Description: Touch centers on a girl, the youngest of nine sisters in a Palestinian family. In the singular world of this novella, this young womans everyday experiences resonate until they have become as weighty as any national tragedy. The smallest sensations compel, the events of history only lurk at the edges--the question of Palestine, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. In a language that feels at once natural and alienated, Shibli breaks with the traditions of modern Arabic fiction, creating a work that has been and will continue to be hailed across literatures. Here every ordinary word, ordinary action is a small stone dropped into water: of inevitable consequence. We find ourselves mesmerized one quiet ripple at a time.
Brief description: Paula Haydar is Clinical Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Arkansas. She holds a PhD degree in comparative literature and an M.F.A. degree in literary translation. She has translated numerous novels by contemporary Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian authors. Her translation of Lebanese novelist Jabbour Douaihy's June Rain was selected as the highly commended runner-up of the 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and also made the Daily Star's list of Top Middle East Novels of 2014. Her translations of Lebanese authors also include three novels by Elias Khoury (Gates of the City, The Journey of Little Gandhi, and The Kingdom of Strangers) and three novels by Rashid al-Daif (This Side of Innocence , Learning English, and Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?). Her translations of novels by Palestinian writers include Sahar Khalifeh's The End of Spring and Adania Shibli's Touch (Interlink). Her most recent translation is What Price Paradise by Jordanian writer Jamal Naji.
Review Quotes: Sometimes the task of an author- particularly one who writes about a hyper-symbolized terrain- is to un-narrativize, to pull things back apart. Adania Shibli is up to this task. Touch brings us the fragmented worldview of a narrator at the cusp of understanding her world....This is not the story an adult would tell about her childhood. Instead, Shibli breaks the story down into its component, sensory parts. It's the narrator's attempt to see colors, to hear sounds, and to take hold of her own thoughts that are given center stage...Shibli certainly has found new and affecting ways of structuring the experience of dislocation and violence, and her prose- even through the lens of translation- startles the reader into re-imagining the familiar.--M. Lynx Qualey, Rain Taxi