A review by jfaberrit
Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander

5.0

For all of the strange pacing and sorting decisions Englander makes, this is a fantastic book that ends up with an extremely surprising take on the vastly complicated situation that is the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. The beginning does a pretty convincing head fake that we will end up with intertwining threads that resolve together, but I think the goal is something much more: This in not so much the story of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is writ small in the lives of the characters, but rather the reverse -- a story of how the conflict itself is a mirror for the participants' lives writ large. This is Israel and Palestine as sibling rivalry, a lover's quarrel, a potential friendship strained and broken. As history, that picture would leave something to be desired, but in the novelistic sense I think it works shockingly well.