Death Is Hard Work
SynopsisPlot
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is―after all―only a two-hour drive from Damascus.
Story
About this book
Abdel Latif, an elderly man from the Aleppo region, dies in a Damascus hospital. Before dying he tells his youngest son, Bolbol, that he wants to rest in the family plot at Anabiya, the village his people come from. Bolbol treats the request as binding and convinces Hussein, his older brother, and Fatima, their sister, to travel north with the body. On a peaceful map the drive lasts about two hours.
The circumstances are far from ordinary. Syria is in civil war, and the landscape the siblings once knew has become a patchwork of checkpoints and competing armed groups. A short trip turns into a prolonged ordeal. The three are stopped, questioned, detained, and pressed into hard decisions as they move their father's body through territory that changes hands without warning.
Khaled Khalifa places the action against the physical reality of wartime Syria, where roads that once linked cities and villages have become contested boundaries. The strained ties among the siblings, distant from one another well before this trip, add a second difficulty. Each carries grievances toward the father and toward the others, and the trip forces those tensions into close quarters.
