Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature)

"I could not believe that human beings could forget so easily..." Love and life, sex and death, childhood and oppression are Inside the Night. Vivid moments of remembrance, disparate yet interconnected, come together to form the body - torn but not broken - of this novel. Beginning with a scene of departure, the two nameless narrators roam back and forth in time, veering from childhood mischief to a Palestinian refugee camp massacre; from ardent first love to necessary migration to an Arab oil country for employment; from spirited adolescent fantasies to the grim reality of life in an Arab country whose claims to progress are mounted on the bent backs of its people. The narrators' trials, tragedies, and rare but blinding moments of joy are shared with, among others, a mother and a father, an old Jewish woman who married a Palestinian, and an abandoned child living in a hut by himself who dissipates, through his innocence, the enveloping atmosphere of terror. A forest of interwoven tales and strange destinies, Ibrahim Nasrallah's novel carves the history of a people over half a century into fragments that are poetic, multi-sensory, and richly evocative. Inside the Night's self-contained freedom is a refreshing development in the corpus of Palestinian, and human, literature.