Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel

by Ibrahim Nasrallah

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9774160975
• ISBN13: 9789774160974
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Inside the Palestinian Night

Ibrahim Nasrallah is a poet and a visual artist whom I had the privilege to meet a few years ago when he did a series of readings here in Ireland. "Inside the Night" is the second novel of his that I've read, the first being the slightly earlier "Prairies of Fever". What these novels have in common is their rejection of realistic narration and their atmosphere of nightmarish claustrophobia. It's as if straight, connected storytelling were inadequate to the fractured experience of exile, oppression and humiliation which is the lot of Palestinians. And yet I understand that such a perception does some injustice to Nasrallah, who has written many more traditional "historical" novels that simply haven't made it into English translation. The fact that the Arab world has produced a steady stream of exciting fiction ranging from the conventional to the experimental is something you'd never know from browsing around bookshops in the Anglophone world. The protagonist of "Inside the Night" is forever on the move, forever remembering the past (childhood, sexual encounters, massacres), forever dreading the uncertain future. He is accompanied by a mysterious one-armed personage who at first seems to be his alter ego but gradually acquires too many independent features for this to be the case. The locations switch with bewildering rapidity from an aeroplane to a refugee camp to a down-at-heel hotel to - again and again - the shores of the ocean. While the overall tone is grim and hallucinatory, there is also a rich vein of humour, sometimes truly farcical, often - for some reason - centred around the narrator's moustache, and often linked to the aforementioned sexual encounters. The prose, readably translated by the late Bakr R. Abbas, is unemphatic but occasionally flowers into something like verse. All in all, an extraordinary book, but one that requires a suspension of one's usual reading habits. I suspect I'll re-read it more than once.