One day Alaa’s beloved grandmother gets up, takes a bath, puts on a lovely dress and headscarf, spritzes on her favorite perfume, sits on a public bench overlooking her native Jaffa (also called Tel Aviv), and dies.
Heartbroken, Alaa begins to journal his memories of her, and the memories she shared of life as a young woman in Palestine before and after occupation. In doing so he grapples with his own Palestinian identity and his place in the wider world.
Then he and every other Arab in the country suddenly disappear. Desks, homes, prisons, farms and refugee camps suddenly stand empty, with only still-steaming coffee cups, old journals, and angry Israeli customers and employers left to show anyone was ever there at all.
When Alaa’s Jewish best friend Ariel finds his grandmother’s remembrance journal and is suddenly confronted with all the things that couldn’t be said(or heard), he learns that he didn’t know his friend as well as he thought. He’s also not as liberal as he thought. His resulting attempts to make journalistic sense of the Disappearance only lead to more confusion.
This is one of those times when just telling you the plot of the book is almost a review on its own, but I’ll also say this–the writing in this book beautifully blends literary style with speculative elements. (Oddly, there’s a scene near the end that reminded me of Yellowface, but much, much worse.) It bounces around a bit, but in a way that ultimately makes sense and adds to the sense of disorientation this book requires to get you to push through to the ending.
And that ending! I cried, a lot. It’s current events. It’s recent history. It’s entirely fictional, yet entirely true. It’s devastatingly indicting, and left me grieving for all of the dissappearances happening now. I couldn’t write about it at first because I was too busy tearing up at the thought of revisiting it. It’s a lot. But it’s entirely necessary.
October 7th was nearly 300 days ago. This book was published in 2014.
A cease-fire and atonement to The Book of Disappearance.
(Fellow readers, it’s rare that I read a book that affects me so much that I well up thinking about it. This is a shockingly relevant, sad, meaningful book that has been so for the past 10 years–and yet somehow, nothing has changed. I could say a lot more, but just go read this. It’s empathy technology at its finest, and its worst. If you want to read more diverse books by Arab writers, check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Don’t forget that we have an affiliate relationship with Bookshop, and any purchase you make there from a link you find here results in a commission being paid. Wherever you buy your books, be sure to read something good! Peace!)
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