I keep expanding my understanding and knowledge about authors and topics pertaining to the Middle East issues, but my advance is often pursued with precaution. As much as I love to be back - on way on the words and not airplanes because we are in 2020 after all - in my favorite places on Earth, I am also aware that writing is not innocent and I want to keep myself away from the toxicity of biased creativity. Against the Loveless World for instance, such a great wording and monomanic bias. Such a far cry from Sayed Kashua who has a strong voice not hampered by hate.
The Lady from Tel Aviv is the debut novel of the British-based journalist Raba´i al-Madhoun, who grew up in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The main character of the book, the journalist Walid Dahman, come back to visit his mother and extended relatives after 38 years of absence from the land. During his 21-day trip he is aiming to collect the fragments of his past, but things changed not only politically but non-surprisingly, from the point of view of the human relations too. Old friendships are challenged by political options, promising futures were broken and even the family connections themselves cannot resist the test of the dramatic political and ideological changes of the last decades.
´Our family now kills and is killed. What kind of family is this that I´ve come back to?´
On his way to Ben Gurion Airport from London, Walid met in the plane an Israeli woman who was returning home broken hearted, because his Ukrainian Jewish boyfriend couldn´t live any longer in Israel. She will randomly send him emails including one to confess her experience during the Army service in Gaza and him being the only Palestinian she actually ever talked with. They will maybe meet later in London, when Walid is back home.
The strongest point of the book resides in long length descriptions and human observations. There is also bias and predictable assumptions but in an elegant less militant articulated way. But overall, there is the permanent condition of randomness in a world with a murky future. And this reality is no more a question of debating who´s guilty and who´s not.
Rating: 2.5 stars
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