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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 March 2024
British-Palestinian actress Sonia, reeling from an unhappy love affair (with a remarkably obnoxious lover) returns to Israel to visit her sister Haneen in Haifa in an effort to reconnect with her family, her past, her memories and Palestine itself. On one level I found a certain amount to admire and enjoy in this novel. It’s a powerful and moving depiction of the plight of the Palestinians and what they have to endure on a daily basis, oppressed as they are by the Israeli authorities. And certainly the IDF do not come out at all well here. Sonia is persuaded to take a role in an avant-garde production of Hamlet on the West Bank. Now this is obviously never going to turn out well, and nor does it – although an Arabic version of Hamlet in such an environment is a potentially effective way of exploring contemporary politics. However, the minutiae of rehearsals, the relationship between the cast members, large chunks of the actual script and presenting the narrative as a play script on occasion felt forced and laboured. The problems of putting on a play at all, especially in the West Bank, is emblematic of what Palestinians have to face all the time, true, but characterisation is particularly weak in the novel and thus it is difficult to really enter into their plight. Sonia herself is pretty insufferable and she is neither likeable nor engaging. So a book with one-dimensional characters, stilted dialogue and over-emphasis on theatrical metaphors soon began to pall for me. Sonia does eventually seem to reconnect with her heritage but I never felt it had gone very deeply with her. Her political “awakening”, if that is what it is, didn’t feel authentic. So overall, although I thought the central conceit of the novel was an interesting one, I found its execution lacking, and it left me feeling cold and unengaged.
