Ali and His Russian Mother (Interlink World Fiction) Paperback – June 20, 2015

I really enjoyed this little novel. There's nothing hidden here: the narrator's naivete is as clear as her acceptance of the protocols of living in a world at war. The lightness of the book never masks its sadness and darkness, but allows us to see them more sharply and in their ordinary human scale. And when I say "lightness," I'm thinking of Calvino's lecture in "Six Memos for the Next Millenium," in which he says (I'm paraphrasing) that lightness allows literature to carry heavy material. I love Alexandra Chreiteh's ability to do just that, and I look forward to reading more of her work in translation.

This book should have been perfect. It involves so many of my interests: Russian language and culture, the Arab World, Jewish culture. Instead it was about the ‘intersectional identities’ of the characters, written in this academic language no one uses and constant descriptions of every time the unnamed female protagonist needs to go to the bathroom. For example:“When I go, I feel burning, but I don’t feel pain unless I’ve held in my pee. When I don’t take care of my need to urinate right away, I cry from pain when I finally do it.” (p14)Rather than being funny, the book is in this weirdly high register (“ urinate”) that matches the academic garble but not the infection/STD part of the plot.This is also more of a short story than a novel since it is a 114 page book with giant type, margins, and spaces between paragraphs.Regarding the political viewpoint of the book: I read literature in translation to find out about how people from other cultures, in other places that I’ve never met think. I don’t need to learn how immigrant PhD students in the far left think—that’s my home environment.I’ll be avoiding books by both the author and the translator from now on.