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John Freeman reviews Israeli novelist Sayed Kashua’s second novel, Let It Be Morning.

Until he returned to his home village from Tel Aviv, the unnamed narrator of Sayed Kashua’s second novel, “Let It Be Morning,” thought he understood [the predicament of Israeli Arabs]. But it turns out he only did so intellectually. As an Arab journalist working at an Israeli newspaper, he was able to enter the West Bank territories and talk to the grieving widows of “terrorists” who were killed in retribution for suicide violence. He wrote about their plight, as well as that of the victims of suicide bombings, trying to be fair. “I adopted the lingo of the military reporters: terrorists, attacks, terrorism, criminal acts,” he says, to keep his job. Ultimately, he got tired of having his copy scrutinized for Arab sympathies, so he returned home to work as a freelancer. “Somehow it seemed to me that if I lived in a place where everyone was like me,” he thinks, “things would be easier.”

And of course they’re not, which is why we have this novel, and why you really should read it. I will have more to say about it very soon.

Related:
Kashua devotes one of his regular columns in Ha’aretz to the war. He joins sixty other Israeli writers and artists in a petition against the war. The MG review of Kashua’s first novel, Dancing Arabs, is still available in the archives.

“Pointless now to study or revise. Impossible to work. Impossible to do anything except chafe and fret and fight with Lateefa who now wants her children to remain in the inner living-room of their flat and not even sit – with the windows closed – in the outer rooms where the walls could fall in on top of them at any moment. Dada Zeina cannot come any more. She has to stay in her own home and look after her own children. No shops are open to be sent to buy anything from. To go to the club would be unthinkable. Apart from the odd phone conversation with a friend, the world has been narrowed down to the inner living-room. Even novels are no good any more: Asya opens Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and closes them again. Out there, there is the world and action and history taking shape. And in here: waiting, helplessness – paralysis.”

Ahdaf Soueif, In The Eye of the Sun.

Over at Slate, a series of photos showing ‘Magical Marrakech.’ One of them looks like it’s straight out of an Ingres painting.

Deborah Solomon interviews Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua for the New York Times:

Let’s talk about your latest novel, “A Woman in Jerusalem,” which comes out in this country in a few weeks.
This is the most important thing! Meaning, I would like to speak not about the Hezbollah but my novel.

Isn’t politics more important than your own career?
Of course, but about my novel I can speak something more accurate, more intimate and more true than I can about Hezbollah.

(via.)