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shadowkatFinally finished The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shanai Boinanjiu - which is her debut novel. Shanai according to the author bio is an Israeli, was born in 1987 in a small town on the Israel/Lebanon border, and she served in the Israeli Defense Forces for two years.
The book itself is hard to review. But haunting. And amongst the best I've read in the last few years. (Granted I've read a lot of crappy and forgettable books). It's about three Israeli women in their late teens who are drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces. The book is told both from the women's perspectives and those who either love them or are related to them. Both male and female perspectives are provided. But it is mainly about what it is like to be a young woman living in Israel during the early 21st Century.
Some books require work to read. They test your mind. Retrain it. Force you to think a little differently. Like learning a new language. While others are easier...you barely have to work at it, you can skim whole paragraphs and still know what's happening and often finish in a day, turning pages rapidly as if you are watching a tv show or movie and not reading or thinking at all, just gazing through a glass. This book is the former, not the later.
It is not a page-turner. It will not keep you up late at night reading. But you won't forget it five minutes later. It's not plot-driven, more character driven, and the characters are complicated and not always easy to like or identify with. They feel real. The story feels real as well. As if it is non-fiction not fiction. You feel as if you are there in the desert, looking at the olive trees. Not gazing safely through a glass at them.
It requires slow digestion and pulls you deep inside another person's perspective - with a stream of consciousness style that takes a while to get into the rhythm of, like learning a new language or a new composition of music. But it does require the right mood and frame of mind. It's also the type of book that works very well in Book clubs and English Lit courses - much to chew on.
Shani Boianjiu is quite ambitious. She plays with time and point of view. Her novel is told in various points of view and perspectives. The first portion in first person, the second in third person, and then back again. It's a tale told by multiple voices not just one, and as a result we see multiple perspectives on the central topic - which is what it is like to live on the West Bank of Israel in the early 21st Century during multiple mini-battles and a hard won truces. And her styles vary depending on the point of view she is in and when she is in it. She writes in the voice of the character without ever once falling into the trap of dialect or phonetics. You hear her characters speaking in your head.
The title of the book is from a bumper sticker one of the character's fathers see on the car in front of him - it is a metaphor for these characters lives - what it is like to live in Israel. It's like when you drive down the road and you see a weird bumper sticker in front of you and think, dang, that's my life, exactly. Here it is told in much the same way. The book is in a hyper-realistic post-modern style - depicting the harsh reality of Israel without the rose-colored glasses. Shani tells it like it is. No small detail is spared.
We are pulled into the lives of three women, from the age of 16, when they are still in school, to the age of 23, a year or two after they've finished their tour of duty in the Israeli Armed Forces. Lea, Yael, and Avishag. They come from different ethnicities, Yemen, Iraq, Eucador...but all are Jewish and all Israeli. They are friends in school, and their friendships change during the period of service, they fall in and out of them. Through them we see first hand what it is like to be female in this environment. How far we've come and how far we have yet to go. While they've been granted the right to serve in the armed forces, they are regulated boring, mindless jobs, while their male counterparts fight and die, often resenting them. In one chapter, after they've finished serving, male soliders take them captive and punish them for not being part of the War. It's a weird chapter that is told in a stream of consciousness almost surreal style that requires re-reading to determine what occurred and is in the first person narrative. Through it, the writer makes clear how traumatized and confused the narrator is, hence the surreal telling.
The book did not move me emotionally. There's an emotional distance or coldness in the telling. The writer has a "matter-of-fact" style to her writing that makes it difficult to related to her characters. You feel as if you are at arms length and perhaps that is for the best. Towards the end, it did begin to move and haunt me. For I found myself thinking, but for the grace of God, go I. These women's lives are far from easy. But they suffer through with a bored pathos bordering on apathy. It's almost as if they are asking towards the end is there any reason for this, any meaning here? And perhaps what they fear most is the lack of it, the meaninglessness, the emptiness...that their lives are an emotional and spiritual desert. If this is true, what in fact are they fighting for? And are they forever, if so what does this mean, and do they really want to be?
Not a book I'll forget any time soon. In some respects more horrifying due to its basis in reality than any horror novel I've read. The characters seem to have lost their souls by the end of the novel, and are fighting with a listless sluggishness to get them back again. What an endless war does to us, what endless fighting for a cause we no longer understand, whose meaning seems to have ebbed ageas ago...and how constantly demonizing the enemy begins to chip away at us - is no better expressed than through these pages. It's a "Heart of Darkness" for the modern age.
Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart or hard of mind.
The book itself is hard to review. But haunting. And amongst the best I've read in the last few years. (Granted I've read a lot of crappy and forgettable books). It's about three Israeli women in their late teens who are drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces. The book is told both from the women's perspectives and those who either love them or are related to them. Both male and female perspectives are provided. But it is mainly about what it is like to be a young woman living in Israel during the early 21st Century.
Some books require work to read. They test your mind. Retrain it. Force you to think a little differently. Like learning a new language. While others are easier...you barely have to work at it, you can skim whole paragraphs and still know what's happening and often finish in a day, turning pages rapidly as if you are watching a tv show or movie and not reading or thinking at all, just gazing through a glass. This book is the former, not the later.
It is not a page-turner. It will not keep you up late at night reading. But you won't forget it five minutes later. It's not plot-driven, more character driven, and the characters are complicated and not always easy to like or identify with. They feel real. The story feels real as well. As if it is non-fiction not fiction. You feel as if you are there in the desert, looking at the olive trees. Not gazing safely through a glass at them.
It requires slow digestion and pulls you deep inside another person's perspective - with a stream of consciousness style that takes a while to get into the rhythm of, like learning a new language or a new composition of music. But it does require the right mood and frame of mind. It's also the type of book that works very well in Book clubs and English Lit courses - much to chew on.
Shani Boianjiu is quite ambitious. She plays with time and point of view. Her novel is told in various points of view and perspectives. The first portion in first person, the second in third person, and then back again. It's a tale told by multiple voices not just one, and as a result we see multiple perspectives on the central topic - which is what it is like to live on the West Bank of Israel in the early 21st Century during multiple mini-battles and a hard won truces. And her styles vary depending on the point of view she is in and when she is in it. She writes in the voice of the character without ever once falling into the trap of dialect or phonetics. You hear her characters speaking in your head.
The title of the book is from a bumper sticker one of the character's fathers see on the car in front of him - it is a metaphor for these characters lives - what it is like to live in Israel. It's like when you drive down the road and you see a weird bumper sticker in front of you and think, dang, that's my life, exactly. Here it is told in much the same way. The book is in a hyper-realistic post-modern style - depicting the harsh reality of Israel without the rose-colored glasses. Shani tells it like it is. No small detail is spared.
We are pulled into the lives of three women, from the age of 16, when they are still in school, to the age of 23, a year or two after they've finished their tour of duty in the Israeli Armed Forces. Lea, Yael, and Avishag. They come from different ethnicities, Yemen, Iraq, Eucador...but all are Jewish and all Israeli. They are friends in school, and their friendships change during the period of service, they fall in and out of them. Through them we see first hand what it is like to be female in this environment. How far we've come and how far we have yet to go. While they've been granted the right to serve in the armed forces, they are regulated boring, mindless jobs, while their male counterparts fight and die, often resenting them. In one chapter, after they've finished serving, male soliders take them captive and punish them for not being part of the War. It's a weird chapter that is told in a stream of consciousness almost surreal style that requires re-reading to determine what occurred and is in the first person narrative. Through it, the writer makes clear how traumatized and confused the narrator is, hence the surreal telling.
The book did not move me emotionally. There's an emotional distance or coldness in the telling. The writer has a "matter-of-fact" style to her writing that makes it difficult to related to her characters. You feel as if you are at arms length and perhaps that is for the best. Towards the end, it did begin to move and haunt me. For I found myself thinking, but for the grace of God, go I. These women's lives are far from easy. But they suffer through with a bored pathos bordering on apathy. It's almost as if they are asking towards the end is there any reason for this, any meaning here? And perhaps what they fear most is the lack of it, the meaninglessness, the emptiness...that their lives are an emotional and spiritual desert. If this is true, what in fact are they fighting for? And are they forever, if so what does this mean, and do they really want to be?
Not a book I'll forget any time soon. In some respects more horrifying due to its basis in reality than any horror novel I've read. The characters seem to have lost their souls by the end of the novel, and are fighting with a listless sluggishness to get them back again. What an endless war does to us, what endless fighting for a cause we no longer understand, whose meaning seems to have ebbed ageas ago...and how constantly demonizing the enemy begins to chip away at us - is no better expressed than through these pages. It's a "Heart of Darkness" for the modern age.
Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart or hard of mind.