khaled Khalifa speaks of this metaphor: \u201cSyria became a corpse not only during the war, but it was also becoming that corpse slowly and day by day during fifty years of dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bobol\u2019s memories give the backdrop to the escalation of the conflict: \u201cSuspicions alone were enough to lead to corpses lining the streets. Suspicions alone were enough to cause someone to disappear without a trace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The history of the escalation blended with the current reality and the hopes and dreams being extinguished: \u201cWhat was the point of clinging to memories as life went by? They were only good for digging up more pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having a journey and taking place in a minibus, a restricted environment, the novel allows for the familial bonds to play out between the two brothers and sister: \u201cHussein didn\u2019t care, Bolbol actively opposed it, and Fatima was too busy trying to play the role of the noble sister reuniting her family after the death of a parent.\u201d<\/p>\n

However even under strained conditions there are still hidden family secrets: \u201cHe had wanted to tell Hussein all the things he had smothered within himself for years, but there hadn\u2019t been a point during their journey when it wasn\u2019t either inappropriate or simply too dangerous to talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

And finally, this is a novel that is also a journey into the unknown: \u201cIt was a mass exodus, hundreds of thousands of people heading from the north and the east toward the unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>A novel that also contains tinges of romance, failed first loves, and even absurdist humor (for example, the corpse requires identity papers), this is a fine example of how literature can parallel and mimic a brutal and inhumane situation. Khaled Khalifa, and the work of translator Leri Price, has brought to the Western sphere a multi-layered book that forces the reader to confront the horrors of the Syrian crisis. The first novel from Syria to make the Best Translated Book Award longlist and a worthy inclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Tony Messenger\u00a0is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in many places including\u00a0Overland Literary Journal,\u00a0Southerly,\u00a0Mascara Literary Review,\u00a0VerityLa\u00a0and\u00a0Burning House Press. He blogs about translated fiction and interviews Australian poets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[70382,1976,70392,70402,68512,37876],"class_list":["post-430362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-death-is-hard-work","tag-fsg","tag-khaled-khalifa","tag-leri-price","tag-tony-messenger","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430392,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430362\/revisions\/430392"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}