Welcome to our third book club chat of the year: In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa. I’m interested to hear what everyone’s reading experiences were like with this book.
Ground rules remain the same as they always have. For those of you who might be joining us for the first time (hello new friends!) all are welcome. All of our topics are numbered and we ask that you refer to them below by that number to help people find the conversation topics they are looking for. If you are responding to someone else’s thoughts, please try to respond directly to them as suits your own ponderings. Also, note that while I’ve never once had to use it and don’t expect to now, I’ll delete comments that are not germane to our discussion or get out of hand.
In addition to the topics here, we will also be talking on our Facebook group, Cannonball Read Book Chat so feel free to wander over there throughout the course of the day and evening.
On to the topics:
- The book focuses on Aleppo of thirty years ago. What meaning does it make for you of the Aleppo of the past few years?
- Though unnamed, our narrator is a part of the majority Sunni population, and is led by her politically active uncles, to embrace the hatred of the Alawite minority. How does that relate to your country today?
- What does the multifaceted understandings of the various women living in the same society illuminate for you?
- How do you feel Khalifa managed in his writing from a feminine voice?
- Khalifa has suffered violence for his work, does that feel justified to you?
What say you?
I didn’t actually read the book club pick this time. I had to ILL it from my library, and then due to poorly timed circumstances, wasn’t able to pick it up. Ah, well. I’m still subscribing to this thread and I’ll be interested to see what everyone has to say about it.
It was a problem I was running into with almost any choice, American libraries don’t seem to be as good at stocking works in translation as you might hope.
This book has one of my pet peeves, two characters with similar names: Maryam and Marwa. I found this very confusing.
Also the narrator’s brothers, Hossam and Humam. Maybe they are only similar to my Western/English speaking brain, but I struggled with both pairs particularly since they were spoken of together quite frequently.
Like Narfna, I have to confess that I haven’t actually read the book this time. First time since we started book club. I hang my head in shame. Will still be following the discussion, though.
#4 – I’ve been waiting to discuss this because it drove me nuts: I do not think that Khalifa managed to write a convincing teenage female character. AT ALL. It reminded me, not in a good way, or Meg Ellison’s piece in McSweeney’s about male/female gaze from last fall.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/if-women-wrote-men-the-way-men-write-women
I agree. I wondered if there was something lost in translation.
Initially I thought so too, but by the time I got to the end of the first section I was pretty well convinced that Khalifa was overly focused on the physicality of femaleness with no particular narrative driver.
Sadly I agree 100%
Oh, that McSweeney’s piece is *gold.* And sadly, so true. I read Lolita in a perpetual haze of blind rage, love letter to the English language, MY ASS. I’ma stop there, as I can sense a rage stroke coming on…
So yes, I agree 100%. Khalifa’s teenaged female convinced me not a whit. As a woman, I am very critical of a man writing a woman, because if there is anything my Woman Card (thanks, Hillary!) bought me, it is the right to criticize a man for Getting Women Wrong.
#4 was the reason I stopped reading altogether, around page 80 (I really tried, you guys). I think that Khalifa may have the disadvantage of less exposure to other, more nuanced writers, but I was still enraged by the continued focus of the male gaze upon the female body, which was out-of-place for a female writer (even if she did have same-sex attraction). No woman, not even queer women, are THIS fixated on breasts. It was very much a man’s depiction of a woman, and I did not buy it for one second. As I said on the FB thread, read Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt instead.
***er, female protagonist, not writer.
I think #4 overshadowed everything this book might have had to offer. I am also retroactively mad at the reviews I read of this which did not mention it. How could you have read this book and not seen it?
It even colors my answer for #5. No, Khalifa (nor any other artist) should be subjected to violence and death threats for their work, nor do I believe in banning books. But #4 makes this one hard to defend.
It’s so strange to think that such a prominent and disturbing part of the book gets completely ignored. Did people give him a pass because of the topic or setting? To me that seems disingenuous. Like, it’s okay to talk about an important issue but ALSO the problematic elements that might be quite instrumental in keeping this book from hitting the big time. To me, that should be a worthy discussion: is Khalifa’s interest in addressing an important issue eclipsed by his own sexism?
I want to go back (wait I think I will)…
Of the two main reviews I focused on while choosing our options, one was written by a woman, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/14/in-praise-hatred-khaled-khalifa-review, and one by a man, http://www.npr.org/2014/04/22/305960115/book-review-in-praise-of-hatred. Neither deal with it.
I feel for our little corner of the internet, the answer to your last question is yes. Invariably the sexism on display in either his writing or how it was translated caused many of us to not get past the first section, therefore robbing us of the third, where Maya Jaggi says the real meaning is made. Fatigue with the sexism and the style choices prevented me from getting there, and I like to think I’m a pretty persistent reader.