National Book Award for Translated Literature
Death Is Hard Work
Death Is Hard Work follows three siblings trying to carry their father’s body to his village for burial during the Syrian civil war. A short journey is stretched by checkpoints, violence, and family memory, revealing a world where even burying the dead has become difficult.
Work Information
A journey to bury a father shows how war has broken life down to its smallest details.
Bolbol, Hussein, and Fatima place their father’s body in a car and cross a landscape turned into a battlefield to honor his final wish. The decaying body and the broken state overlap, compressing private grief and historical collapse into one journey.
Review Summaries
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The novel is valued for rendering brutal circumstances with dry humor. Though a war novel, its center is not political explanation but the urgency of a family trying to fulfill its duty to the dead.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- 2019-02-12
- Pages
- 180 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.53 x 2.18 x 21.74 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780374135737
- ISBN-10
- 0374135738
- Price
- 3514 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/War
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.
Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He has written numerous screenplays and is the author of several novels, including In Praise of Hatred , which was short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City , which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013. He lives in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing Syrian civil war. Leri Price is the translator of Khaled Khalifa’s In Praise of Hatred and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City , as well as literature from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
Reviews
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Good but long drawn in some parts
3 siblings are reunited to carry out their father's last wish and have to travel through war-torn Syria. I wasn't sure what the author wanted to highlight. The narrator's complacency, the war, or just human relationships. The story does highlight the war in the background but not enough for you to feel any sympathy for anyone. Although the situations in the characters' lives are familiar with regards to family ties or discontent in general, you don't empathise and that is the biggest drawback I felt.
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Prenant, original, poignant
Le fil directeur du roman est particulier : on suit les pérégrinations de trois frères et soeur qui entreprennent un voyage de 200 km pour aller enterrer leur père en pleine guerre civile en Syrie. On suit, d'une part, les méditations des personnages et leurs souvenirs du défunt, et d'autre part on voyage en Syrie. On passe une quinzaine de checkpoints, tenus par des factions différentes, et on surmonte avec les personnages les divers obstacles qui surgissent sur leur chemin. On entre par ce biais en contact avec le les réalités de la Syrie c'en guerre.
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Grim but Rewarding Stuff
This is a genuinely horrifying, darkly, darkly comic novel which repays your patience if you stick with the style. If you're fine with the idea of three mismatched adult siblings taking their slowly decomposing father's corpse back to their hometown during a time of confused civil war, you're already halfway there as far as enjoying the book goes. What takes a little bit more effort is Khalifa's meandering narrative which jolts off one way and another as the minibus with the doomed family jolts down yet another potholed road. I have to admit there were times when I was ready to give up on the book - it's not easy reading, especially at first, until you get to grips with it - but I am glad I persevered. The problem isn't so much trying to keep track of who's doing what or who's who but more who's story are you being told at whatever point and why. But this passes. What settles, like the odour of dad's rotting body in the back of the van, is the helplessness of those caught up in a civil war which is nicely highlighted by Khalifa's weary, wise, worried cynicism. The end of the book - which is hard to describe without spoilers - is wonderful and horrible, a bit like the title. Recommended.
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A masterful work, highly recommended
“Death is a solitary experience, of course but nevertheless it lays heavy obligations on the living.” This is both an astonishingly simple and deeply complex story set in the devastated, war-wracked contemporary landscape of Syria. The novel is among the more intellectually and emotionally satisfying books I have read in some time. The novel demonstrates the truism that reality—in this case, the Syrian war—can often be best understood through the lens of fiction. As elder Abdel Latif is dying, he extracts a promise from his adult son Bolbol to transport his body back to his ancestral village to be buried next to his sister. Bolbol enlists the help of his estranged brother Hussein and sister Fatima. The trip to the father’s birth-village would, under normal circumstances, take two hours. But in the ravaged and bitterly territorial countryside, the journey stretches into a harrowing five days. The siblings quickly realize the folly of their promise to their father but will not turn back, even as their journey becomes increasingly absurd. As the journey progresses, through the narrator Bobol, the history of the individual family members is presented—their loves, losses, hopes and disappointments. We see in these stories the spectrum of human frailty, strength and cruelty, the sometimes-stultifying confines of family and cultural expectations, and the redemptive power of love, even love among the ruins. Through this unspooling of interwoven family stories, we begin to understand how a once-fervent optimism that the fight in Syria would become a revolution for all humanity has been reduced to the same rubble as their homes. The people are starving, terrorized and, by necessity for survival, increasingly immune to the savagery of their new reality. Death is Hard Work is acutely disturbing in its depiction of the Syrian war and its traumatizing psychological effects on Syrian survivors, seen through the microcosm of one family’s past, present and future. This is not an easy book, but it is an important book. In today’s world, looking away from evil and violence and human suffering can be all too easy. Don’t look away. Read this masterful book. Khalifa has done a great service for his people, for those outside of Syria who seek to understand, and for history itself.
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A beautiful heartbreaking work
Profoundly sad about the impact of the war in Syria on it's citizens and the nature of family and identity.