Book Review: No Knives in the Kitchens of This City

No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khaled Khalifa
Publisher: Hoopoe Fiction
Translator: Leri Price
Translation Edition Release Date: October 15, 2016
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, one Syrian family descends into tragedy and ruin.

Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ruling party, and finally religion, seeking but never finding salvation. She and her siblings and mother are slowly choked in violence and decay, as their lives are plundered by a brutal regime.

Set between the 1960s and 2000s, No Knives in the Kitchens of this City unravels the systems of fear and control under Assad. With eloquence and startling honesty, it speaks of the persecution of a whole society.

No Knives in the Kitchens of this City is a strange book that’s difficult to review. Khaled Khalifa is a Syrian author and the book is translated from the original Arabic. It was my book club’s January selection. It was chosen primarily because we wanted to learn more about Syria, specifically Aleppo because it’s in the news so much. However, it turned out this was not the right book for that. This book follows one family from the 1960s through the 2000s. It’s told in a stream of consciousness from the first person point of view of one of the family members. He relays anecdotes about his family as they occur to him. This means that he jumps around in time, which I found confusing. Knowing more about the timeline of political happenings in Syria probably would have helped me, as they are mentioned in the background and also motivate some of the character’s actions.

There are so many characters in No Knives that I had trouble keeping track of who was what. I actually made a notecard with their names and roles, which helped a lot. I didn’t find any of the characters particularly likeable. There was a lot of weird sex in this novel and I found myself wondering how the narrator knew the details of his mother, sister and uncle’s sex lives. It was vaguely disturbing.

This book is supposed to be good and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 but I just couldn’t get into it. I might have abandoned it if it wasn’t for my book club. Other members of my book club felt the same way. I wouldn’t recommend it.