Like the novel itself, the protagonist of “The Parisian” bridges two worlds
THIS NOVEL about people with layered or doubled lives has a suitably ambiguous title. Midhat Kamal, the faltering but sympathetic hero of Isabella Hammad’s debut, becomes known as the “Parisian”—in Arabic,—after his return from years of study in France. Back home in Nablus, north of Jerusalem, Midhat must try to reconcile the free-thinking ideals fostered by his years in Montpellier and Paris with the duties of a son and heir.
In the first act of this lavish, leisurely and immersive novel, Midhat’s craving for intellectual freedom and “cosmopolitan life” finds a focus in his love for Jeannette, the daughter of his academic host in France. Predictably, prejudice and misunderstanding thwart their union. Throughout, Ms Hammad counts the psychic cost of the gulf between others’ views of Midhat and his own. Disoriented, in every sense, Midhat quits his medical studies.
A “fever of unity” slowly binds the Palestinian elite and the peasantry into a campaign against the injustice of the British Mandate. Despite the local backbiting, the riots and repressions, Midhat lets his dream of Europe fade. His home, and his clan, seems to suck him in, with its “webs of subtle comfort, of knowing and being known”.
Raised in London, now living in New York, Ms Hammad herself has family roots in Nablus . Like its riven protagonist, her novel—an English-language epic steeped in Palestinian stories from almost a century ago—can feel tugged between two worlds. Midhat’s overlapping identities seem to him like “conflicting maps of the same place”.
“The Parisian” comes across as both old-fashioned and modern-minded. Despite a few dragging interludes, Ms Hammad’s command of the broad picture and the filigree detail alike makes this paradoxical tone succeed. One of Midhat’s French friends disdains the small stuff since he “was an architect, not a carpenter”. Ms Hammad knows, and triumphantly shows, that a novelist of vision must be both.
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