Customer Reviews

A Sky So Close: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"A Sky So Close" is many things at once: a girl's coming-of-age story, an elegy to dead parents, a historical chronicle of life in war-torn Iraq, and a meditation on cross-cultural relationships in an increasingly complicated world. The unnamed narrator writes the novel as a kind of cathartic journal with her dead Iraqi father as the "you" she often refers to explicitly as her ideal reader. Her British mother is also central to this coming-of-age tale, as is her parents sad, failed, cross-cultural marriage.

Despite a few instances of forced/unconvincing dialogue (this might be the translator's fault), I generally found Khedairi's novel touching and engaging. It also has the added value of being an insider's look at Iraq, a country that is much in American/European news these days. The novel avoids explicit politics, but certainly the politics of gender and war permeate the story in any case, even though the narrator's very conscious disengagement helps her avoid clear political pronouncements.

The strength of the novel surely rests in the little details the girl notices about life in rural Iraq in the 70s and 80s, and in the portrayal of her warm relationship with her father. I remember hearing that cross-cultural experts often say that a single novel is better than reading ten non-fiction books about a place, if you really want to get to know it, and Khedairi's book would seem to foot that bill well. One quibble I have with this aspect, though, is that the narrator's extended family is strangely absent from the entire novel. Her Iraqi father has moved back to his home country with his British wife and child, but not a single relative figures in their lives at all? The same is true of her mother's non-existent English relatives when she moves to London with her late in the book. I think Khedairi does this to highlight the sense of isolation in the post-modern, post-colonial world, but I found this one aspect ill-conceived.

Born of an Iraqi father and an English mother, the narrator grows up in an atmosphere of discord and dis-ease, never fully belonging to either culture. Joys that she experiences end tragically. Peaceful afternoons spent with her father stop with his untimely death. Her lover goes to war. People die, victims of custom and superstition as much as disease. And finally, she leaves the scenes of destruction in war-torn Iraq for more deaths in London. Horror is piled upon horror, but the narrator remains anonymous, detached from the reader. This novel is a disturbing look at life in a country with which few of its readers may be familiar.

This story of a girl growing up in wartime Iraq sparked controversy when it was published in the Middle East: now English readers have a chance to experience Betool Khedairi's A Sky So Close, a coming of age story of an Iraqi childhood. The result is a series of insights on contemporary Iraq which no history coverage could hope to match for depth.

This child's eye view - and then young woman's eye view - of the world reveals much about the narrator. Curiously, although we absorb the narrator's passions in detail, we never learn her name.

Her early childhood, in a bicultural and hopelessly disfunctional family, is set in a rural area of Iraq. Much of the narration is addressed to the father, with whom the small child has a warm relationship. How the child makes her way through difficulties of her family life, as well as comes to grips with the life/death cycles of human existence around her, gives this novel great power. This same tension - a difficult family life and even more difficult world situation - recurs in the second section of the book, set in England. The young woman struggles through a relationship with her mother, who must deal with widowhood and a grueling fight with cancer. Thrown into the mix are blighted love affairs, the Iran Iraq War, the First Gulf War and sanctions against Iraq. Horrors of the war are contrasted to sugary military communiques claiming the Iraqi forces are "succeeding."

How the child/woman observes and handles battles within and without is truly remarkable. I found the writing sensitive, evocative and refreshingly frank. An unusual and beautifully written novel.

A friend of the author gave this book to me in 2002, while clouds were gathering over Iraq. I read it with interest then to glean from it something about a country that was then shut off to me. Two years later, I found myself in the US Army brigade responsible for Zafraniya itself, no longer a sleepy town lying outside Baghdad, but more of a congested suburb. I did not have time to "tour" Zafraniya to look for the beer brewery or some of the other landmarks, but I certainly got the sense that the world captured in the book has vanished.

This book takes us to a time when not just Iraq, but the whole Middle East was experiencing the most recent high-water mark of outside cultural influences. The closing of the dance school acts as an analogy to the gradual closing off of lines of cultural communication with the Middle East, of cultural isolation. It's an isolation imposed by the people there, not those outside, largely out of distrust and misunderstanding. All this will pass in time, but neither the Middle East nor the outside world will be able to regain the curiousity - rather than the suspicion - with which they regarded each other until the 1970's. Betool's book captures the end of that period and the transition to the current one.