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Summary
Summary
A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
Midhat Kamal is the son of a wealthy textile merchant from Nablus, a town in Ottoman Palestine. A dreamer, a romantic, an aesthete, in 1914 he leaves to study medicine in France, and falls in love. When Midhat returns to Nablus to find it under British rule, and the entire region erupting with nationalist fervor, he must find a way to cope with his conflicting loyalties and the expectations of his community. The story of Midhat's life develops alongside the idea of a nation, as he and those close to him confront what it means to strive for independence in a world that seems on the verge of falling apart.
Against a landscape of political change that continues to define the Middle East, The Parisian explores questions of power and identity, enduring love, and the uncanny ability of the past to disrupt the present. Lush and immersive, and devastating in its power, The Parisian is an elegant, richly-imagined debut from a dazzling new voice in fiction.
Author Notes
Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review , The New York Times and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. Her first novel The Parisian (2019) won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and has received literary fellowships from MacDowell and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently a fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her exceptional debut, Hammad taps into the satisfying slow-burn style of classic literature with a storyline that captures both the heart and the mind. In 1914, 19-year-old Midhat Kamal leaves his hometown of Nablus in Palestine and heads to Marseilles to study medicine, where he stays with university professor Dr. Frederic Molineu and his daughter, Jeannette. Jeannette has just completed her own schooling in philosophy, and though her interactions with Midhat are initially based on distant friendliness, romantic notions begin to stir inside them both. Midhat nevertheless relocates to Paris after one year, changes his academic major to history, and evolves into an image like "the figure of the Parisian Oriental as he appeared on certain cigarette packets in corner stores." After he returns home to Nablus, Midhat's life is directed by his wealthy father, who plans for his eldest son to marry a local woman and work in the family business. Midhat remains separated from Jeannette, his first love, as national and geopolitical machinations continue to grind, and by 1936, Midhat has witnessed a number of historical regional changes, including British rule and the Arab fight for independence. Richly textured prose drives the novel's spellbinding themes of the ebb and flow of cultural connections and people who struggle with love, familial responsibilities, and personal identity. This is an immensely rewarding novel that readers will sink into and savor. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Born to a Cairo-based merchant father, raised by his paternal grandmother in Nablus, educated in a Constantinople boarding school, Midhat Kamal is already a peripatetic polyglot when he arrives in France. While he studies medicine at the University of Montpellier, he lives with a doctor and his enigmatic daughter. Without finishing his degree, Midhat deserts his hosts despite having fallen in deep, dire love and for three years earns his moniker, the Parisian, studying at the Sorbonne. By his 1919 return to Palestine, he's estranged from his comfortable former life as threatening politics loom, with colonizers and settlers shifting borders, redrawing alliances, toppling leaders, and killing innocents. Amidst threats of violent chaos, Midhat's life continues with marriage, fatherhood, responsibility, reinvention, and the haunting memory of lost love. Plimpton Prize-winner Hammad's first novel is a historical, multigenerational sprawl, with a stupendous beginning that, alas, devolves into a tumultuous muddle of superfluous characters and unnecessary side-narratives, ending with a disappointing lost-letter-induced-insanity ploy. That the twentysomething novelist is already an enviable wordsmith promises, however, that experience and maturity will produce sustained spectacularity in future titles.--Terry Hong Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FURIOUS HOURS: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, by Casey Cep. (Knopf, $26.95.) Cep's remarkable first book is really two: a gripping investigation of a rural Alabama preacher who murdered five family members for the insurance in the 1970s, and a sensitive portrait of the novelist Harper Lee, who tried and failed to write her own book about the case. LOT: Stories, by Bryan Washington. (Riverhead, $25.) This audacious debut collection, set in the sand- and oil- and drug- and poverty- and resentment-soaked landscape of Houston, is a profound exploration of cultural and physical borders. SEA PEOPLE: The Puzzle of Polynesia, by Christina Thompson. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) Mystery has long attended the inhabitants of the Pacific's far-flung islands: Where did they come from, when did they get there, and how? Thompson explores these questions, with a particular focus on the early Polynesians' incredible navigational skills. WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER, by Hugh Ryan. (St. Martin's, $29.99.) This boisterous history captures the variety and creativity of the sexual outsiders who congregated around the economic hub of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a flourishing center of gay life from the middle of the 19 th century until well into the 20 th. THE GLOBAL AGE: Europe 1950-2017, by Ian Kershaw. (Viking, $40.) In a time of uncertainty and harsh political division, Kershaw's book is a valuable reminder that Europe's recent history was a period of enormous accomplishment, both politically and economically, achieved against obstacles that make many of today's troubles seem minor by comparison. THE PARISIAN, by Isabella Hammad. (Grove, $27.) This strikingly accomplished first novel, set in the early 20th century and modeled in part on the life of the author's grandfather, captures the fate of a European-educated Arab, a man divided, like his native Palestine. NORMAL PEOPLE, by Sally Rooney. (Hogarth, $26.) Rooney dramatizes with excruciating insight the entwined lives of a high school couple as they mature into college students, bringing to light how her contemporaries think and act in private, and showing us ourselves in their predicaments. RABBITS FOR FOOD, by Binnie Kirshenbaum. (Soho, $26.) After a New Year's breakdown, the heroine of this furious comic novel checks into a Manhattan mental hospital and starts taking notes. OPTIC NERVE, by Maria Gainza. Translated by Thomas Bunstead. (Catapult, $25.) In this delightful autofiction - the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English - a woman delivers pithy assessments of world-class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
An engaging hero's journey through the end of the Ottoman empire to the rise of Palestinian nationalism Isabella Hammad's remarkably accomplished debut novel very quickly snares the reader's attention. Ranging from Nablus in the dying days of the Ottoman empire via Istanbul and Cairo to Montpellier and Paris, and always connecting the personal with the political, the journey of our hero Midhat Kamal - who as the book opens in 1914 is sailing to pursue his studies in medicine in France - makes for compelling reading. The sensation of reality is intense, at various levels. Time and place are fully imagined, with constant attention to the details of dress, furniture and architecture. With Midhat enrolled at Montpellier university and the dead of the first world war stacking up, the ideas and prejudices of the French historical moment are rendered most successfully in extended party scenes, Midhat speaking "with the accidental definiteness of a person using a second language". Relationships between characters are precisely noticed, and the characters are brought to life by a fierce interiority. Midhat's sense of himself, through his different ages and states of consciousness, is a sustained theme, beginning with his discovery at Istanbul's Lycée Impérial of "the electric feeling of aloneness, victorious and agonising, unearthly". The physical correlative is consciousness of "the hard outline of his body", which transforms when he falls in love: "the awareness of his limbs was an agony, he wanted to get out of them, to be elsewhere". As a relationship deepens between Midhat and his host Dr Molineu's daughter Jeannette, Midhat attempts to learn more about Jeannette's mother, who killed herself. He studies her diagnosis of "hystero-neurasthenia", and the influence on her of the mysterious Sylvain Leclair. But the pleasures of investigation are superseded by a crisis when Midhat learns that he himself has been an object of study for Dr Molineu, part of a project "linking philology and development" to analyse "the Muslim as a deviation from the onward progression". Midhat then flees to tumultuous Paris, where he studies history at the Sorbonne and enjoys soirees with pan-Syrian nationalist intellectuals - including the law student Hani Murad, an associate of Emir (soon to be king) Faisal, who believes that "to unify a country is the supreme goal of mankind". After the war Midhat returns to a British-occupied Palestine that is at once parochial and cosmopolitan. There are set pieces here to rival the French parties - at the market, in the women's hammam, at a popular festival that turns into a riot. Despite familial and financial constraints, Midhat settles back into Nablus, "with its webs of subtle comfort, of knowing and being known". The passing years bring a transition from Syrian to Palestinian nationalism, amid accumulating political disasters, the Arabs squabbling while - as Hani puts it - "the land is taken from under our feet". Hani's young wife Sahar organises demonstrations and women's committees. There are signs, meanwhile, of incipient class conflict. Sahar and her bourgeois circle oppose the veil in the name of modernity, while the peasant fighters promote it for the sake of communal identity. By the eruption of the 1936 uprising, "to be a Parisian in Nablus was to be out of step with the times": Midhat must undergo a painful ripening, a final reckoning with the past. This section is as beautifully told as it is surprising, and is echoed by the storyline about the French scholar and priest Antoine, whose treatment contains a hint of Graham Greene. He is another student of Arab "essences" who, observing the unexpected social transformations brought about by anticolonial resistance, marvels "how fast custom could degrade from its pure form". The dialogue flows easily but is sometimes marred by an unnecessarily liberal scattering of unexplained French or Arabic phrases. This perhaps adds flavour, and reaches towards Midhat's bilingualism, but such sentences as "Only a Parisian could be tellement fier du Languedoc ", or " Lazim, kulluna , rise up", will surely be disruptive for most readers. Apart from that editorial quibble, Hammad is a natural storyteller. She sustains tension and suspends revelation skilfully, and interweaves character and theme, the global and the local, with the assurance of a much more experienced author. The writing is deeply humane, its wide vision combined with poised restraint. Zadie Smith's endorsement on the cover compares Hammad to Flaubert and Stendhal, and the social tapestry she creates certainly has a sense of their worlds, but one could also cite the realism of Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz, or set her against a contemporary historical novelist such as Jennifer Egan in her inter-war Manhattan Beach . A story of cultures in simultaneous conflict and concord, The Parisian teems with riches - love, war, betrayal and madness - and marks the arrival of a bright new talent.
Kirkus Review
An assured debut novel that sets the life of one man against the tumultuous backdrop of Palestine in the waning years of British occupation.Midhat Kamal has been thoroughly steeped in French culturewrites Hammad, he "knew the names of his internal organs as le poumon' and le coeur' and le cerveau' and l'encphale' "but is never at home in his dreamed-of France, where he has come from his home in Nablus to study medicine. His French isn't quite perfect, not at first, which occasions an odd thought: "What if, since by the same token one could not afford ambiguity, everything also became more direct?" Things happen directly enough that he's soon enfolded in various dramas acted out by the good people of Montpellier. Midhat is a philosophically inclined soul who, as his yearned-for Jeannette remarks, is wont "to rely on what other people have said" in the countless books he's read. Like Zhivago, he is aware of events but somehow apart from them. When he returns to Nablus at a time when European Jews are heeding Herzl's call and moving to Palestine, he finds the city divided not just by the alignments of social class, but also by a new politics: "We must resist all of the Jews," insists a neighbor of Midhat's, advocating a militant solution that others think should be directed at the British colonizers. Hammad sometimes drifts into the didactic in outlining an exceedingly complex history, but she does so with a poet's eye for detail, writing, for instance, of Nablus' upper-class women, who "grow fat among cushions and divert their vigour into childbirth and playing music, and siphon what remained into promulgating rumors about their rivals." The years pass, and Midhat weathers change, illness, madness, and a declining command of French, seeking and finding love and family: At the end, he announces, "When I look at my lifeI see a whole list of mistakes. Lovely, beautiful mistakes. I wouldn't change them."Closely observed and elegantly written: an overstuffed story that embraces decades and a large cast of characters without longueurs. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT At the outbreak of World War I, Midhat Kamal, the privileged son of a textile merchant from Nablus, Palestine, is sent to Montpelier, France, to study medicine and avoid conscription. On arrival, he is warmly welcomed into the household of his mentor, Frederic Molineu. Midhat develops a keen interest in his studies and an even keener one in the doctor's daughter, Jeanette. But their love affair is cut short when Midhat discovers he's been the subject of Dr. Molineu's research. Hastily -abandoning medicine and Jeanette, he departs for Paris, where he completes his degree at the Sorbonne, pals around with a group of like-minded Arabs, and affects the stylish air of a flaneur. At war's end, he feels compelled to return to Nablus, where his father expects him to join the business. Any hope Midhat harbors of a reunion with Jeanette is thwarted by his father's demand that he consent to an arranged marriage. VERDICT Against a backdrop of Arab nationalism and unrest caused by shifting political control of the region and waves of Jewish immigration, this finely plotted, big-hearted novel explores the origin of Mideast tensions that continue to this day. A compelling first novel. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/18.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
There was one other Arab onboard the ship to Marseille. His name was Faruq al-Azma, and the day after leaving port in Alexandria he approached Midhat at breakfast, with a plate of toast in one hand and a string of amber prayer beads in the other. He sat, tugged at the cuffs of his shirt, and started to describe without any introduction how he was returning from Damascus to resume his teaching post in the language department of the Sorbonne. He had left Paris at the outbreak of war but after the Miracle of the Marne was deter-mined to return. He had grey eyes and a slightly rectangular head. "Al-Baris." He sighed. "It is where my life is." To young Midhat Kamal, this statement was highly suggestive. In his mind a gallery of lamps directly illuminated a dance hall full of women. He looked closely at Faruq's clothes. He wore a pale blue three-piece suit, and an indigo tie with a silver tiepin in the shape of a bird. A cane of some dark unpainted wood leaned against the table. "I am going to study medicine," he said. "At the University of Montpellier." "Bravo," said Faruq. Midhat smiled as he reached for the coffeepot. Muscles he had not known were tense began to relax. "This is your first visit to France," said Faruq. Midhat said nothing, assenting. Excerpted from The Parisian by Isabella Hammad All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.