Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa

First published in Lebanon in 2016; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 12, 2019

On his father’s deathbed, Bolbol promises to bury his father’s body in the grave of his father’s sister. It is a promise he will soon regret. The grave is in Anabiya, hundreds of miles from the Damascus hospital where his father died. People in Syria are dying in droves, their bodies occupying mass graves. The “martyrs” who die for the state are no longer given funerals; corpses line the streets. Bolbol has promised to give his father’s body the kind of attention that even wealthy families can no longer provide to their dead. “The exceptional had become habitual, and tragedies were simply mundane — perhaps that was the worst part of this war.”

Accompanied by his brother Hussein and sister Fatima, Bolbol begins a harrowing journey to Anabiya. If he survives the snipers and bombs, he wants the trip to be his last familial act. His dream is to escape to a peaceful country where he can “inter himself in snow.” But the journey is perilous, particularly when the Mukhabarat (Syrian Intelligence Service) arrest the corpse on the theory that Bolbol’s father was wanted, death not being a defense to his crimes. At later checkpoints, Bolbol is challenged to prove that his father is dead, the putrid corpse itself being insufficient evidence. Syrians are not dead, Bolbol learns, until the government proclaims them dead.

Death Is Hard Work paints a vivid picture of Syria in conflict, a seemingly constant state of affairs. Bolbol is caught in the middle of a Civil War, avoiding any action that might cause the regime to question his loyalty. He has even cancelled cable channels that are disfavored by Hezbollah. He was born in an area that is controlled by the opposition, a fact that has caused thousands like him to disappear. He is also the son of an enemy of the regime, but he has passed every security check. If he were living in an area controlled by the opposition, he would behave in exactly the opposite way to prolong his survival. “Holding onto their lives, despite the misery of them, was the real goal that everyone harbored.”

To illustrate the contrast in Syrian life before and after the civil war that began with the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, the story recounts the history of Bolbol’s father, Abdel Latif. As a teacher for 40 years and a respected member of his village, Latif clung to idealistic memories of the 1960s, another time of upheaval. He remembered the 1960s as a time of elegance and erudition, while professors in the current incarnation of Syria are accused of sedition if they speak out against nationalism.

While Death Is Hard Work illustrates the difficult and dangerous lives of Syrians in a divided country, it does so by telling a universal story. Latif's story is one of  love and loss, a story suggesting that age is no barrier to a fresh love. The story of Bolbol and Hussein is one of family conflict that could arise in any culture, although not often under such terrifying circumstances.

The journey through checkpoints on a sniper-infested road is tense. Traffic is frequently halted by gun battles. Bombs fall from the sky, sometimes hitting the highway instead of their intended targets. The army and rebels and bandits are all armed; different checkpoints are controlled by different extremist militias, some of whom are not from Syria. Bolbol and his family can only hope they will survive each day and night as Latif’s corpse bloats in the back seat. Khaled Khalifa makes their fear is palpable. “The calmest of the four was the corpse, of course, which knew no fear or worry; blue tinged, it swelled with perfect equanimity and didn’t care that it might explode at any moment.”

The story dramatizes how peaceful Syrians, like peaceful people all over the world, do their best to cope with a violent environment they had no part in creating. The story is intense and, while it is relatively short, it is difficult to read without taking frequent breaks to refresh a mind that is overwhelmed by the mental stench of a decaying corpse (I had the same reaction to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a novel I love although the imagery still troubles me, decades after reading it).

Death Is Hard Work tells a powerful story about sympathetic characters who undergo a life-changing experience in a dangerous place and time. Books like this are essential for readers who want to understand and reflect upon the trauma that so many of the world’s residents endure.

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City of Windows by Robert Pobi

Published by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on August 6, 2019

Snipers are apparently the thriller flavor of the month. On the heels of Tzer Island’s review of Game of Snipers comes Tzer Island’s review of City of Windows, another thriller in which the villain is a sniper who shoots with amazing accuracy. While Game of Snipers will appeal to fans of gun porn and thrillers that feature terrorists from the Middle East, City of Windows recognizes that ill-named “patriot militias,” consisting of poorly educated white men, pose “the greatest threat that exists to American security.” As I was reading City of Windows, the accuracy of that observation was driven home by the white supremacist who killed 20 people in El Paso because of his irrational hatred of their national heritage. The recognition that the number of mass shootings in America committed by white American Christians dwarfs the number committed by Islamic extremists sets City of Windows apart from mainstream thrillers. Gun porn fans are likely to hate it.

Lucas Page is a math whiz. He goes into a place in his head that lets him see everything as data. He no longer works for the FBI, but when his former partner is killed by a sniper in New York City, Lucas is called upon to close his eyes and figure out the location from which the shot was fired. That isn’t easy in a city of windows.

Lucas is missing an arm, a leg, and an eye, the result of his former law enforcement career. Now he is a professor with a wife and five children who were adopted from shattered homes. He has no desire to work for the FBI again, so of course he will, notwithstanding the wife who initially complains about his misplaced priorities. All of that is standard thriller fare.

Lucas has an impatient attitude that makes him an interesting character, although you might not want him to be your co-worker. He tells a prison guard who insists on being called a corrections officer that air conditioner installers should not expect to be called refrigeration engineers. He has no patience for the dumbing down of America, which he blames on fact-challenged opinion makers of all political persuasions. He lambasts both the propaganda-disguised-as-news served up by Fox and the focus on talking heads rather than facts served up by CNN.

The administration wants the killing blamed on a Muslim terrorist. They have one in mind and the FBI has been ordered to find him. That seems sadly plausible in today’s political world. The agent in charge wants Lucas to focus his skills on finding the real killer while the rest of the Bureau is chasing wild geese for the administration.

A series of shootings follow, all seemingly impossible shots, mostly made in bad weather. Rightwing militias (described as dimwitted and emotionally unstable bullies who have been irradiated by rightwing media) eventually enter the investigative radar. The story illustrates the madness that ensues when individuals who refuse to submit to society’s laws clash with law enforcement officers who enforce laws blindly. As in Waco, where both cops and outlaws want to prove that they are the baddest men on the block, confrontations that could be managed nonviolently instead explode.

The novel becomes a bit preachy at times, but its timely condemnation of white supremacists and their gun culture is a message that needs to be preached. An ironic “live by the sword” moment involving an NRA leader might be criticized as heavy-handed. Still, the novel is a welcome change from all the thrillers that depict armed white men as saviors who protect America from Muslim terrorists.

City of Windows earns a recommendation not because of its politics (I recommended Game of Snipers despite its politics), but because it is a smart, engaging thriller. Lucas assembles all the clues in a Sherlockian effort to identify the killer. The plot takes a clever twist at the end when Lucas comes to a new understanding of the killer’s choice of targets. Lucas’ disability and gift with spatial reasoning might be a bit gimmicky, but he is an admirable character because he solves problems by using his intellect, not by being bigger and tougher than everyone else. The story moves quickly, and the ending is no less plausible than is typical in thrillers. If Robert Pobi continues to write at this level, the Lucas Page series will be attract a large following, even if gun porn enthusiasts are not likely to embrace the unarmed Lucas as a hero.

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Hunter's Moon by Philip Caputo

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 6, 2019

Hunter’s Moon is billed as “a novel in stories.” The first few stories appear to be related only by location (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) and hunting. The eventual reappearance of characters in earlier stories begins to justify the use of the word “novel,” although this is really a collection of stories that are linked not just by recurring characters but by the theme of men searching for ways to cope with damaged lives.

Hunting makes the difference between life and death stark, as do these stories. They aren’t the kind of hunting stories that might have appeared in Boy’s Life. One begins with this sentence: “I’ve understood why a son might be driven to kill a cruel father, but a father murdering his son, no matter how delinquent, has always struck me as an unthinkable crime against nature, right up to the moment when my son made me think it.”

The first story sets the stage for several that follow. Paul Egremont and Tom Muhlen must babysit their friend Bill Erickson on a hunting trip. Bill’s wife has instructed them to put Zoloft in his orange juice and to keep him from drinking. Soon after the story begins, Bill is dead. The circumstances of the death are initially ambiguous, and that ambiguity comes back to haunt his widow in a later story. Her story involves making a new life and meeting a new (married) hunter.

Jeff is ostensibly on a hunting trip in the UP with his elderly father Hal, having been persuaded by his siblings to take the old man off their hands for a bit. Jeff and Hal drive to a cabin to meet Jeff’s three friends. When they aren’t hunting, and even when they are, they fill time by airing old grievances.

In the most eventful story, Will Treadwell is hired as a guide to takes two cops bowhunting. A perpetually offended local redneck decides to go hunting for Will and the cops. The encounter brings back Will’s memories of Vietnam. A later story addresses Will’s poor adjustment to retirement after selling a bar, some years after he last worked as a guide. He’s trying to forget all the pain in his past rather than learning how to live with it, and it is changing him into a person he doesn’t want to be.

The son who makes his father contemplate murder is Trey, son of Paul Egremont, and Paul’s thought occurs not on a UP hunting trip but on a fishing trip in Alaska. Neither he nor his son are fundamentally bad people. The question is whether the man-against-nature challenge they confront will inspire either or both of them to gain a new perspective on their lives and relationship.

Will’s hunting friend Phil tells the last story. Phil, like Will, is a Vietnam veteran. Phil tells of his experience as a combat journalist; Will tells the story of his former bartender, a post-9/11 veteran whose life has gone to ruin. Will is now volunteering at a wellness center as a mentor for veterans who need help readjusting. The center was founded by characters we meet in an earlier story. Phil’s reaction to their New Age methodology lightens a serious story about the horror of war and its impact on people who witness indiscriminate destruction. As Phil comes to realize, a true war story has “no heroes, no excitement, and no redemption” and the people who tell them are also, like the dead and maimed they describe, casualties of war.

As we reencounter characters from earlier stories, we see how events shape lives, how people change in response to their experiences, sometimes reimaging their lives and learning to find comfort inside their skin. At the same time, the final story makes clear that taking control of our lives after tragic or disheartening experiences is challenging. It takes time to make positive changes. Sometimes help is required, but nobody changes until they are ready, and we have very little ability to hasten that journey.

The stories have a collective power, an energy that builds. The last story would be powerful if it stood alone, but the reader’s familiarity with Will adds an extra dimension of understanding. With the exception of the story that focuses on Bill’s widow, this is an exceptionally masculine book, but it portrays solitary men with an honesty that male-centric “tough guy” thrillers never achieve. Some of the stories are stronger than others, but they work together to convey a deep understanding of broken lives and wounded men.

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The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Sarah Crichton Books on June 4, 2019

Dominic Smith invented most of the characters who populate The Electric Hotel, as well as the silent film that shares the novel’s title, but the book reads as if it were the retelling of a key moment in cinematic history. The story features a character who was, in his youth, a pioneer of filmmaking. Now he is old and the subject of an interview by a young man who is pursuing a doctorate in film studies. The filmmaker has survived war and heartbreak, but since the end of World War I, “the ruins of the past had presided over his life …. For half a century, he’d been reckless in his caution, drunk on it.” While fundamentally a story of the creative process, The Electric Hotel is also a story of how the abuses of love and war can defeat even the most lively minds.

Claude Ballard is 85 in 1962, living in Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel. A young film student named Martin Embry wants to interview him about his silent film, The Electric Hotel, apparently lost but regarded as a masterpiece. Martin discovers that Claude has kept the reels of the film in his room. They are deteriorating, as is Claude.

Claude remembers his sense of marvel when he attended a demonstration of a new invention by the Lumiere brothers, a camera that made pictures move. Accepting employment as their agent, Claude began to film anything that might interest an audience, including his sister’s death. In New York, he met the French stage actress Sabine Montrose. Claude films Sabine taking a bath, falls in love, and begins a life that will overwhelm him with excitement and disappointment

Beginning with the bathing scene, Claude slowly conceives the idea of making movies, as opposed to filming things that he happens to come across. Eventually he conceives of a horror film called The Electric Hotel. He wants Sabine to star in the film, hoping that her death at the film’s end will be the symbolic death of his love.

Sabine is a diva. She has no use for love except for her love of herself, but she finds Claude to be useful and therefore uses him for her own ends. Among the novel’s touching scenes, one off the best involves Sabine’s interview with a refined woman who is dying of consumption (as Sabine will be in The Electric Hotel). That scene allows the reader to see a softer, more empathic side of Sabine, a side that she rarely reveals to others.

Other key characters include a theater owner named Bender who invests borrowed money and his future in The Electric Hotel, and a fellow named Chip who earns a living by setting himself on fire and diving into the sea. Chip is called upon to do just that as the movie’s climax is filmed, making him the first cinematic stunt man. The description of Chip’s preparation for and execution of the scene is tense, as is a surprising scene involving an untamed tiger.

The initial story is built on the travails of filming the first lengthy, plotted movie. It then imagines a legal conflict between Thomas Edison (who “would patent human breath itself if he could find the legal precedent”) and Claude, who allegedly infringed Edison’s patent on film and cameras. Edison makes threats designed to ruin a competitor, regardless of their legal merit — a technique that the business world subsequently perfected. This is the second novel I’ve read that portrays Edison as a litigious asshole and I am inclined to believe that the portrayals are accurate.

The Electric Hotel imagines that the film, an act of creation, results in the destruction of Claude, Sabine, and their relationship. The story arc traces the long road to that destruction and its aftermath, including Claude’s capture by Germans while filming World War I and his clever plan to undermine Germany’s insistence that he make propaganda films for the Kaiser. The closing chapters give a brief picture of Claude’s life after the war and explain why he has chosen to live as a recluse.

Dominic Smith tells the story in such detail that The Electric Hotel reads as a well-crafted biography. His graceful prose enlivens his characters, conveying all the tragedy that attends artistic creation, business, and love. The book captures the marvel of creativity in its infancy while reminding readers that after the act of creation is finished, the brutal world can destroy even the most gifted creators.

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Gettysburg by Kevin Morris

Published by Grove Atlantic on July 2, 2019

Gettysburg might be viewed as the story of a midlife crisis, but near the end, two characters talk about engaging in a search for the profound. That conversation more accurately captures the theme of Gettysburg — the search for meaning that often happens in middle age, the search for a story to embrace that gives context to all our other stories. Perhaps it is the search for a way to escape a life of quiet desperation, a way to become one of those few people who make a difference in the way history will unfold. Or perhaps the search is for a way to accept the inevitability of death.

When John Reynolds Stanhope was a child, his family lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Stanhope (who goes by “Reynolds”) lived next to the Civil War battlefield, where he worked as a tour guide. Now he lives in Malibu and makes crazy money working for a famous television writer/producer named Norman Daley. Reynolds’ wife Stella has become a wealthy producer of spy movies. His daughter Bella is in college.

Reynolds recently invested in a Civil War costume and musket and signed up for a recreation of the Gettysburg battle that is being held in California, not the most authentic location, but a perfect place to act out a fantasy. His neighbor warns him against it because being perceived as one of “those guys” will stick with him forever. Yet Reynolds views the battle reenactment, strangely enough, as “an escape from the horror.” Given the nature of his work in Hollywood, participating in a fake war is his way to be authentic.

In the meantime, Reynolds has been pitched the idea of producing a reality TV show starring a former Playmate of the Year and a former Miss Universe from Spain, both in their 50s, who are best friends. They follow a self-help program called The Secret. They hope the reality show will empower women by revealing their depth, of which they have little, as well as their sexiness, with which they are loaded. The women are charming and funny, perfectly suited for reality TV. But is that really the kind of show that Reynolds wants to produce?

Reynolds’ drunken decision to attend the Gettysburg reenactment with the two women sparks most of the novel’s action. I love the women’s perspective on the “bunch of big old weird guys playin’ dress up,” which captures Civil War reenactments in a nutshell. Stella, Bella, and Norman eventually join the party, along with Bella’s friend Heather and the sons of the reality TV wannabes.

All of the characters, even those who are shallow but charming, are created in satisfying depth. Stella is less than understanding about Reynolds’ disappearance (particularly after she sees the former Playmate’s boobs), although she does want to understand Reynolds. Since Reynolds doesn’t understand himself, he can only quarrel in reaction to Stella’s criticisms rather than providing reassuring answers. How Reynolds’ decision to reenact the Civil War will affect their marriage creates most of the story’s dramatic tension.

The story offers explicit lessons, most of which are drawn from the Civil War. One is that no battle was ever won by quitting. Another is that Americans who whine about their lives don’t have it so bad, compared to men who marched barefoot for ten days, only to be slaughtered after arriving at the battlefield. Reynolds, like most people, is so obsessed with his own sense of dissatisfaction that he might need the Battle of Gettysburg to remind him of everything he has and to teach him what loss really means.

The Civil War came about because of a divided America. That division is a constant in contemporary life. Reynolds makes a speech near the novel’s end urging Civil War reenactors to remember, when they watch “these stupid cable channels and all the people that want to scare you into fighting the other side,” that the Civil War caused the deaths of 2 percent of the American population and caused wounds that still have not healed.

While that lesson is important, the book has a more subtle take on how Civil War enactments perpetuate the division of the country. Reenactors who wear blue feel a self-righteous sense of entitlement. They know they will win and are smug about protecting the Union. Reenactors who wear gray feel resentment that the rebels will not prevail. They don’t see themselves as perpetuating slavery but as protecting states’ rights. They fight for honor despite the knowledge that they will be vanquished. Reynolds believes that fighting for the Confederacy in a reenactment is about southern revenge that also plays out in country music and Fox News.

Gettysburg has a number of funny moments. While it is more of a family drama than a comedy, it is also a novel that defies characterization. Gettysburg raises more questions than it answers. The story unfolds over the course of a weekend, but very little is resolved. What Reynolds actually learns from his experience isn’t entirely clear, even to Reynolds. This might not be the right novel for a reader who can’t tolerate ambiguity. Readers who will appreciate a novel of ideas populated by characters who are both entertaining and thoughtful might want to put Gettysburg on their reading lists.

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