http://thebookwormslibrary.com/?p=114... ( )

Sad story of a Palestinian doctor, who succeeds in Israel and become an Israeli citizen only to find that his wife was responsible for a suicide bombing. At considerable risk to himself he tries to find out why and is reconciled with his family in Palestine again. ( )

Une fraction de secondes de la tragédie israélo-palestinienne, un personnage qui se craquèle. Terrible. ( )

This novel has a plot with a momentous premise—a successful Israeli surgeon of Bedouin descent in Tel Aviv who tries to comprehend that his wife not only led a completely hidden “secret life,” but blew herself up in a restaurant amidst a group of children celebrating a birthday party. And it has an author whose insistence on his female persona even after the original reason for acquiring this nom de plume, i. e., avoiding military censorship, has become obsolete, I really admire. The problem with The Attack is that this novel is not well written. Its metaphors and especially its descriptive expressions of pain and agony are not only well-worn but outright generic; its storyline’s structure is bumpy, to say the least, and predictable; and its characters are outright flat and stereotyped. And yes, there is a considerable bias against Jews. But, as I see it, it’s not the text’s bias, or Khadra’s, but the first-person narrator’s—a completely self-centered prick, so absorbed by his own pain and his feelings of “betrayal” that he neither realizes how skewed his perspective is toward even his Jewish friends who genuinely care for him, nor that there might be further human dimensions to the assault, namely those of the victims and their friends and families: dimensions hovering only vaguely, and sporadically, just outside the horizon of his own pain and incomprehension and his efforts at coming to terms with the “betrayal.” Looking for the very “clues” he thinks he must have missed, the first-person narrator misses the biggest and most visible clue of all, his utter self-centeredness. Now, here we come back full circle to the text’s major problem: it is too poorly written to get this adequately worked out. Owing to the lack of command of techniques to put the necessary distance, subtly or overtly, between itself and the narrator, the text’s and the narrator’s views are always on the verge of collapsing, and the text, page after page, runs the risk of incorporating the very mindset it struggles to expose.

Khadra has chosen an interesting subject: the reaction of an Israeli-Palestinian doctor to learning that his wife was a suicide bomber. Unfortunately, the novel is fairly predictable, the characters stereotypical and not particularly believable, and the writing (or perhaps it's the translation)--well, it's rather overwritten. I wanted to like this book and wanted to feel that I was coming to some important point or understanding from the experience of reading it, but (like Amin) I guess I never really got it, aside from some rather florid and generic statements about nationalism and humiliation. ( )