Iman Humaydan Younes

"Everything around me seemed radiant, silent and bleak"
By sally tarbox on 24 June 2017
Format: Paperback
In four separate - but interlinked - narratives, the author writes from the point of view of each of four women living in a Beirut apartment block. The Civil War is at its height, but life goes on - though a tormented, fractured, unreal sort of life.
"Life continued its cycle and people went back to their work and their thoughts. But when the sounds got closer, everyone started running in all directions, and in a few minutes the street was empty. It returned to its normal state, silent and bleak. It became empty except for their smells, as though the masterful fingers of a magician had passed over their heads and hid them up his sleeves."
As bombing becomes a regular event, the women are overcome variously with depression, madness, plans to flee, a need to live life to the full - or wreak revenge.
It's an evocative book which must give a pretty fair picture of how life was.
I have to say that I found the unremitting awfulness a little wearing by the end - with four separate lives (though they all read rather similarly) perhaps the reader doesn't get into one character enough to feel as deeply as she might.
But certainly brings the era to life… (mer)

I had a difficult time relating to these stories. Perhaps I am not as well read as I thought I was or perhaps it is because I have never travelled outside my home country yet alone a country surrounded with such chaos and upheaval. Whatever the case because so many of the stories were written about the already departed and not the here and now I found them hard to connect with.
I did however enjoy the writing. I feel as though little could have been lost in the beauty and fluidity of the prose. Two of my favorite stories were The Bastard by Tarek Abi Samra & Pizza Delivery by Bana Beydoun.… (mer)