“Gaza Weddings” by Ibrahim Nasrallah is a beautiful yet devastating tale of families living in Gaza. The book is dominated by strong women — neighbors Randa, Lamis and Amna — who manage to keep life moving forward as the occupation crushes both the city and the spirit of its people.
Nasrallah is a poet, novelist and literary critic. He is the author of several collections of poetry, as well as 14 novels. This book was first published in 2004 by the Arab Institute of Research and Publishing as the third part of his Palestinian series, following “Time of the White Horses” and “The Lanterns of the King Galilee.” The book was translated by Nancy Roberts and published at the end of last year by Hoopoe, an imprint of the American University of Cairo Press.
Nearly every male figure in the lives of Nasrallah’s main characters are absent from his book, either on the run, in jail, missing or martyred, as the women dominate the scope of hope and resilience amidst the never-ending bombardment. At the forefront are neighbors Randa, an aspiring journalist, her sister Lamis, and Amna, or Umm Saleh, who looks like Egyptian actress Athar Al-Hakim and works as a supervisor at a rehabilitation center. Their lives are pieced together poetically by Nasrallah as the shattering reality of life under occupation is revealed on every page.
Nasrallah’s book is a long poem, the power of his verse and female characters palpable, as intense as the distress in their lives. The men are physically, mentally and emotionally beat, so the women are the ones who are picking them up and rallying for life.
The heartbreaking stories in Nasrallah’s book are overwhelming — of homes being destroyed, people losing their lives due to clashes with settlers and multiple women mourning at a grave of an unknown victim but assumed loved one. His every word is purposeful, to convey the conviction in survival and the grief that inevitably follows. The days and nights all blend into one when tragedy after tragedy befalls the women, but they do not allow their anguish to stop them.
Nasrallah writes of a reality that sounds like a nightmare. The conditions of life under occupation are torturously painful, but his characters are a source of strength. They are the light in a world of darkness.
Review: 'Gaza Weddings' is about finding hope in dark times
Review: 'Gaza Weddings' is about finding hope in dark times
- This novel tells the beautiful yet devastating tale of families living in Gaza
- Author Ibrahim Nasrallah is a poet, novelist and literary critic
What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and Craft of Doing Science’
Author: Kenneth Catania
Like any creative endeavor, science can be a messy and chaotic affair.
“On the Art and Craft of Doing Science” shares the creative process of an innovative and accomplished scientist, taking readers behind the scenes of some of his most pioneering investigations and explaining why the practice of science, far from being an orderly exercise in pure logic, is a form of creative expression like any other art.
Kenneth Catania begins by discussing how ideas set the stage for scientific breakthroughs and goes on to describe ways to approach experimental design.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’
- It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes
Author: ANDREW W. BERNSTEIN
Mount Fuji is everywhere recognized as a wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan.
Yet behind the picture-postcard image is a history filled with conflict and upheaval. Violent eruptions across the centuries wrought havoc and instilled fear.
It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes.
And while its soaring majesty has inspired countless works of literature and art, the foot of the mountain is home to military training grounds and polluting industries.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’
- Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history
Aleksandar Hemon’s 2011 essay “The Aquarium” is an exploration of parental love, grief, and the isolating toll of confronting a child’s mortality. The essay was first published in The New Yorker and later appeared in “The Book of My Lives” in 2013.
Written with unflinching honesty, the piece chronicles Hemon’s experience navigating his infant daughter Isabel’s diagnosis of a rare brain tumor and the family’s agonizing journey through surgeries, chemotherapy, and loss.
Hemon juxtaposes the clinical detachment of medical jargon — “external ventricular drain,” “stem-cell recovery” — with visceral snapshots: Isabel’s breath on his chest, her laughter amid IV drips, her small hand gripping his finger.
At the heart of the essay lies the metaphor of an aquarium where the family exists in a suffocating bubble, visible to the outside world but severed from its rhythms.
Central to the narrative is Hemon’s elder daughter Ella, who processes her sister’s illness through an imaginary brother, Mingus.
Stylistically, Hemon oscillates between reporter-like precision and raw vulnerability. He rejects platitudes about suffering’s “ennobling” nature, writing: “Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.”
The essay’s power lies in its refusal to soften despair, instead confronting the “indelible absence” grief leaves behind.
Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, he doesn’t just tell stories; he uses language to find pockets of hope in shattered lives.
Think of him as a guide through the chaos of modern exile — equal parts poet and provocateur.
What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms
- In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy
Author: Ian Duncan
The 120 years between Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time.
In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses, even as the two were separating into distinct domains.
What We Are Reading Today: Utopianism for a Dying Planet
- The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability
Author: Gregory Claeys
In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior.
“Utopianism for a Dying Planet” examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today’s thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe.
The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability.
Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives.
