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A Sky So Close!

Name: A Sky So Close!
Author: Betool Khedairi
ISBN: 9780641635533

by Betool Khedairi, Muhayman Jamil (Translator)

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Overview

"The narrator is a schoolgirl living in a small town in the Iraqi countryside when the book opens. Torn between the cultures of her parents, she loves the simple pleasure of provincial life in her father's native land but, at the urging of her English mother, she is thrown into the study of Western music and ballet and becomes a devoted dancer by the time the family relocates to Baghdad. Even as the city around her is transformed by the blackouts and deprivations of the war between Iran and Iraq, she propels herself passionately through the full range of teenage discovery. The death of her father, her first love affair, and her mother's unexpected illness carry her into adulthood and ultimately to London, where she confronts, with surprising results, the other half of her East-West legacy."--BOOK JACKET.

About the Author, Betool Khedairi

Betool Khedairi was born in Baghdad in 1965 to an Iraqi father and a Scottish mother. She received a B.A. in French literature from the University of Mustansirya and then traveled between Iraq, Jordan, and the United Kingdom, working in the food industry while writing A Sky So Close, which was published in Arabic in Lebanon in 1999. She currently lives in Amman, where she is working on her second novel.

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

A young Middle Eastern woman's embattled-and elongated-coming of age, in a gracefully written if rather tepid first novel set in rural Iraq, Baghdad, and England. An unnamed narrator relates in a curiously affectless voice the details of her childhood years, spent bonding furtively with a neighboring farm girl and her sprawling family, over the objections of the narrator's Iraqi father, a well-to-do "trader in food flavorings," and especially her English mother, who's determined to impose upon her daughter the standards of Western culture. The early pages present a series of contrasts between the narrator's incompatible parents, who disagree-often violently-over personal hygiene, diet, a woman's right to work outside the home, and numerous other issues. A partial escape from their bickering is provided by ballet lessons; particularly by the florid presence of the narrator's demonstrative instructor "Madame" and several members of the latter's circle, including a sculptor named Saleem, ten years older than the narrator, who romances her efficiently, but is soon spirited away to fight in the border war with Iran. The family's move to the busy metropolis of Baghdad is followed by the father's untimely death, then her mother's ordeal with breast cancer, for which she seeks treatment in England. The story ends there, some 30 years after its beginning, with the narrator twice bereaved, now employed as a translator, and of necessity estranged from both the man she loves and her homeland. Individual particulars aside, this is an awfully familiar tale, which often feels summarized rather than told, and is almost devoid of emotional resonance until its very late scenes, when the sufferings of thenarrator's mother are made graphic, painful, and genuinely involving. And matters aren't helped by a leaden translation that frequently makes Khedairi's dialogue ring false (" ... this is the twentieth century; the weapons of modern warfare have reached their peak in causing death!," etc.). Disappointing.