The Parisian

Starred review from February 18, 2019
In her exceptional debut, Hammad taps into the satisfying slow-burn style of classic literature with a storyline that captures both the heart and the mind. In 1914, 19-year-old Midhat Kamal leaves his hometown of Nablus in Palestine and heads to Marseilles to study medicine, where he stays with university professor Dr. Frederic Molineu and his daughter, Jeannette. Jeannette has just completed her own schooling in philosophy, and though her interactions with Midhat are initially based on distant friendliness, romantic notions begin to stir inside them both. Midhat nevertheless relocates to Paris after one year, changes his academic major to history, and evolves into an image like “the figure of the Parisian Oriental as he appeared on certain cigarette packets in corner stores.” After he returns home to Nablus, Midhat’s life is directed by his wealthy father, who plans for his eldest son to marry a local woman and work in the family business. Midhat remains separated from Jeannette, his first love, as national and geopolitical machinations continue to grind, and by 1936, Midhat has witnessed a number of historical regional changes, including British rule and the Arab fight for independence. Richly textured prose drives the novel’s spellbinding themes of the ebb and flow of cultural connections and people who struggle with love, familial responsibilities, and personal identity. This is an immensely rewarding novel that readers will sink into and savor. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.

Starred review from February 1, 2019

In a debut novel from Plimpton Prize winner Hammad, set in the early 1900s but clarifying today's tumult in the Middle East, dreamy, idealistic Midhat Kamal travels from Ottoman Palestine to Paris to study medicine. When he returns home, Palestine is under British rule, the entire region rings with nationalism, and Midhat's struggle to resolve conflicting ideas and loyalties parallels the struggle for independence.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2019
An assured debut novel that sets the life of one man against the tumultuous backdrop of Palestine in the waning years of British occupation.Midhat Kamal has been thoroughly steeped in French culture--writes Hammad, he "knew the names of his internal organs as 'le poumon' and 'le coeur' and 'le cerveau' and 'l'encéphale' "--but is never at home in his dreamed-of France, where he has come from his home in Nablus to study medicine. His French isn't quite perfect, not at first, which occasions an odd thought: "What if, since by the same token one could not afford ambiguity, everything also became more direct?" Things happen directly enough that he's soon enfolded in various dramas acted out by the good people of Montpellier. Midhat is a philosophically inclined soul who, as his yearned-for Jeannette remarks, is wont "to rely on what other people have said" in the countless books he's read. Like Zhivago, he is aware of events but somehow apart from them. When he returns to Nablus at a time when European Jews are heeding Herzl's call and moving to Palestine, he finds the city divided not just by the alignments of social class, but also by a new politics: "We must resist all of the Jews," insists a neighbor of Midhat's, advocating a militant solution that others think should be directed at the British colonizers. Hammad sometimes drifts into the didactic in outlining an exceedingly complex history, but she does so with a poet's eye for detail, writing, for instance, of Nablus' upper-class women, who "grow fat among cushions and divert their vigour into childbirth and playing music, and siphon what remained into promulgating rumors about their rivals." The years pass, and Midhat weathers change, illness, madness, and a declining command of French, seeking and finding love and family: At the end, he announces, "When I look at my life...I see a whole list of mistakes. Lovely, beautiful mistakes. I wouldn't change them."Closely observed and elegantly written: an overstuffed story that embraces decades and a large cast of characters without longueurs.

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April 1, 2019
Born to a Cairo-based merchant father, raised by his paternal grandmother in Nablus, educated in a Constantinople boarding school, Midhat Kamal is already a peripatetic polyglot when he arrives in France. While he studies medicine at the University of Montpellier, he lives with a doctor and his enigmatic daughter. Without finishing his degree, Midhat deserts his hosts?despite having fallen in deep, dire love?and for three years earns his moniker, the Parisian, studying at the Sorbonne. By his 1919 return to Palestine, he's estranged from his comfortable former life as threatening politics loom, with colonizers and settlers shifting borders, redrawing alliances, toppling leaders, and killing innocents. Amidst threats of violent chaos, Midhat's life continues?with marriage, fatherhood, responsibility, reinvention, and the haunting memory of lost love. Plimpton Prize-winner Hammad's first novel is a historical, multigenerational sprawl, with a stupendous beginning that, alas, devolves into a tumultuous muddle of superfluous characters and unnecessary side-narratives, ending with a disappointing lost-letter-induced-insanity ploy. That the twentysomething novelist is already an enviable wordsmith promises, however, that experience and maturity will produce sustained spectacularity in future titles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)