Book Review: "The Arsonists' City" by Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan is a poet and author and since publishing her work “The Arsonists’ City” she has garnered a lot of attention as it has also been used for a ‘pick of the month’ for the Belletrist Book Club. This book has honestly gotten some incredible reviews all over the internet and the reason I decided to read it was based on many of these which gave some quotations to get me into the book itself. Whilst actually reading the book, I found the most incredible thing to be the language; the author seems to have a great understanding of the inner-workings of the human soul and uses the grand amounts of description to her advantage when speculating about the positions of her characters. An amazing and expansive story filled with moments of great contemplation by which the characters seem to stop in time.

The book is a family saga set in a number of places including: California, Brooklyn, Lebanon and others. It starts off with the death of a man and the opening passage is absolutely captivating:

“Tonight the man will die. In some ways, the city already seems resigned to it, the Beirut dusk uncharacteristically flat, cloudy, a peculiar staleness rippling through the trees like wind. It’s easy to costume the earth for grief, and tonight the birds perched upon the tangled electricity wires look like mourners in their black and white feathers, staring down at the concrete refugee camps without song.”

I have always loved books which open with a sense of extreme atmosphere, it always gets me ready to read the whole thing with a taste in my head for what comes next. This dark, eerie and almost uncomfortable sense of isolation definitely gets you ready for the family saga that is to come but it also makes you aware of the here and now. You are in a refugee camp, you are seeing the stillness, the eerie calm and the resign of an entire city and finally, you are probably going to witness a man die tonight.

As the book moves on, we get these moments of contemplation that I spoke of earlier. I think that these too give a great insight into the atmosphere as the entire book is about the movement and involvement of these very different characters that all come from the same family. Saying that, I do not think I connected the same way with the character of Mimi that I did with characters such as Mazna and Ava. I think Mimi was a bit out-there as a character and we were not supposed to really understand him at all, as that was his persona. However, I loved the characters of Mazna and Idris, I thought that their juxtapositions made the characters themselves stronger and the sense of the changing world around them something more to be highlighted by their situations. As we move through the book, we get thrown back in time and ultimately, get to see what actually happened that strange night in the refugee camp as this book teaches us that there is always a reason for everything. The characters do show their deep affection for each other, but the secrecy underlying it is always present, someone always holds back.

In conclusion, I have to say that this book was way harder to put down than I first thought it would be and now, I am going to have to proceed to read everything that this author has written because I am pretty damn obsessed with her writing style. Beautiful and flowing, it reads as if you are have wings and are being chased by the sea.