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Een Meisje In Het Zand (2011)

by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi(Favorite Author)

3.42 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Artemis & Co

review 1: "A Girl Made of Dust" starts with a deceptively slow pace. After all, it is narrated by the eight year old girl Ruba. Its power accumulates deliberately and relentlessly. The novel takes place during the early eighties outside Beirut. The slow beginning colors in the portrait of a family already in crisis over the nervous breakdown of the father whose shop feeds it. Rufa's family is Christian but not biased against Muslims; one of Ruba's friends in a Muslim boy. As the violence intensifies, the community is fractured--Muslims are murdered or flee--then family. A brother is wounded, the father's secret exposed, a businessman uncle bankrupted despite turning to crime. In at least one sense, the violence is a symptom of an irrational and inflexible society. The sins of the pa... morest are visited on the present with a fury. And religion is no solace for this not especially churchy family for whom God is still very present, even in the midst of insanity. "What was God thinking?" asks the grandmother of a senseless death. Another character speculates that they are living through the nightmares of a sleeping God. The only balm is to take a mute girl into an already small, jammed home. This is real horror, not the kind that lulls insomniacs to sleep or gives teenagers a thrill, and it is a remarkable achievement that lingers, however painfully, in memory.
review 2: The problems with child narrators is that they need to be authentic, because the reader wants to believe the story is told by an eight year old but at the same time the reader doesn't want to feel that the book was actually written by an eight year old. Here lies the catch-22, the book needs to be told by an eight year old but written by an adult.Many authors resort to writing simple sentences and just dumbing down everything but that's not the way, of course. Nathalie Abi-Ezzi didn't fall into this trap. Her writing is exquisite but it is not done at cost of authenticity of her eight year old narrator, Ruba. Abi-Ezzie managed to capture the world as it is perceived by a child. There is a thin line between the real and the fantasy and the logical order of causes and consequences is often muddled.We follow Ruba as she is trying to save her family in the midst of the civil war in Lebanon. Her father stopped speaking and caring for the world and spends most of his time sitting in his armchair and staring into space. Her mother cleans and cooks, cleans and cooks, as if afraid that if she stops she might realize the ruin that her family has come to. And her brother has secrets.It is a beautiful story that analyses the madness of a civil war in a very interesting way. It raises an important question if you can (and should) lead a normal life when the world around you is falling apart. If you like poetic imagery and ephemeral style you should give "A Girl Made of Dust" a go. less

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