NO ONE PRAYED OVER THEIR GRAVES

An elegantly written multigenerational novel set in 19th- and early-20th-century Syria.

Khalifa, the most prominent Syrian writer at work today (albeit in exile), opens with a scarifying moment from history: a 1907 flood that swept away a small town along the Euphrates River. There are few survivors. Two are friends, the Christian Hanna Gregoros and the Muslim Zakariya Bayazidi, both of whom were away at the time; of those at home, only Bayazidi’s wife, Shaha Sheikh Musa, and Mariana Nassar lived through the flood. The destruction is total, and both friends lose their sons. For his part, “Hanna felt like the flood hadn’t just drowned his wife and son; it had drowned all his sordid and uproarious past, his entire life.” Sordid it was, and Bayazidi, less inclined to repentance, was only too glad to take part in the brothel visits and drunken nights that, even before the flood, Hanna was tiring of, although he had committed to building a citadel of sin with, as Bayazidi says, “a stage especially for suicides.” With a star-crossed artist friend named William Eisa, their Xanadu on the Euphrates grows until the disaster changes everything, whereupon Mariana takes a more central role in the story. It’s not the first catastrophe to have struck the village, as Khalifa writes, taking the friends to their childhood a quarter-century earlier and a massacre of Christians by the Ottoman government; nor will it be the last, as plague and famine strike and religious fundamentalism hardens, foreshadowing the horrors that have beset Syria in our own time. The Syria Khalifa evokes is one where Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs overlook their differences to forge friendships and family ties; and although his storyline sometimes wanders between seemingly disconnected episodes, the extraordinary closing pages, poetic and prophetic, speak to the possibility of building a “kingdom where life is fresh and tender and the fish never die.”

A small epic that blends magic realism with grim realities, always memorably.