“Overall, if you can muster the patience, this novel will teach you some important things”

While the action seems to be torn out of today’s newspapers, it is actually set in the late 1970s and early 1980s when a rebellion against the current leader’s father was brutally suppressed. In chilling terms, the narrator describes her embrace of fanaticism and her rejection of the middle ground.

Add this one to the growing list of thought-provoking novels about Muslim women caught in the crossfire of politics and personal life.

The Syrian writer Khalid Khalifa moves inside Damascus from one neighborhood to another, moving in what he describes as “bourgeois displacement”. The writer says he doesn’t believe he is entitled to the honor of saying he shares the suffering of real displacement in refugees camps.

On March 1, 2012, Fouad Ajami (USA) wrote a long analysis and review of Khalifa’s In praise of hatred for The New Republic.
Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-chairman of the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
As the book is soon being published in the US, below are a few excerpts of Ajami’s review.

All this may sound fantastic, but Khalifa has no need of magical realism. He invents no extravagant flights of fancy. His novel is …

Khaled always entered first and greeted the customers sitting at tables near the door. He bent down, kissed the men, flirted with the women, and strutted to where Nabil, Qasabji’s owner, had cleaned a spot for us. He ordered either a glass of arak or the local Damascene beer, Barada, pulled a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and added to the purplish haze of smoke.