(Sunday 25 February 2007)
IF the past is another country, for the displaced Palestinian diaspora, it is often a journey through many lands, sustained by hope of returning to the life before the disaster of 1948.
Samir El-Youssef, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, now lives in London. His divide-crossing credentials include co-authoring with an Israeli writer. This book is published by an imprint specialising in "books of Jewish interest."
El-Youssef's meditation on the philosophical possibility of "return as a grand concept" is a slim novel competently structured through flashbacks, though with scant imagery.
The style is discursive, but anyone looking for a manifesto will not find it. The end is a negative but inconclusive shrug. Return is not possible — probably.
In some ways, the novel reads like a slacker generation screenplay. The young narrator Samir inhabits the drug scene in Beirut cafes of the early '80s, offering intriguing shades of a Lebanese Trainspotting.
Less compelling are the cardboard cutout political caricatures. Maher the "Marxist" inadvertently encouraging Salim the "worker" to blow up his boss's sweet factory in Beirut merely triggers the plot rather than suspension of disbelief.
MALCOLM BURNS
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