No Knives in the Kitchens of This City: A Novel (Hoopoe Fiction)

“What if we had lived in another time?” asks the narrator at the conclusion of "No Knives". The question arises during a moment of reflection on the necessity of parallel lives in modern day Syria: a world where the motives of others cannot be trusted, and the trajectory of one’s own life could, in a few moments, take a fatally wrong turn.Khaled Khalifa’s detailed observations of tumultuous lives in Syria are funny, richly evoked and tragic. Through deftly crafted phrases, Khalifa recounts the fractured personal histories of a family living in a country, and at a time, when the survival hinges on knowing the right people and on biographical invention to escape the life-sapping clutch of a totalitarian regime.At the heart of the novel is the vivacious, irrepressible Sawsan, a young woman who is out of time and place in a country crushed by state dictatorship on the one side, and emerging religious zealotry on the other. Along with Uncle Jean and brother Rashid, her story forms the mainstay of the novel. All around, multiple lives are discarded and disposed of, with a frequency that aspires to the death count in Slaughterhouse 5. Within the first five pages, a brutalized, fingerless body is discarded. The incident is returned to later in the novel when we learn that the individual, teenage boy, had been tortured and killed by a regime that offers its victims the slow death of the informant as the only alternative to instant termination.In a few lines, Khalifa captures the banality of the situation with great pathos: “We sat in the secret funeral reception, where a muffled tape recorder played verses from the Quran and a few mourners conversed about the price of vegetables. Most of them were illustrious teachers and former colleagues of my uncle, who from one to another had turned from a lauded physics professor to a criminal’s father, arbitrarily dismissed from his teaching post and prevented from travelling abroad”.The novel reminds us that power - gained through oppression - is maintained by endemic corruption. To prevent the unfortunate boy's brothers from suffering a similar fate, cash and connections must be used to appease those the regime has frightened into servitude: “Staying alive became a primary aim, and it would cost the two remaining sons of Abdel-Monem all the remaining money they could gather from their small businesses after it was discovered that their Yehya, the dreamer who had loved watering parsley plants in pots on the balcony, was a member of the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood”.Khalifa has the novelist’s gift for encapsulating life-changing events in economical, finely-tuned sentences. Here, a potted history is unwrapped in barely fifty words: “Ibthihal left for Saudi Arabia as the second wife of a Syrian in his sixties, after her husband, Haitham Sabbagh, a wool trader, fell in love with an actress playing Ophelia and divorced her. Haitham was exhausted by my aunt’s snobbishness and angrily concluded that her beaky nose brought bad luck”. Khalifa is as skillful with the fine details of personal stories as he is accomplished at describing social and political movements on an international scale."No Knives.." is an important novel for Western readers: in part because it elucidates how unelected regimes in the Middle East limit the opportunities for individuals and nations to escape the oppression of history; and in part because it reminds those of us living in democracies that the minor imperfections we endure are a small price to pay for personal liberty. Beautifully told as it is, the novel is both pleasurable and required reading that benefits from close attention and rewards many times over.

I got half way thru and was totally confused about what was going on and who was who. He leaps around chronologically among other things and lost me.

Alle Bücher von Khaled Kalifa sind lesenswert.

No Knives in the Kitchens of this City is a strange book that’s difficult to review. Khaled Khalifa is a Syrian author and the book is translated from the original Arabic. It was my book club’s January selection. It was chosen primarily because we wanted to learn more about Syria, specifically Aleppo because it’s in the news so much. However, it turned out this was not the right book for that. This book follows one family from the 1960s through the 2000s. It’s told in a stream of consciousness from the first person point of view of one of the family members. He relays anecdotes about his family as they occur to him. This means that he jumps around in time, which I found confusing. Knowing more about the timeline of political happenings in Syria probably would have helped me, as they are mentioned in the background and also motivate some of the character’s actions.There are so many characters in No Knives that I had trouble keeping track of who was what. I actually made a notecard with their names and roles, which helped a lot. I didn’t find any of the characters particularly likeable. There was a lot of weird sex in this novel and I found myself wondering how the narrator knew the details of his mother, sister and uncle’s sex lives. It was vaguely disturbing.This book is supposed to be good and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 but I just couldn’t get into it. I might have abandoned it if it wasn’t for my book club. Other members of my book club felt the same way. I wouldn’t recommend it.

One could spend days discussing this book. We are thrust into the inner lives of these characters, beyond their thoughts, into their unprocessed experiences and the shards of affect that leave them so confused and overwhelmed. They are traumatized, ashamed, and alienated from themselves and one another.One device—the narrator. He is the brother, son, and nephew of the main characters, yet he stands apart and reports their intimate thoughts and distant actions like an unnamed omniscient narrator. Why use him as the narrator? Its strange brother/stranger duality effectively heightens the reader’s empathy for the characters, allowing the reader to feel overwhelmed and confused with the characters, while simultaneously bringing language to cut through their particular experience to their common story.I could go on describing the wonder that this book elicited in me. Ultimately, I stood close enough to feel disturbed for this family, yet distant enough to grasp that this is but one family.