I AM ARIEL SHARON by Yara El-Ghadban, translated from its original French, is one of the more creative and innovative novels I've read this year! The book takes place during former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's coma; the spirits of significant women in his life visit him as he teeters between life and death, and remind him of the various acts that he has committed as prime minister in the name of his country.
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Unfortunately, this book was maybe too innovative for me! I don't normally read in second person, so that style of writing was difficult for me to get into. I also have next to no knowledge of specific historical events in Israeli and Palestinian history, so there were references and nuances in the book that went totally over my head. Overall, I just had no idea what was going on because most of the book takes place in Sharon's head and isn't meant to be literal - there was just a lot of confusion for me as a reader.
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I'm disappointed that I didn't enjoy this book since I listened to Yara El-Ghadban speak at the Festival of Literary Diversity this year and thought she had really interesting things to say about power and identity in the world of translation! I think I'll continue to keep an eye out for her work despite not liking this particular book.

I gave this book my best shot, but just could not get going with it. I can see why it's been well-received, but it didn't work for me.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for the Reader's Copy!

Now available.

If you aren't familiar with the history of Ariel Sharon, the 11th Prime Minister of Israel, I would recommend doing a brief search just to help follow along the narrative in this extremely lyrical, fast paced & prosaic novel. Told in fragments, "I am Ariel Sharon" attempts to reconstruct the life of a man through the perspectives of his loved ones, including his mother, Vera, who is a refuge and his two wives, Lily and Gali. It's a taut read that delves into the complexities of life in Gaza's West Bank, the contradictions of being a Zionist on a refugee land, of settler colonialism and its impact on human life. If anything, I was entranced by Yara El-Ghabdan's light poetic language in direct contrast to the gruesome subject matter, making the latter all the more poignant and timely.

Quite the searing indictment of Ariel Sharon -- a man who I knew nothing about before reading this book. The author uses a very creative storytelling technique of having women from Ariel's life (dead or alive) speak to him while he is in a coma, though a mystical omniscient-style voice. You learn about his childhood, his career and relationships, and how a man from relatively humble beginnings could be corrupted by power. The politics and history of Israel & Palestine is so complicated, and this is really a heartbreaking topic. I didn't feel like I knew about about any of the characters and had to Google a lot about Ariel Sharon to get some context. I think other readers who are more familiar with this time period and region of the world will really appreciate this book a little more than I did.

I also struggled with the formatting of this proof ebook to the point that it actually annoyed me so much that I started to get annoyed with the book. So much of the spacing was off, missing spaces between entire sentence or between period. Itlookedlikethis thewordsinstringsoftext?And.No.Spaces. I can't imagine that being a style choice.

Happy to include this unusual and fascinating new book in Novel Encounters, my monthly top ten roundup column of notable upcoming fiction titles for Zoomer magazine’s Books hub. To read the feature, click on the link.

The premise of this book is intriguing: during Ariel Sharon's long coma, he has a series of visions/dreams/hallucinations of the women in his life who have passed before him. His mother, Vera, speaks first, and reflects on how she and her husband immigrated to Israel from Belarus. Then, his second wife, Lily, speaks about how she fell in love with him and the Zionist mission. The feminine perspectives allow the author to critique the state of Israel and Sharon's part in it, first as a moshavnik, then as a military leader, and finally as prime minister. The state and Sharon are one. As Lily says, "At thirty years old, you are exactly like the country. Lean and swaggering with the confidence and impatience of a born leader awaiting his destiny."

Vera's section was the most interesting for me, because she highlighted the complications she and her family faced in revolutionary Russia before immigrating, followed by the problems on the moshav caused not only by the conflict with Arab Palestinians but also by forced communal living.

The overarching "Furies" voice was not so compelling to me. I didn't find the language particularly poetic, and I yearned for more realistic and straightforward accounts of these women's lives and their imagined critiques of Israel. I wasn't that interested in Lily's crush on Ariel (her sister's husband), and sometimes the choppy, one- to two-word sentence-exclamations didn't add much, other than to remind me, "Oh, right, this is a Furies, Greek chorus, afterworld situation."

The final feminine voice was intriguing, the "Nightingale," and tied it all together well. She describes the Palestinians as "a stubbornly ordinary people in a land infested with biblical legend. With miracles. With myths conjured behind the walls of castles a million miles away. Dreams harvested in the ghettoes of foreign cities." This book examines what it means for ordinary people to decide that they are not ordinary and that the land they possess (or want to possess) is not ordinary. Sharon is the symbol of that ordinariness turned extraordinariness, and the women who have died are grounded (literally) and able to express the problems with this, his way of thinking about himself.

This would be a good book for anyone who is familiar with Israel/Palestine and wants a different take on the political critique of Zionism.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.