No Knives in the Kitchens of This City suggests a mechanism, telling the story of the city, in some sense, through that of a single family, beginning in the early 1960s and concluding a few years before the Syrian insurgency began. There are parallels here to Americas current upheaval; let’s not be coy about that, even though No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was originally published in Arabic in 2013.
Key Takeaways:
- To read a novel is to know someone else on the most intimate level, to sit with them, to grieve with them, to undergo what they have undergone, their traumas and their joys. It is, in other words, a way to bridge the gap between ourselves and what we like to call the other, a reminder of our essential, shared humanity.
- Khalifa encodes such a sensibility into his work by shifting back and forth across the decades, slipping from character to character with a fluid, even dreamlike grace.
- Khalifa’s narrator carries a historical burden; he was born in 1963, the same year as the Ba’athist coup that put the Syrian military in power. But if this seems like a metaphor, it’s a metaphor of a particularly elusive sort.
“Khalifa’s narrator carries a historical burden; he was born in 1963, the same year as the Ba’athist coup that put the Syrian military in power.”
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/no-knives-in-the-kitchens-of-this-city
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