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A review by lezreadalot
About the Night by Anat Talshir
2.0
The runaways always did it again. Something about running away was painful to the point of clarity and clarifying to the point of pain.
2.5 stars. And that does seem like a kinda harsh rating for what it is, because I didn't dislike this book? But I'd be lying if I said it didn't bore me sometimes. It's historical fiction about a Turkish-Jewish woman and a Christian-Arab man who fall in love in 1947 Jerusalem, not long before the city is divided. It spans years and wars, and we also have a future timeline with Elias as a much older man in hospital care. I didn't run into the problem that I sometimes have with translated fiction, where the translation doesn't seem natural sounding or apt in English. I thought the writing was pretty good; beautiful, if somewhat overwrought at times. But some things about how the story was told really didn't appeal to me. Several times, we'd get pivotal moments between the couple from outsider POVs, and I really didn't understand that choice. Maybe the author had a reason for wanting to create that distance, but it didn't work for me. Or sometimes, even when we were still in the main characters' points of view, the narration just seemed so far removed. I just really couldn't connect with these characters as much as I would have wanted to; especially Elias, who was incredibly annoying and I don't know what Lila saw in him. It was interesting from a historical point of view, as I've never read fiction about this region in this time, and I think it did a good job of telling the story of the various wars from both sides of the divide? I'm not the best judge. Ultimately, as I said before, this was just kinda boring. I normally don't complain about slow books, but this one... oooof. And a lot of things in the last quarter just kinda annoyed me.
Listened to the audiobook as read by Mel Foster, which was fine. It's the kind of book that I think would have benefitted from dual narration, but the POVs very often weren't cleanly split (another pet peeve of mine) so I don't know how that would have been done. Overall, it was fine, just not really for me. It had all the good bones and makings of a moving story, but the end result was somewhat artificial and not all that well-realised.
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