2005 book 12

suad amiry's sharon and my mother-in-law
i really wanted this to be a book i could recommend to people to let them try and understand some of the major problems w/ israeli occupation, and why palestinians should have their own state already, goddammit. i read a great review of this in the guardian, but it really didn't live up to my expectations. not b/c of amiry's (completely justifiable) bitterness and anger, but b/c she's just not a very good writer. i really wish whoever had written that guardian story had done a book about amiry, b/c amiry (a professor of architecture and the founder of the centre for architectural conservation in ramallah) is just not that great with the prose. first of all, the little vignettes are all pretty short, so it's difficult to learn anything about the characters, including amiry herself. it would be so easy to show the pathos of living under israeli occupation, and amiry's anger is very evident, but she just doesn't do a very good job of making herself and her family sympathetic. the only remotely interesting anecdotes involve how she got her little dog, and the two short chapters where her mother-in-law is staying with her. i jsut wish amiry wasn't so heavy-handed or something . . . i mean, i could quote endless examples of how clunky her writing is, but it seems pointless. i'm pretty disappointed with this book, as more stories from the palestinians need to be publicized, but having poorly written stories doesn't really help their case much, unfortunately.