The Attack: Novel
The Attack traces the story of Dr. Amin Jafaari, an Arab surgeon who lives with his beautiful wife, Sihem, in one of the exclusive neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. Highly successful in his professional life and well liked by his friends, Dr. Jafaari is a poster boy for successful integration. Until that eventful day, when he was woken up in the middle of the night to identify the body of his beloved wife, who was killed in a bomb blast.
I've seen mutilated bodies in my life. I have patched up dozens of them. I've seen some so badly damaged it was impossible to identify them. But the shredded limbs on the table in front of me pass all understanding. This is horror in its most absolute ugliness....Only Sihem's head, strangely spared by the devastation that ravaged the rest of her body, emerges from the mass, the eyes closed, the mouth open a little, the features calm, as though liberated from the suffering....I could think that she's peacefully sleeping, that she's going to open her eyes any minute and smile at me.
What follows is the shocking revelation that his wife was not just killed in the blast, she was in fact the suicide bomber. Even while he is fighting with his inner demons to come to terms with the guilt he feels for missing any sign that his otherwise happy wife would have given him about her planned mission, he is harassed by his neighbors as well as the police, who eventually clear him of any involvement. The rest of the novel traces his journey in search of truth, in search of an explanation of how a seemingly happy woman who had everything one could possibly wish for, could one day decide to tie a pack of explosives to her body and blow up herself and seventeen other kids.
I just want to understand why the love of my life excluded me from hers, why the woman I was crazy about was more receptive to other men's sermons than she was to my poems
The beauty of the novel lies in the poignant way in which the author has expressed the range of emotions that Dr.Jafaari goes through - from utter disbelief, to denial, to reluctant admission, to eventually and gradually opening up himself to the world outside him. Where the author succeeds, is in drawing up an entirely believable character in Amin Jafaari, with whom the reader could completely empathize. Perhaps he even does this at the peril of the other main characters in the book - he could have, perhaps explored the psyche of Sihem Jafaari a bit more. Or Kim, his confidante and guardian angel could have been another character. As could have been Navid. While the book is a great exploration of one character, it leaves the reader yearning for a bit more of the goodness. It must however, be admitted that the novel has a good range of characters, who are often mouthpieces of events and perspectives that had unfolded in recent history.
The book is also particularly good in painting very real images for events which many of us, thankfully, had never been witness to. Or perhaps have passively watched it on TV or seen pictures in newspapers. But when Yasmina Khader describes a bomb blast, you feel like you are part of the scene, you feel like you are experiencing the pain, the chaos, the absolute panic. The author is also very successful in bringing to light the life of a Palestinian Arab - the life style, the choices that they have and they make, and ultimately the utter despair at the helplessness one might feel when he can't defend his own home.
What could have Yasmina Khader hoped to achieve through this book? Arguably, a delightful read that will keep the reader hooked throughout the read, and leave him with something to ponder afterwards. And perhaps he had a loftier ambition of getting us to understand the motives and drive of a suicide bomber, who often seems to live in a world so far apart, and yet so near. On the first count, Yasmina Khader wins, many times over. Less so on the second. I am perhaps a step closer to understanding the environments that seem to breed militant religious fanaticism, but not to the extent that I can imagine myself in the shoes of Sihem Jafaari, and to experience the range of emotions and thoughts that must have sent her hurtling from the secure life of a upper middle class wife to that of someone willing to kill seventeen innocent children for the sake of a cause. To give credit where it is due, one aspect that the author definitely succeeds in is to portray a very balanced argument for both sides of the story - despite being told from the point of view of an Arab, the book is undoubtedly non partisan, It captures well the futility of "war between brothers" while exploring the psyche of someone caught in between such a war.
All in all, it's a book not to be missed.
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