WHEN I BUY books, I always intend to read them, but rarely do I read them right away. They typically land on some shelf or in some stack as I promise myself I will soon find the opportunity...you can imagine how it goes. It usually takes some kind of occasion or spur to get the book off the shelf and into my hands. In this case, it was the publication of Sharif's second book and its attendant buzz. I thought, geez, I guess it's time I read the first book.
It's a strong one. Sharif is Iranian-American, and the book reflects both her own family's experience of the lengthy and terrible Iraq-Iran war and the U.S.'s military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her language tends to be spare, pared down, exact, with a scattering of lyrical bright spots.
The surprising element is that throughout the book Sharif stirs in terms and phrases from U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Their presence in the text is signaled by block capitals:
His father grew very quiet
His father would
HEAVY DROP sob
behind a closed door
His father was a
PERSON ELIGIBLE TO RECEIVE EFFECTS
A PILLBOX of opium
in his sock drawer.
The incongruity of the military terms would, you might think, sink the enterprise, given their clunkiness and their Orwellian tendency to hide or blur a grim actuality--their being the exact opposite of what poetry is supposed to be, we might say--but Sharif makes them work in a kind of counterpoint to the grace and clarity of her own voice. Perhaps the military terms' indigestible rigidity makes clearer that the family's suffering and the suffering of whole peoples occur within constraints they did not choose, in terms they do not get to set.
A really convincing first volume. Yes, I have already bought Customs. I hope to read it before the third appears.
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