The Parisian

In Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian, published in 2019, I turned away from science fiction to my other love, literary fiction. The story begins in 1914 when the protagonist, Midhat Kamal, from Nablus in Palestine, now the West Bank, travels to Montpelier, France to study medicine. The opening third of the book, focuses on the intense internal feelings of Kamal as he experiences the indefiniteness of the immigrant’s position in French society, at once treated as an important person, but always with reservations, suspicion, and never as quite an equal. The writing is some of the most beautiful I have read… show more.

I liked her restraint, i.e. that she left it to the reader to figure it out. Example: She used Arabic a lot but mostly didnt translate it so you had to figure out what she was saying. Gave atmosphere to the book.

This is a recent first novel, set mostly in France, about a young Palestinian man who goes there to study medicine and falls in love with the daughter of his host. I’m still reading it, and admiring the sureness of touch, the knowledge of history, and above all the sense of the period – it’s set before World War 1 and continues through the 20th century. Brava, Isabella Hammad!