SAMIR EL-YOUSSEF IN THE 

WATERSTONE'S BOOKSELLER REVIEW

The Illusion of Return Book Review

Waterstone's Brighton Bookseller Review

Samir El-Youssef’s previous work in English translation, Gaza Blues, is a refreshing collection of short stories depicting the often chaotic life of young Palestinians in Lebanon during the first intifada. Written in collaboration with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, whose writing takes up the first half of the collection, Gaza Blues represents a creative willingness by the writers to let art mend the broken ways of politics. The co-existence in one book of El-Youssef’s playful stories and Keret’s often surreal tales bravely give birth to controversial hopes of reconciliation and a peaceful future.

El-Youssef’s new novel, his first written in English, again concerns his history as a Palestinian in Lebanon, but this time his experiences are seem from a distance. The narrator has left Lebanon and, after fifteen years of living in London, he is suddenly confronted with the past when he gets a call from an old, also emigrated, friend. Their short meeting at Heathrow airport, where his friend is waiting for a plane back to Lebanon, brings up not only difficult memories of their previous life together, but poses more universal questions as well.

While The Illusion of Return has dropped a lot of the humour and rebellion of Gaza Blues, more serious ideas of exile, belonging and memory take its place. As the title suggests the central theme of the novel is the narrator’s meditations on the issue of ‘the right of return’ for Palestinians exiled at the creation of the state of Israel. Intellectually he sees this issue as an urge to escape the ‘inhospitality of the present’. In one memorable scene he argues with his fellow exiled Palestinians from the ‘right of return’ society at SOAS, where he is studying, about the futility of their cause, only to become angered by his ‘lack of ability to explain’ and make them understand his position. His experience lacks a coherent narrative by which to express itself and this book is in many ways the attempt to create one. The result is a structure which at first comes across as rather repetitive -gradually retelling the same tragic story from a prologue-past-epilogue perspective- but it soon becomes clear that it is the creation of this non-linear narrative which provides the challenge. Although the narrator insists on separating the ‘unreality’ of the past from the ‘real’ present in his mind, his story nevertheless demands interaction between the two and shows that such a separation is impossible.
  
The book in no way gives you easy, comfortable answers and the ‘yearning for completeness’ which the narrator has sought from the start of the novel is equally strong in the end, as he realises that he is part of a story too epic to achieve a tidy ending.

                                                                                                                                     Jessica Nero
                                                              

© 2007 Waterstone's


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