If you are willing to suspend clarity of place and time, entering into Khaled Khalifa's dreamscape novel, In Praise of Hatred, immerses the reader in an intimate sense of modern Syria (1980s) through the eyes of a radicalized, young woman. Her home, albeit the home of her
…more relatives, and the city of Aleppo, provide a backdrop for many of the events and characters that inhabit the story.
Vivid, if only occasional, details punctuate Khalifa's metonymous prose and provide the novel's sense of authenticity and place: the barking of wild dogs, the parsley and aubergines needed from a Souk, a charred corpse that suffers an onslaught of unnecessary bullets. Despite the title, the unnamed narrator's hatred emerges as malleable, as she confesses toward the conclusion of the novel, "The hatred which I had defended as the only truth was shattered entirely….My life was a collection of allegories that belonged to other people." Khalifa's prose is poetic; his story is poignant.
Reading this novel against the background of present-day Syria elevated the works importance, even though the author hopes his novel will not be read as a political screed. It is, nonetheless, a painful reminder of the absence of threat with which most of us live. (less)
