My first Lavie Tidhar book, although not the first book of his I have acquired (that would be Central Station). I found it a somewhat wistful and poignant read at times (if that makes any sense) but just in an overarching sense as the voice felt rather prosaic - the premise is rather intriguing (for me anyhow) an alternate history of the Jewish resettlement that ended up somewhere in Kenya... going into a multi-verse/parallel universe/earth/history skein that I sort of found myself stumbling along whilst feeling about as foggy as the MC. The seemingly meandering plot, the commentary and open ended-ness reminded me somewhat of an Ursula K. Le Guin book ( more in terms of the feeling it left me with if not the overall writing and style). I feel like reading more Tidhar now - should probably look into getting to my copy of Central Station 😅. Reading this was made weirder for me as I am also currently reading Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union atm, both books share the alternate resettlement history & noir-ish mystery strains.

Also the cover for this book is just lovely (can’t see it via the b&w e-reader obvs) - going to get a copy ... probably. Central Station needs a friend!

In Lavie Tidhar’s new novel Unholy Land, a suspiciously similarly named pulp writer Liro Tirosh returns to his homeland of Palestina, a Jewish state on Lake Victoria between Kenya and Uganda. Tirosh has been out of the country, living in the Reich for years, in a Germany that never perpetrated a Holocaust. But his father, a larger than life national figure, is dying, so he returns. He presses through his dreams of Berlin in the plane above Palestina, and then through customs, where he is interrogated by the secret police, and then pushed out into the strange, bright streets of his homeland.

Revisiting one’s home town, one’s native country, after a long period always causes a sense of dislocation: the smell of things and the quality of the light tend to remain the same, but the buildings, the cars, often the very scale of the place feels off, forcing the memory to stutter and warp. Tirosh’s uneasy reintegration to the place of his origin seems the usual kind of dislocation—until he is visited by an old classmate, who barges into Tirosh’s hotel room and harangues him with his very presence. Tirosh knew him as young man, but now he’s run to the thin-haired middle age, both thicker and thinner than he remembers.

The guest drinks Tirosh’s hotel liquor and rants about how Tirosh’s niece, the daughter of his war hero brother, has gone missing amid her investigations of the folklore of the wall, The Wall, the wall—the one going up now to partition the Jewish state from the displaced African populations around it. And then, the old classmate dies, poisoned, and Tirosh is blamed for it, and arrested. Even though the secret police were watching Tirosh, they missed both his friend’s entrance into the hotel room, and his death.

Here, the slippages begin in earnest: Tirosh begins thinking of himself as a detective in one of his novels, interrogating old drunks and rich socialites as he plays the flatfoot. He answers his phone and speaks to his ex-wife, but the connection is staticky, and when he looks down, the phone is a glasses case again (there are no cell phones in Palestina). These are not the only holes in Tirosh’s reality: in a remembered conversation with the literary agent who is pressing him to write more marketable fiction, Tirosh snarls, “Why don’t I write a book about, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler as a private detective?” Which is, of course, precisely the plot of Lavie Tidhar’s novel A Man Lies Dreaming. You see: Tirosh, Tidhar. We are in that kind of novel, the kind that doubles back and dodges sideways. Keeping up provides its own kind of pleasure.

There are three point of view characters in Unholy Land. Tirosh’s portions are the only in the third person, but strangely remain the most intimate, lingering in the strange fallow between his life in Berlin and his return to Palestina, running forward and back through his young life, his exodus and return, and intimate in their close observation of his thoughts and feelings. Conversely, the first person narrator, Bloom, a member of the secret police, is the most impersonal. Bloom is a terrible person, filled up with his own righteousness and fully believing in the structural and institutional cruelties he perpetrates.

The final sections are narrated in second person, and follow Nur Al-Hussaini, who is a sort of detective herself, sent to Palestina to shadow Tirosh (and Bloom, and any others influencing the ouroboros of the overt plot.) At times, the various points of view meet up, and the result is an altogether dizzying and masterful use of narrative voice. The clashing narrative perspectives produce something like parallax—looking out of one eye, and then the other, and then both focused together on a third point. Which is the operative metaphor of Unholy Land: one of partition and perspective, the same thing seen over and over and over again through different eyes.

I believe there are a number of hat tips in this novel to China Miéville’s The City & the City, which is about two central European cities superimposed onto one another, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, even down to rooms in the same domicile. The people of Bresźel and Ul Qoma unsee one another when they pass on the street, and any perforation of the lines between the two cities, even sightlines, results in harsh consequences. It is not quite clear if the separation between the cities is mystical or cultural, or if the difference would matter.

The Palestina of Unholy Land does not have this kind of cross-hatching, exactly, but the metaphor of partition, separation, and division operates throughout the narrative. This Jewish state in Africa is building a wall between the African people who were Palestina’s original occupants and the Jewish people who have resided in Palestina for several generations. Both, certainly, have rights of residence, and birthright, and colonization, and all the other things nations use to decide and mark citizenship. Still, there are suicide bombers on buses, unrest in the streets, and resistances on both sides of the wall.

The people of Palestina are known as Palestinians, which surprised me every time I came upon the word, this inversion of the state of things in my reality. The partition between the real Israel and Palestine is called a “separation barrier” by the Israelis, and an “apartheid wall” by the Palestinians. It is the same thing seen by two very different points of view, occupying the same space (more or less, depending on granularity): a physical manifestation of both difference and sameness. Unholy Land plays in the strange, uncomfortable DMZ between the national founding myth and the uninterrogated childhood, between the person who leaves the homeland and the one who returns.

In Unholy Land, Lavie Tidhar imagines an alternate history for Palestine and Israel, where the Jews relocate to the African continent before Hitler's rise to power, evading the Holocaust. Travelling from one history to the other is Lior, who is leaving behind him a few complicated relationships in order to go on a lecture tour.
Lior arrives in the alternate history and his past starts to slip away...or maybe come back...while people die and spies and time travellers follow him. To what end?
Tidhar is excellent at the politics, the confusions of secret policing and the slipping between pasts and memories. Echoes of Christopher Priest and China Miélville, this is a quick read that turns from one thing to another and back. Satisfying as an alternate history book, science fiction and pure entertainment.

I absolutely loved Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (and was not alone in that), and while his newest, Unholy Land, didn’t blow me away quite to the same extent, it kept me on the couch in “don’t talk to me I’m reading” and “uh-huh, uh-huh, ya don’t say, uh-huh” mode all afternoon while my family just rolled their eyes and gave up, as they know to do when all the signs of being engrossed in a great book are manifest (luckily, they live those moments as well so it’s a fond eyeroll . . . )

The novel is set in an alternate universe setting where the Jewish homeland of Palestina appears not in the Middle East but in East Africa, a homeland formed before the Final Solution occurred (a forward explains how this is based on an actual idea pre-dating the creation of Israel). The book follows three characters: the main character Lior Tirosh via typical third-person narration, a ruthless security agent via first-person, and a mysterious third actor via second person.

Lior Tirosh (suspiciously similar to Lavie Tidhar) is a middling science-fiction and mystery writer who had left Palestina for Europe long ago but has now returned. The country is in turmoil, with terrorist attacks, protests, and the construction of a huge wall to keep out refugees (those who had been expelled from the land so Palestina could be formed). In short order Lior witnesses a horrific bombing, is caught up in a murder, and learns his niece, an anthropology/folklore student who’d been protesting against the wall, is missing. Things actually spiral downward from there.

But things had begun to go strange well before then. The reader is teased from the beginning by all sorts of weird tidbits: the way Tirosh’s memories don’t seem to cohere, vaguely foreboding hints about his young son, an odd emphasis on the word “outsider,” references to “strange sightings of ice age carnivores the locals had named Ngoloko or Kerit . . . ,” or to how “organisms can disguise themselves visually in a foreign environment.” All of these, combined with the disorienting and often sudden shifts in POV, including that unnamed second person “you,” create a wonderfully surreal, unnerving, and compelling atmosphere, where, similar to Tirosh, the reader is never ever on firm ground.

And it all creeps in at such a wonderfully glacial pace. Such as that reference to his son that you’re so smugly sure you know where it’s going, what Tidhar is doing there, but then it takes a little sidling hop and suddenly you think you know but then again, maybe . . . and then the light slants in a different way, and then there’s a change in temperature, and then and then and somehow, in as dully mundane and banal a fashion as you can imagine (think airports, think bureaucracy) you’re in a completely different world than you thought you were.

That sense is both metaphorical and literal, because — and since it’s noted on the back of the novel, I don’t feel it’s too spoilerish to say this — eventually what comes clear is this is not simply an alternate history but a book set in a multiverse (the “sephirot”) full of alternate histories, complete with people who can travel between them — some more easily than others, some more intentionally than others. Such a set-up allows Tidhar to explore several themes: the creation and guarding of borders, questions over do walls shut out or shut in, ethical conundrums over what acts are allowed if done with good intentions, the old stand-by of is it OK to kill some to save more, the construction of memory and self, the desire to belong somewhere, the bond between people and land, determinism, the possibility that different historical choices would lead to different results (or not), and more. And of course, explorations as well of the political morass that is the Middle East, though such questions can easily be broadened to conflicts around the world and throughout history.

It’s a heady mix and one can easily linger a while to think such moments through as they appear on the page. And it’s not the only esoteric facet, as one could argue for a metafictional point here as well, what with the main character being an author, one oddly similar to his creator, and one who muses on or is questioned about the impact of writers in the world. And after all, what do authors do but create a sephirot of their own?

But I don’t want to make it sound as if Unholy Land floats along in some airy realm. Tidhar keeps things grounded by offering up alongside the more esoteric aspects of the book an old-fashioned, solid mystery — what happened to Tirosh’s niece — which, combined with a ticking bomb scenario wherein someone is trying to either break down the walls between worlds or destroy the worlds, keeps things gripping throughout. You read just as much to find out what happens as you do to explore the themes.

And then there is the language, which is vivid and precise and always adapted to the moment. As just one representative illustration (out of many to choose from), here’s an early segment as Tirosh’s plane takes off for Palestina:
The flight attendants went through the safety routine. The inside of the plane smelled of warm plastic, stale breath. There was a piece of gum struck to the underside of the food trey. The engines thrummed alive. Tirosh watched small grey figures through the window, moving with a clear but unguessed at purpose. He watched the runway move past and tensed as the plane began to accelerate, then took to the air with a bump. The airport grew wider before growing smaller. For some moments there was a flash of fields, the density of a city, the silver snail trail of cars on a highway. Then they entered the clouds the world turned white and grey, and fine strands of fog drifted past outside the wind. Tirosh put his head back and closed his eyes.

Take a look at the progression here. We begin with the routine. Literally, the same old same old safety talk. We get the concrete smell of stale breath, the concrete mundane image of gum stuck to a tray. Dull language, dull syntax (sentence begin with The, The, There). Then we get “thrummed” and a bit of personification with the engines coming “alive.” Then we get mysterious “grey figures” doing who knows what. And once the plane has left the ground, the prose shifts from, well, prose to a more lyrical poetry. The alliteration of “flash of fields.” The near rhyme/echo of “density-city.” The alliteration, rhyme, and metaphor of “silver snail trail of cars.” The consonance and assonance of “white-fine-outside, strands-past, fine-fog-drifted, that strings of D sounds.” All of it ending with Tirosh, and us, in a world removed from reality, a drifting, untethered, non-distinct, blurry world of white and grey. That is an author in full control of his craft. And as noted, this isn’t an isolated example (I haven’t even touched upon the maddening teases of some of the other worlds: “the mechanical warriors under the banner of the Crimson Emperor in Jund Filastin,” “the fish-frog men abomination of Ash-Sham,” “the green swamp villages of Samaria where the Awful Ones live”).

I read Unholy Land straight through in one sitting, blowing off work, family, and the first few minutes of dinner to do so. And had I not finished I most likely would have just skipped dinner entire until I did. For such a short book — under 300 pages — Tidhar crams in a world (worlds) of thoughtfulness, suspense, imagery, and beautiful prose. Highly recommended.

This is a bewildering and brilliant alternate history. Tidhar imagines a Jewish homeland that might have been, a tract of land actually offered (really offered, I mean, in real history) by the United Kingdom in high Imperial mode in Central Africa and considered, however briefly, as an alternative to Palestine. (The views of the previous inhabitants weren't, of course, canvassed).

What might our world be like, if that offer had been accepted? How would things stand in Africa? How would they stand in Palestine? What else would be different?

A man, Lior Tirosh, a writer, flies back to Palestina (that might-have-been state) from Berlin. He's a writer of pulpy detective novels, son of a famous general, returning to visit his ill father. Tirosh remembers, sometimes, a son Isaac; sometimes he doesn't. In his conversations with his agent he refers to a possible book casting an alternate universe Adolf Hitler as a seedy private detective.

Hang on... I read that book... it was A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar.

Tirosh has also written a book called Osama.

As has Tidhar.

There are layers and layers to this book. A writer returns to his homeland. A people find, or are given, a homeland. Another people loses theirs. Many are saved, or lost, and the world pivots. In the world Tirosh inhabits, for example, things turned out sufficiently differently that in a refugee camp, the "Red Swastika" is an equivalent symbol to the Red Cross, Crescent, or Star of David. Tidier isn't afraid to take his idea to shocking conclusions any more than he was in A Man Lies Dreaming. Yet even in this different world, echoes remain, with the same tragedy of people displaced, with echoes of genocide, camps, an armed struggle, and the same security response, as in our present day.

It's a deeply unsettling book, asking questions, perhaps, both about individual responsibility and about the shape of history. Through them all, Tirosh ambles, a bit lost, seeming to forget, at times, who he actually is. Affected perhaps by all the possibilities Tidhar has granted, he remembers who he might have been, as it were. That is both engaging - Tirosh is very human and hapless, not, for most of the book, a fictional protagonist and also frustrating: he doesn't provide any answers (this isn't a book of answers).

The story also follows two others. There is Bloom, a security official in Palestina, and Nur, who seems to work for another agency from outside. It's not clear to begin with whether they are working together or at cross purposes, but they both seem to have an interest in the blundering Tirosh who himself increasingly assumes the persona of a gumshoe, setting out to ask questions and find the truth. But while he may have written about private eyes, he doesn't seem well fitted to actually be one. Is this real life, one may ask, or is it just a fantasy? Either way, bullets kill and walls divide. There is a kind of dead heart at the centre of this story with real consequences for those who might - or might not - have been saved if history had taken a different course.

It's a deeply troubling, deeply thought provoking read, no less for the lush evocation of the Jewish State in Africa: the colours and light of that continent, as well as the imagination Tidhar uses to weave his imaginary country. You might almost swear he'd been there.

I don't want to say exactly what happens in the end because there are twists that should only emerge slowly. It's the kind of book you may want to go back and reread, looking out for little hints once you really understand them. It's also a book that refuses to be sidetracked by action or plot, however tempting that may be: the final third could, for example, have been a great deal longer with much that is sketched out given in detail, but that would I think be to obscure the central idea behind too much running around and shooting. Instead Tidhar gives the bigger picture and leaves much of the detail to the reader's imagination - a risky judgement but one that really pays off since it lets this book be much, much odder that you might expect.

It's probably a bit trite to say that given the facts of actual Jewish history in the 20th century, alternatives, might-have-beens, other turns and possibilities, will always fascinate. As Tidhar explains in his Historical Afterword, speculative fiction was anyway part of the events leading to what would become Israel, long before that awful historical weight became a factor. But it's impossible to read this book without it provoking that sense of how different things might have been, and the good and bad that might have followed from that.

But perhaps that is true of all history, and isn't it really the basis of any fiction?

As you may guess, this book has left my head buzzing.

I'd strongly recommend you read it, and set yours buzzing too.

Israeli author Lavie Tidhar gives a fairly lengthy prologue to explain the inception of his most recent book. Back around the turn of the century, Zionists in Europe were looking to Ottoman controlled Palestine as a potential homeland but negotiations stalled. Looking for an alternative solution within the British Empire resulted in a proposal to establish a Jewish homeland British East Africa, land in Kenya that bordered Uganda. The idea split the Zionist movement, with many holding that there could not be an alternative homeland for the Jews. An expedition in 1905 to explore the area and report back did not support the idea and the scheme was rejected. The rest, as they say, is history. In Unholy Land, Tidhar wanted to consider what would have happened if the plan had gone ahead.
When the book opens, pulp science fiction author Lior Tirosh (a fairly obvious stand-in for Tidhar himself) is flying back from Berlin to his homeland of Palestina, nestled between Uganda and Kenya. He is flying home to visit his ageing father, a famous general from earlier wars. As he arrives the narrative switches and it appears that Tirosh is being followed by local security forces. When an old friend dies in his hotel room, Tirosh feels obliged to investigate, slowly falling into the role of one of his pulp novel detectives.
In the history that Tirosh inhabits, Jews established Palestina in the early twentieth century and while there were world wars, the Holocaust never happened. But the tide of history is hard to shake and in this funhouse mirror reflection of our own reality, Palestina has been at war with neighbouring Uganda and Kenya, the army walks the streets of the capital Ararat city where the Jewish population are facing bus bombings from displaced African groups, and the government is building a wall along the border to control the movement of workers. Tidhar digs deep into the parallels and differences between this world and our own.
But then, not far into the narrative it turns out that his alternate history is just one of many and that there are operatives who are able to move between different versions of reality and history. These planes of reality are called sephirot after the Kabbalistic idea of different planes of existence.
In Unholy Land, Tidhar wants to have his cake and eat it – he wants to examine an alternate history but also explore with multi-world theories at the same time. And he pretty much succeeds. Along the way he manages to revel in some pulp fiction tropes as his author protagonist finds himself living in the plot of one of his novels. That plot revolves as much around the threat to the multiverse as it does around Tirosh’s personal quest.
That mix makes Unholy Land provocative and mind bending but also gives it some emotional heft. A combination that, while it does not always work, provides a fascinating and insightful read.

Lior Tirosh, a pulp-fiction writer, returns to Palestina, his homeland in East Africa to see his father. With an enormous border wall being built, and terrorist bombs going off in the capital of Ararat, it is not the place he once knew.

After a visit from an old friend who is concerned about Tirosh’s niece and implores Tirosh to find her, Tirosh discovers he is being pursued by Special Investigator Bloom of the state security. All the while Tirosh’s reality seems to be shifting in subtle and alarming ways.

This is an intricate novel of ‘what ifs’ and genius use of points of view to convey an intriguing narrative of alternate realities. Unholy Land begins simply enough as an obvious alternative reality story, where Hitler never came to power (although he does make a fleeting appearance in Tirosh’s world) and the Jewish homeland was established not in Asia but East Africa. What could be a bewildering narrative of Tirosh’s life seemingly fracturing and reassembling itself is held together by the underlying detective story of Tirosh’s search for his niece.

Science fiction/fantasy is often used to discuss real life. Plenty of the tumultuous events of the last few years (terrorist attacks, the building of walls to keep people from entering a country), as well as historical events (the Israeli/Palestinian conflict) will resonate uncomfortably with a reader.

The addition of alternate realities in any other author’s hand might have been a confusing mishmash of concepts. In Lavie Tidhar’s it becomes something to make a reader consider their world, while enjoying a gripping story and experiencing the same unnerving disorientation as the hapless Tirosh who, despite everything that happens to him, remains single-minded in his pursuit for the truth.

Tidhar’s complex network of threads within this tortuous narrative can at times verge on the bewildering. So, in deciding to read Unholy Land, you need to commit yourself completely to the story, applying total concentration, because this is the kind of novel which only rewards if you soak in every detail. As usual with Tidhar’s writing, this relatively short read feels as rich as an 800 page epic.

Lavie Tidhar tiene un claro fetiche con las historias alternativas. Desde el anhelo de lo que pudo ser (o la revancha) en «A man lies dreaming» hasta el triste y melancólico inmovilismo de «The violent century» (siendo estas novelas sólo dos ejemplos), el autor israelí parece deleitarse con el ejercicio intelectual de imaginar posibilidades. No os voy a engañar: mientras que con otro autor/a esta obsesión por un tema o una estructura podría hacerse cansina, hay algo exquisito en las historias de Tidhar, aun compartiendo claros late motivs, y que me hace disfrutar como un enano. También es cierto que es lo suficientemente consciente de su propia obra como para encarar cada libro de forma distinta y original.

¿A qué viene esta chapa introductoria? Pues a que quizá por sinopsis, y para alguien que ya haya leído algunas de las obras que he citado en el párrafo anterior, este «Unholy land» pueda no resultar tan atractivo a primera vista: Lior Tirosh es un escritor de novelas pulp que, debido a un suceso traumático que nos acompaña de manera difusa a lo largo de la novela, vuelve a su país natal para descansar y pasar página. Ese país no es otro que Palestina, pero no la Palestina que conocemos. En 1904, Nahum Wilbusch, un joven judío de origen ruso, encabezó una expedición a una región al norte de África para juzgar la viabilidad de que un territorio, supuestamente no reclamado y que sería cedido por los británicos, se convirtiese en el nuevo hogar de su pueblo.

Esto es historia; como también lo es que Wilbusch falló en favor de los «Holy Landers» —un grupo que sólo veía con buenos ojos la ocupación de Jerusalén— y el proyecto fue abandonado. A partir de aquí, como cualquiera podrá imaginar, comienza la ucronía. En la novela, este informe fue muy favorable y finalmente esta Palestina imaginaria se convertiría en el estado oficial de Israel. Al regresar a su hogar, Tirosh descubre de manera desagradable que su sobrina ha desaparecido y a partir de aquí la novela tiende más hacia el género negro (al menos momentáneamente).

Como iba diciendo, me gustaría desterrar ese pensamiento de que «esto es más de lo mismo» de la mente de cualquier posible lector. ¿Me dejas intentar convencerte?

Otro elemento clave en la obra de Lavie Tidhar es la experimentación salvaje con los recursos formales de su arte. En esta novela, eso no podía ser distinto y lo apreciamos desde el mismo nombre del protagonista: Lior Tirosh. Este personaje es un trasunto descarado de Tidhar y a lo largo del libro incluso se le atribuyen con bastante gracia parte de sus obras; se hace con «Osama», por poner un ejemplo, o con «A man lies dreaming» (aunque de forma distinta y muy divertida). Además de este elemento meta-literario, que aunque divertido, no deja de ser algo a mayores, otro recurso interesante es la elección del narrador: una arriesgada mezcla de primera, segunda y tercera persona que evoluciona a lo largo de la novela y que, a pesar de resultar algo extraña al principio, a medida que se avanza en la lectura va cobrando significado. La verdad es que me ha parecido un poco innecesario. Si bien agradezco que un autor/a pruebe cosas distintas, en este caso me parece que aporta poco para lo mucho que complica las cosas (y lo mucho que se las tiene que haber complicado al autor).

Como he dejado caer antes, no estamos sólo ante una historia alternativa. La historia —en la que al principio podríamos apreciar de forma clara la rima con «A man lies dreaming»—, se va tornando cada vez más fantástica; creciendo la especulación y la crítica social conforme esto ocurre y ampliando la riqueza de la novela más allá del mero ejercicio intelectual de la ucronía de partida. La prosa de Tidhar es elegante; evocadora y bella sin caer en lo barroco; precisa a pesar de las complicaciones que su propia elección de narrador le impone. Su pluma acompaña divinamente este in crescendo, creando una atmósfera de extrañamiento cada vez mayor que consigue transmitir con la habilidad suficiente como para que el lector no se quede por el camino.

No quiero contar mucho más porque la gracia de la novela es ir descubriendo todo lo que esconde Tidhar detrás de esta sinopsis de apariencia repetitiva y que podría parecer una simple variación de «El sindicato de policía yiddish» de Michael Chabon. He disfrutado muchísimo de esta novela. Creo firmemente que Lavie Tidhar es uno de los mejores escritores que tenemos hoy en día y me encantaría ver este libro ganando algún premio en 2019. Muchas gracias a Tachyon por el ejemplar.

A great story, as usual with Tidhar. It starts like an ucrony, but that's not all, although it might have been enough. An emotional and intriguing mixture of literary genres and points of view.
A review in spanish: https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2018/11/unholy-land-lavie-tidhar.html

When Lior Tirosh, a writer of pulpy science fiction detective stories, returns from Berlin to his home Palenstina, a Jewish country in central Africa, weird things start to happen. Lior forgets details of his life, people around him find some of his actions perplexing, and he takes on a missing persons case to search for a niece he doesn’t know.

I love the slow, surreal unraveling of Unholy Land, both in terms of plot and genre. Without quite realizing it himself, Lior transitions from writer to detective, from an uneventful life to one filled with murder and intrigue, narrowly escaping multiple factions who want him dead. Then, it’s not just Lior’s memories that slip away, but reality itself, as Lior finds he can travel through alternate realities.

Author Lavie Tidhar’s relationship with Tirosh reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s complicated relationship with his own fictional character Kilgore Trout. Tirosh mentions some of the books he’s written, including Central Station, Osama, and even Unholy Land, books which in our world were written by Tidhar. Tirosh feels he is a character is one of his own novels. Tidhar blurs the lines between realities both within the book, but he keeps the possibility open that he is also Tirosh.

The alternate history includes a Palestina in conflict with it’s neighboring state of Uganda, even going so far as to build a wall to keep out refugees and terrorists. The Nazi regime is alive and well, but the Jews settled in Africa well before their rise to power.

At first blush the plot seems over-the-top and action-packed, and it is at times. But at its heart, the novel is slow and subtle and abstract and unnerving.

Lavie Tidhar – Unholy LandLavie Tidhar follows up his 2016 Mosaic Novel/Short Story collection Central Station (John W Campbell winner, Clarke shortlist, and book of the year for me) with Unholy Land, an alternative history concerning a Jewish Homeland in Africa which turns out to be much more more.

It's not as light, not as dancingly sparkling with ideas and concepts as a lot of the former is, but at the same time it's maybe heavier, worthier, loaded with thought-provoking takes on identity, the fluidity of reality, and weighty moral questions which are exhibited rather than discussed or preached.

It starts simple enough, though – we follow one Lior Tirosh (a thinly disguised alter ego, it appears), a moderately successful writer of 'inconsequential fantasies' in some personal crisis, as he is headed to Ararat City, Palestina. Which is set in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley. And so we know we are in an alternative history – or, to be more precise, in a world where the Wilbush expedition to British East Africa returned a different report, had a different outcome, and a Jewish state, a Nachtasyl, was created instead of the country we are familiar with. At first this is, like all such conceits, mightily disorienting. We see Palestinians, who speak Judean, and a culture which inevitably has taken on parts of the area it has settled in and the people it displaced, whilst retaining a lot of the tensions and drivers that brought it here.
But back to Tirosh – he is here to visit his ailing father, a general and famous figure, we learn later on. But instead he gets, more or less from the go, caught up in strange happenings involving Border/Secret police, multiple agencies following him, murder (it's actually an attempt on his life which catches an acquaintance), a disappeared niece who campaigned for the rights of the native population, a builder who builds the wall designed to keep the terrorists and suicide bombers out... it's a fascinating and dizzying world, and you get absolutely no time to get used to it before the action kicks off.

“Then he asked you if you thought the world was real”



And just when you think you know where you are with the premise and the setting then the story takes a sharp turn into the leftfield. Tirosh is a damaged man – not just from the loss of his son and his wife, but there is something else. He comes from “Outside”. He has visions of other worlds, of concentration camps. We see several agencies who work across different worlds, across possibilities. We learn that the wall has other aims than simply keeping Suicide Bombers out. That time can run differently on the Outside. There is more, so much more, and most of it only gets hinted at, is never explained or barely shown. And boy would I have wanted to see, learn, read more.

“The world is the sum of what it could be, what is might have been, and how it could have been”

The story is told through the eyes of the protagonists – and the viewpoint frequently shifts fluidly between them which can be rather disorienting; and occasionally it does so in ways evidently designed to actively mislead the reader. Tidhar also heavily uses foreshadowing, giving the reader (sometimes misleading) information advantages, again occasionally, purposefully, and skilfully misleading us.

I was surprised at how little there is here in terms of looks, skin colour, racial origin. It's not that book entirely omits this, but given the setting I would have expected more variety warranting comments, descriptions, and assignations. This is a minor quibble – what bothered me more was that we learn so little about the parallel worlds, the sephirot, and how they hang together; how people travel between them; who this mysterious Border Agency is which seems to look after some of it; or also the rather mythically infused final denouement, which I found to be a bit of a let-down after all that had transpired.

Still, this is great and all too short book, delivering much more than it originally promises, and for this alone it deserves your attention.

Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer, who has spent long periods of time in South Africa, Laos, and Vanatu, and who is now living in London. He writes across genre boundaries, and is the author of the World Fantasy Award–winning novel Osama, of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station, in addition to a number of other books and many short stories.

More Lavie Tidhar

Title: Unholy Land
Author: Lavie Tidhar
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: Tachyon
Publisher URL: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Publication Date: October 2018
Review Date: 180925
ISBN: 9711616963057
Pages: 196
Format: ePub
Topic: Alternate History
Topic: Parallel Worlds

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Ever since I read Exodus by Leon Uris in high school, I have been fascinated by the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine and the prickly nation-building that comes with it. This novel has a premise that suits my interest. In the early 20th century, a group of explorers came to Uganda to examine a site that might become a homeland for the Jews. If only I had known that particular history before I visited Uganda two years ago, I'd have another perspective. Obviously, whatever result the team came up with, it was not enough to convince the site was suitable. Unholy Land tells a story where the exodus to Uganda did happen. An alternate world where World War II occurred but the Holocaust as we know it did not.

It was truly fascinating. But that's not all.There were also different realities and the barriers among worlds, timelines, histories, might be broken. China Mieville's The City and the City and many Doctor Who episodes came to mind. Started with what looked like a detective/missing person investigation in the 'Unholy Land', the novel became much more intricate.

I enjoyed the first 2/3 of the book but lost my grip in the later parts. I did not understand the resolution and the reasoning/motivation of some characters during the hasty big reveal. The issue of a "Wall" and conflicts with the Ugandan natives provided a hazy background. Last but not least, there are many POV jumps from first to second and third person, here to fro, in a very quick succession, it was rather disorienting.

Overall, however, I am still impressed with the execution and the ideas. This is my first Lavie Tidhar novel and since I had come to enjoy his atmospheric writing, this won't be my last.

My thanks to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for the opportunity to review this book.

Tirosh goes back to his home in Africa, an alternative Palestine bordering Uganda. Which could have happened. Alternative history, what-might-have-beens, detective novel, hints of an autobiography and choices we make or that are taken from us.

I am really struggling with writing a review. I am not even sure if I liked this or how much. It certainly is ambitious and has lots of potential and plot bunnies that ran off into the great beyond. And the author has won awards and gets many excellent reviews.

It‘s just that this indeed very interesting story does not really go anywhere meaningful for me. Perhaps I just like plot-driven stories too much. Or this just went over my head. I don‘t know. I finished the book two nights ago and still haven‘t made up my mind.

I wish the alternate timelines would have been explored more. All these hints and then we are left dangling. Nur‘s story was a bit of a non-event. Tirosh‘s story took off in an interesting direction, developed little over the middle of the book and was sort of meh at the end. Really disliked Bloom as a person, although he was the most complex character.

I think it‘s going to be 4 stars just to honor the inventiveness and intended scope of the plot.

I received this free e-copy from the publisher/author via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

This book works in a meta cognitive fashion, sweeping and engaging in a cultural sense. There is fine characterization here with a protagonist like no other.

There are notes or writers like Orhan Pamuk, but also uniqueness.

Lavie Tidhar es un escritor polifacético que lo mismo te escribe una novela juvenil como Candy que se descuelga con un libro de difícil clasificación como Unholy Land.

Digo que es de difícil clasificación porque se puede adscribir a varios subgéneros de la ciencia ficción sin pertenecer en realidad a ninguno claramente.

El protagonista es Lior Tirosh, que podría ser una personificación de propio Tidhar, un escritor de "medio pelo" de origen judío pero afincado en Berlín que por enfermedad de su padre se desplaza a su lugar de nacimiento. Pero no es Israel, tal y como la conocemos, Palestina es un asentamiento en África, dando el punto de partido a una ucronía absorbente. Además este hecho podría haber tenido lugar en realidad, ya que a principios del siglo pasado se realizó una expedición con esa intención.

La prosa de Tidhar es tan maravillosa como siempre, con una gran cantidad de juegos metaliterarios y referencias a su propia obra, así como guiños a la situación actual en Israel estableciendo paralelismos con esta mítica Unholy Land de la que nos habla el autor. Pero sin duda lo que resulta más llamativo son las diferentes voces que utiliza. Variando entre una primera persona antinatural porque no le da la voz al protagonista, una segunda persona desconcertante y una tercera persona que nos sirve para estabilizarnos, el autor consigue un estado permanente de confusión en el lector y exige un esfuerzo constante para situarnos en la trama.

Los cambios de entorno son continuos pero sutiles. Vemos como Tirosh actúa de forma contraria a la que esperaríamos depediendo de la situación en la que se encuentre, porque en realidad no es el mismo personaje en todo momento y no estoy hablando solo metafóricamente.

Unholy Land es una novela difícil pero atractiva, con una perspectiva distinta de una ucronía que nos podría recordar a El sindicato de policía Yiddish por su punto de partida pero que navega por derroteros totalmente diferentes. No es para todo el mundo, pero creo que para un lector de ciencia ficción habitual resultará muy atractiva.

I closed the book--or rather swiped to the last page on my iPad--and my first thought was, I want to read this again. Now.

Because Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar took me on a crazy ride across genres and space and time and I want to do it all over again.

I read Tidhar's Central Station last year after my son raved about it. So I was expecting Science Fiction. But Unholy Land transcends genre, encompassing alternative history, noir mystery, and time-travel sci-fi, with social and political commentary (not so unusual in sci-fi, of course), so in the end, it transports the reader into an imagined alternative reality AND reflects on contemporary world politics. Add the "wink wink" self-referential nods and existential discussions on the nature of reality, we also get humor and philosophy.

In one work of fiction. And I think I missed some things.

So, yes, I want to read it AGAIN.

Tidhar was inspired by a true story of forgotten history. In 1904, the Zionist movement leader Theodor Herzl was offered land in Uganda as a Jewish homeland. Three men went on an expedition to survey the territory. One became separated and at journey's end, reported fertile land and while the other a saw desert. The idea was abandoned. Tidhar's novel considers the implications of establishing a Jewish homeland predating the Nazi regime.

The main character Lior Tirosh (note the character's name, so like Lavie Tidhar) slips through to an alternative reality. He doesn't realize what has happened, but he is tracked by two people who have been through the portal and lived in other worlds. He becomes embroiled in a battle to control the portal and prevent overlaps in realities.

Tirosh questions, what is history if not an attempt to impose order on a series of meaningless events, just as a detective must piece together a story from conflicting tales.

Don't expect escapist genre fiction, readers, for in Unholy Land we learn in all the worlds possible walls will be built and some will be cast into the outer darkness.

"Lavie Tidhar is a clever bastard, and this book is a box of little miracles." Warren Ellis, Afterword Unholy Land

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

This took a bit of time to get in to. When it starts it feels like just an alternative reality but then as more and more bizarre happenings occur the reader realizes there is more going on than thought. I thoroughly enjoyed the world that Tidhar created. The characters are all fairly interesting. I would have enjoyed a little more of the mechanics of how Tidhar's world worked but I didn't need that to enjoy the book. This is definitely a bit of a mash-up of genres with a healthy dose of Kabbalah thrown in, but Tidhar makes it all work.

There was a time in my life when a book described as "literary science fiction" would have caused me to run at full speed in the other direction. I don't run away from it any more, but I don't necessarily run toward it, although it can be argued that most of what I read and review these days is much more literary than I might be willing to let on. But I will run toward the work of Lavie Tidhar, whose work contains literary qualities that would make your high school English teacher (well, mine, anyway, since in the mid-1970s genre fiction was to be avoided at all cost) nod with approval while at the same time paying homage to the ideas of science fiction of old. Tidhar's last novel, CENTRAL STATION, was a novel that nodded toward the old traditions while telling the story with modern literary sensibilities. And he's done it again with UNHOLY LAND.

The novel uses the actual historical event of an expedition to Africa to take a look at some land that was under consideration to be a site for a Jewish homeland. In this way, it is somewhat reminiscent of Michael Chabon's THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION, but that idea of an alternate Jewish settlement is about where the similarities end. While Chabon's book remains grounded in reality - only qualifying as genre because of its alternate history aspect (although I would argue that the book is not really science fiction in anyway, although it was a brilliant novel) - UNHOLY LAND, when all is said and done, takes the reader in a completely different and unexpected direction that is unmistakably genre.

At the beginning of the novel, pulp author Lior Tirosh is traveling from Berlin to his homeland, Palestina, in East Africa. Things are a little bit odd right at the very beginning, but when he goes to talk with his niece, he discovers she is missing - well, missing as far as he is concerned, anyway; no one else seems to be worried about her. Thus, the novel starts out as a fairly straightforward detective story in an alternate history setting. And yet, it is not all *that* different fromour world of today. Palestina is in conflict with a neighboring state, and a wall is being built to keep intruders out (I don't for a minute believe that Tidhar was thinking about the current situation in the United States when he wrote this, but it sure makes for an interesting thought experiment).

There's a lot of stuff going on here that is very meta in nature. Tirosh feels as if he himself is a detective in one of the novels he's written. Tidhar leads the reader into thinking that Tirosh is actually Tidhar himself; there is mention of Tirosh having written little, unknown books such as OSAMA and CENTRAL STATION. He even refers to looking for a book called UNHOLY LAND in a shop, a book that he himself wrote.

But, as I said earlier, there is much going on that leads the reader and Tirosh to believe that something is amiss, and this is where the book changes from a detective story to an all-out interdimensional genre tale. The book quite literally changes from one story to another in such a way that is seamless. It's one thing, and all of a sudden it's another. At the beginning of the novel, I was wondering what it was Tidhar was getting at; it certainly didn't seem like genre to me. It was a bit slow to get moving as well. But once that twist is revealed and the transition made, the book was really a page-turner as it made a mad dash toward its completion.

Once again, Tidhar has written a gem. It truly is a book that your high school teacher would approve of you reading. But since when have you needed her approval to read anything? You'll give yourself all the approval you'll need when you've finished reading it.

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar- This book is a historical fantasy based on the premise of "What If", and concerns how small changes can make a lasting difference as they alter the Future. The author in his introduction explains that when he was growing up in Israel, there were folk tales told about an effort to build a Jewish State in Eastern Africa that never came about. Then he begins his story in the fully developed African nation of Palestina, in the present day, which also has no Israel, and the German Reich is alive and well. The main character, a pulp writer is searching for his niece, stumbling around a country he grew up in but barely remembers. At every turn he is followed by people from different backgrounds and allegiances. Mostly they want to kill him, but he does not know why, and he doesn't understand why he has confusing memories of a different world that appear then fade away. He finds that there are many possible futures and he can slide in and out of those worlds while still being pursued across a ghostly landscape.

I doubt that I'm doing justice here to a very entertaining and engrossing story. The concepts are intriguing and Lavie Tidhar's comfortable, stylish writing is well paced and engaging. He changes POV quite often and it can be a bit jarring at first, but only the important characters get their own reality. You get used to it, so you know at once who is speaking. As with his last book, Central Station, I recommend this book.

Review written for publication in a magazine, so not suitable for being published on Netgalley. Supplied to publisher.