レビュー要約

• 苛酷な状況を乾いたユーモアで描く点が評価されている。戦争小説でありながら、中心にあるのは政治解説ではなく、家族が死者への義務を果たそうとする切実さである。

レビュー

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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