★來自曼布克獎初選黎巴嫩裔作家Naeem Murr

Set between the 2006 election of Hamas and the 2009 Gaza War, Bye-Bye Palestine is a compelling drama – part love story, part tragedy – speaking to the present horrors with a nuanced, historical, and intimate human perspective.

Jamal “Jack” Shaban, an airline steward originally from Gaza, is living a double, if not triple life. While everyone at work assumes he’s gay, he’s desperately in love with his best friend, a sweetly clumsy stewardess with a kind heart and bawdy sense of humor.

At home in Chicago, Jack is married to Dimra, a fellow Palestinian immigrant whom he loves. They hope for a child to bring a true new beginning to their lives in this newly adopted country. He is the president and fix-it man of a shabby condominium full of first-time owners who dump all the building’s problems – structural and social – into his lap.

He tamps down the relentlessly petty tirades of May, a Vietnamese refugee and dictatorial rule-enforcer with a drug-addicted son; shares an interest in “borrowed” artifacts with Gunther, a subcurator at the Field Museum; helps Pauline retrieve her wandering, dementia-addled father; and lends a compassionate ear to Lulu whose abusive older girlfriend, a successful novelist, demands she dress like a schoolgirl. For Marcia, a single mother who carries an angry erotic charge, he not only makes consistent home repairs, but also plays mediator between her and the other residents.

But this willingness to sacrifice himself for his community has deep and tangled roots in the traumas and betrayals of his childhood and young adulthood in Gaza, a complex history that included a dangerously taboo affair during the First Intifada in the late 1980s. As time goes on, the lines between Jack’s several lives (and between past and present) blur, while the longings and secret histories of other characters, including Dimra, emerge in shocking echoes and contrasts.

Murr’s variegated, often comical tapestry of multicultural life becomes something deeper, richer. It becomes a story about the tyranny of identity and history, even as it miraculously works its way to a moment that perfectly expresses the pain and hope implicit in giving birth to a new future from a tragic past.

 

Naeem Murr, whose father was a Palestinian refugee, began Bye-Bye Palestine some years ago, unaware, of course, that this current war would occur. He is the author of three novels, The Boy, which was a New York Times Notable Book, The Genius of the Sea, and most recently The Perfect Man, which was awarded The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has been translated into numerous languages. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, among his many awards is a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, a Pushcart Prize and a Lannan Residency Fellowship.