A Sky So Close: A Novel Review

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A Sky So Close: A Novel Review"A Sky So Close" is many things at once: a girl's coming-of-age story, an elegy to dead parents, a historical chronicle of life in war-torn Iraq, and a meditation on cross-cultural relationships in an increasingly complicated world. The unnamed narrator writes the novel as a kind of cathartic journal with her dead Iraqi father as the "you" she often refers to explicitly as her ideal reader. Her British mother is also central to this coming-of-age tale, as is her parents sad, failed, cross-cultural marriage.
Despite a few instances of forced/unconvincing dialogue (this might be the translator's fault), I generally found Khedairi's novel touching and engaging. It also has the added value of being an insider's look at Iraq, a country that is much in American/European news these days. The novel avoids explicit politics, but certainly the politics of gender and war permeate the story in any case, even though the narrator's very conscious disengagement helps her avoid clear political pronouncements.
The strength of the novel surely rests in the little details the girl notices about life in rural Iraq in the 70s and 80s, and in the portrayal of her warm relationship with her father. I remember hearing that cross-cultural experts often say that a single novel is better than reading ten non-fiction books about a place, if you really want to get to know it, and Khedairi's book would seem to foot that bill well. One quibble I have with this aspect, though, is that the narrator's extended family is strangely absent from the entire novel. Her Iraqi father has moved back to his home country with his British wife and child, but not a single relative figures in their lives at all? The same is true of her mother's non-existent English relatives when she moves to London with her late in the book. I think Khedairi does this to highlight the sense of isolation in the post-modern, post-colonial world, but I found this one aspect ill-conceived.A Sky So Close: A Novel Overview

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