Best Translated Book Nominees: Khaled Khalifa's DEATH IS HARD WORK (tr by Leri Price) with a sidebar on a movie I saw once

Once upon a time, as longtime readers of this blog or my twitter feed or other bits and bobs around the internet know, I got to go to the Toronto International Film Festival, not as press or anything like that, but just to drink, play D&D in a pub with my friends, and go to screenings of a whole lot of very cool international/arthouse films. It was a glorious period in my life, and I got to see some exceptional stuff, some of which still hasn't gotten a lot of eyeballs on it because not all distribution deals are created equal, and not everybody gets one.

One I vividly remember from my first year, 2010, was a Taiwanese gem called Pinoy Sunday, in which two young overseas contract worker types from the Philippines seized on an Allston Christmas-type opportunity and got their hands on a really nice red sofa. So far, so excellent; they lived in a dorm sparse of furnishing and lacking in comfort. All they had to do now, was get the thing from the location where a squabbling couple left it, to their dorm -- clear across the giant world-class city of Taipei. Being overseas contract worker types, they did not own a vehicle capable of transporting furniture, did not even own bicycles. The bus is quickly ruled out; a friend "offers" to help for entirely too much money, TL;DR, they wind up hand-carrying it home. And have many adventures, encountering many obstacles, saving a life here, getting arrested there. A typical Sunday. It's a charming and funny, though also moving and sad, piece of cinema that invites us to contemplate the true cost of "free", the plight of immigrants in any nation, growing up, all the good stuff. It often gets billed as a comedy but it's bittersweet.

I thought about it a lot as I started listening to the exceptional audiobook edition of Khaled Khalifa's Death is Hard Work, and I'm still trying to decide just how much of a jerk this makes me, because in making this comparison, I'm basically equating a dead human being to a sofa that got dumped on a street corner, aren't I?

Let's see.

The novel, beautifully narrated in its audio book edition by Neil Shah and translated into clear, even stark prose that lets the pure sensory impact of the scenes described shine through without a lot of frippery by Leri Price, concerns a trio of siblings whose father has just died of old age -- in Damascus, Syria, during the current violence, destruction and turmoil of that country's now ten-year-old civil war.* We begin the novel with that death, in which the father tells the only one of his children who is present that his dying wish is that he be buried next to his long-dead sister in their home village of Anibaya -- a couple hours' drive away from Damascus. And then, just to be sure that those are his last words, spends the next two hours saying nothing at all and daydreaming about his dead second wife (his children's stepmother) while his son Bolbol just has to kind of sit there and live with the fact that he just made a really stupid promise to a man who wasn't really much of a father -- because of course Bolbol said he'd make sure his father got his dying wish.

Death isn't hard work for the person who does the dying, really, is it? By the way, I'm told that a better translation of this title would be "Death is Hard Labor" because that term "hard labor" evokes things like prison sentences. The kind you risk incurring if you cross anybody in authority over anything in present-day Syria -- assuming you surive the encounter.

There are a lot of authority figures, official and un-, between Damascus and Anibaya.

But so, Death is Hard Work is essentially a road trip story that should bear more comparison with, say Smoke Signals (in which a young Native American man is charged with transporting his father's remains and brings along a friend for the trip) than Pinoy Sunday, maybe, but it's Pinoy Sunday I thought of first because once the death scene is behind us, we're watching the swift transformation, through both literal biological decay and through bureaucracy and commerce, of a human being to a commodity, something Bolbol himself realizes very early in the narrative -- and, like that of a couch through busy city streets, the movement of that commodity is very much impeded by the circumstances, physical and psychic, of the territory traversed. 

And of course, Bolbol isn't his father's only child; his acquiescence to his father's ploy sentences  his two siblings as well. Neither his brother, Hussein, nor his sister, Fatima, would have been so foolish, we quickly understand -- which is why they weren't even there to be manipulated in the first place. It's only grudgingly that they agree to help him, which is fortunate because Bolbol doesn't even have a vehicle for the trip. Fortunately, Hussein drives a minibus for a living. Perfect. Quick little trip to Dad's hometown and their obligations are complete. I mean, how is this even a novel, right?

But these are siblings, and did I mention that their dad wasn't a great one? He wasn't a great dad, which means Bolbol, Hussein and Fatima did not have easy childhoods even back when Syria wasn't a war zone-cum-exremist playground.

On top of a whole lot of tasty family drama (in which each sibling seems to embody a universal vice - Bolbol is a coward, Hussein is proud, Fatima is vain) is that of the various sides in this endless conflict; living in Damascus, the siblings have tried very hard to blend in with loyalists to the Assad regime, still in control there, but their dad was a left wing agitator of some small fame and comes from a region that is very much in the control of (I think) the Free Syrian Army, which matters more than an ignorant American (yo!) might think because his children were all three born there and it's on their identity cards as a permanent stigma, which no amount of hanging Assad's portrait in their living rooms** or other protestations of loyalty can really overcome.

So, as the siblings set off with their father and many blocks of ice to stave off decay, they're already in for it, as at every checkpoint they'll have to present their identity cards to armed strangers who will judge them by their birthplace, whether they're passing through loyalist or rebel territory -- or territory controlled by what seems a lot like ISIL.

Which is how a ten-hour journey back when there was relative peace and the roads weren't bombed-out pothole farms infested with snipers and lined with mass graves and, occasionally, fresh human corpses just left out to begin rotting in the sun, stretches out to three days while Dear Old Dad begins to bloat and stink and becomes a host to teeming maggots. And the story stretches even longer as we take turns exploring the back stories of the entire family, including the father's long-dead sister, whose dramatic death as a teenager kind of set off this whole big thing.

I make it sound ponderous and punishing, but it really isn't. A lot of this is due to the prose, which is vivid and reads like good journalism: no wasted words, precise, detailed and vivid as hell, and very, very efficient. Characters' states of minds are communicated as swiftly and completely as a description of the state of DoD's corpse as intensely as the fierce and unforgiving stare of a soldier pointing a machine gun at the minibus. In audio book form it's not even six hours long! But it turns out to be the perfect length as we discover at the end when we collapse exhausted alongside a survivor into a bleak and empty bed back in Damascus.

So to answer the question I posed myself at the beginning -- how big of a jerk am I to be mentally comparing a family's dead father to a fortuitously discovered red sofa? -- I don't feel like much of a jerk, no; as I said, the father (whose name I keep forgetting and also don't know how to spell -- one of the bummers of audiobooks is not knowing how proper nouns are spelled, and it's also a pain to go back and check something I've forgotten) is transformed into a thing pretty early on, even as he also grows into a character through all the flashbacks, but the vast divide between corpse and character is sort of the point, standing in, perhaps, for the divide between the character and his children, who it seems would gladly have traded him for a sofa not long after retrieving it from the Damascus morgue.

Anything to keep from facing themselves and each other. 

You know, the Hard Work.

*Which, wow, I always forget this conflict basically started as part of the Arab Spring. Remember that? And how excited we were for a whole lot of people in a whole lot of countries who were looking like they were going to fight and win for democracy and civil liberties and whatnot? Yeah.

**A flashback to when their father first arrived from the home village, frail and failing, to live with Bolbol turns on the point of this portrait, with the father ultimately winning out as Bolbol finally fails to put the picture back up until it sort of disappears in the kipple of his house, where it becomes an emotional irritant to Bolbol nonetheless as he lives in a passionately loyalist neighborhood and is already a figure of suspicion and hostility there.