The flood opens the book, but comes roughly at midlife for the characters⎯that is, for three of them. By 1907 religious hatred has cut down the fourth, and such ugly business from the preceding years is often dislodged amid the swirl of the narrative’s first half, while later chapters take the group saga all the way to the 1950s. First we witness the arthritic Ottoman Empire in its final throes, allowing a place for those outside Islam but affording them little protection, and in any case no match for the onrushing locomotive of the twentieth century. Remnants of older cultures turn up as well, fascinating; there’s even a dinosaur skeleton. The fossil that looms over the book’s latter half, however, is that of the flood survivors’ extinct way of life. The First World War takes an especially vicious toll⎯ the Ottomans backed the losers⎯ and the way Khalifa renders Aleppo’s descent into starvation and barbarism call to mind medieval plague illustrations. Thereafter the region falls under a “French mandate,” and the novel has a couple of late scenes dramatizing the calculated indifference of the Europeans: whenever native-on-native hostilities erupt, foreign soldiers turn their back. The West does next to nothing to lessen the antipathy between secularism and fundamentalism, and so loosed the monster that’s lately devoured so much of the Arab World.
(…)
Yet he concedes that “he always returns, enduring a sort of exile at home.” Now approaching his sixtieth birthday, Khalifa’s been picking up more and more residencies abroad; a good deal of No One Prayed was written at Harvard, where he lived as one of their Scholars at Risk. At the same time, however, back in Damascus he’s maintained a career in the arts, even achieving some celebrity as a screenwriter for film and TV. An intriguing case.
The author has two early novels, from before 2000, but these remain in Arabic only, and nowadays they too have been suppressed in Syria. Even without seeing those texts, however, I’d draw the same conclusion as Alfred J. Naddaff for Lit Hub: “a disciplined commitment to writing is the only thing that has stayed consistent in his life.”
(…)Both the novels preceding No One Prayed Over Their Graves could be termed the author’s masterpiece, and in my best judgment, this latest makes it three. Moreover, I’d hate to finger any one as “best.” As I’ve tried to show, Death Is Hard Work makes the most compelling read, its structure relatively conventional, but the other two don’t lack for a sense of development, if segmented and incremental. No Knives, given its contemporary setting, doesn’t immediately recall the Thousand and One Nights, that kudzu-tough vine snaking through so much of Arab literature. Nonetheless those loosely linked medieval narratives, so full of women, make a useful comparison. They have an even greater pertinence to No One Prayed.
The new novel, given its cross-century reach, often references the days of the imperial Caliphates. The storied past comes to life whenever one of Khalifa’s characters pokes around old Aleppo, really, a city center that went back as far as any in the world⎯ until it was blown to smithereens by Assad. No One Prayed is plainly intended in part as an elegy, keening and groaning, to that lost UNESCO Heritage Site. Still, it’s another aspect of the novel that most recalls the Nights, namely, the frequency of scenes like this:
Hanna touched her breasts… and kissed her for the first time, on the nipples. She reached for his sex, which was swelling and rising hard, and she felt its veins softly; she… was crying silently when he entered her.
Not all the encounters are so explicit, but as Hanna, Suoad, Zakariya, and William Eisa set intricate fractals of relationships wheeling around them, they all give off a lot of heat. As ever, things are taken to the limit, even when couples never connect. Souad doesn’t just carry a torch for her adoptive brother, but rather: “Her soul was crushed, and she wouldn’t grant her body to a man who would be unable to expel Hanna from her depths.” The infatuation eases over time, the woman achieves the same thoughtful maturity as her brothers, but she never loses the old intensity, exactly. Rather, it sprouts more fractals⎯metamorphoses, to cite another ageless story cycle⎯which expand the notion of love. So too, while the affairs and marriages in No One Prayed are all hetero, the alternatives draw occasional mention, and so contribute further to “a fairy tale, full of enough secrets to burn down the city.”
There it is again: cities in ruin, the bleak vision forever shadowing these lives. A reader can’t fail to see the correspondence with Syria’s current breakdown (quieter these days, but by no means settled), and this novel of the past also has people who can’t take the place anymore. One of the book’s better angels, a sagacious priest, emigrates to Beirut and renounces the church, settling down to write books of his own. The case holds up a funhouse mirror, it inverts the position of the priest’s creator and adds to the unease suffered by all these characters. Is their homeland eternally cursed? What’s today’s Civil War, for instance, against the horrors of the First World War? That cataclysm visits about two-thirds of the way into No One Prayed, and three of the protagonists are still alive, bearing witness: “here was death, walking barefoot, creeping … beside me, and harvesting thousands…” The devastation can’t help but prompt an all-too-familiar question: “Who can bury a dead city?”
Yet while the twenty-first-century resonance is impossible to deny, it’s only one element in Khalifa’s larger purposes. His people and their passions will never work as mere stand-ins for contemporary ills, but rather shape their epic as a dialectic between love and destruction. The counterpoint sounds throughout, never simple, not even during the protagonists’ comfortable childhoods. Souad’s and Zakariya’s father isn’t himself aristocracy, but he manages their money, and this leaves him generally laissez-faire. He heads up a household of mixed faiths and he lets the young sow their wild oats. Even when Hanna and others are at their most “riotous,” however, it takes them to ultimate questions: “He liked the moments of spirituality that a woman’s slender body would inspire in him, when he would reflect that she would age and her skin would wither…. His memory [of making love] came back to him, weighted with apprehension.”
Apprehension, visions of death, dog the high times. Hanna can never forget how he ended up an orphan, a nightmarish collision of desire and bigotry: “In 1876, every other member of the … family had been slaughtered … as punishment for the murder of an Ottoman officer who had tried to rape Hanna’s aunt in broad daylight.” Indeed, a similar fatal falling-out, in which heartfelt affection is pitted against the world’s intolerance, spurs Khalifa to a sustained performance at the peak of his skills, a two-part sequence coming about mid-book and running more than a hundred pages.
The chapters are set apart at once, via an author surrogate: “Khaled Khalifa found these works in his family home…” Their original writer was a great-uncle, so we’re told, in a setup that nods again to the Thousand and One Nights, a tale within a tale. As for what happens, the title of the sequence offers an excellent clue: “Impossible Love.” The events mostly take place during the years before the flood, but also continue another few years, and they stay with the novel’s unruly central foursome⎯ until one of them ends up dead. His impossible love becomes one of the novel’s most chilling haunts, it hangs over both his surviving friends and a circle of others, deeply shaken. One of the latter delivers the section to another frenzied outburst, a ferociously imaginative finale that either desecrates or ennobles one of Islam’s most sacred sites.
No One Prayed brings off many, many more such splendid touches, to be sure. The point that matters is how, by stepping back from his homeland’s present torment, after the two preceding works, Khalifa has created a triangulation of viewpoint, profoundly illuminating, and in the process brought off a trio of novels to stand with any similar recent run. Yes, I’d include Ferrante’s Naples quartet among those, but a better comparison might be the brilliant Jokha Alharthi, of Oman. The writer has two very successful books out so far; she won the Booker for Celestial Bodies (Oman 2010, US 2019), and I hope she’s cooking up even better⎯ but in any case, she’ll write it at home, like Khalifa. Oman enjoys a relatively benevolent rule, but it’s a Sultanate, patriarchal; Alharthi must’ve faced difficult compromises, getting where she is, and both her novels feature emigrants. In her case as well as Khaled Khalifa’s we see a duality as rich as that of Stephen Dedalus: on the one hand yearning for exile, on the other forging, in the smithy of their souls, the conscience of their race.
