This timely and unconsoling novel is a deeply humanistic fable about a young boy fleeing Syria and the expat girl he meets in Greece “Yallah, yallah!” The words are Arabic: “Let’s go!” According to the narrator of Cairo-born, Doha-raised Omar El Akkad’s second novel _What Strange Paradise_, their very sound conveys restlessness and movement. They can be grasped universally. “Following its phrases for greeting and introduction,” he claims, “every culture’s first linguistic export should be the directive _Let’s go_.” That’s what eight-year-old Amir Utu does. Like so many of his fellow Syrians, he escapes his benighted homeland, decamping from Homs to Damascus, down through Jordan, across to Alexandria in Egypt. Then, late one evening, he sneakily follows his uncle on board a rickety boat and joins hundreds of wretched strangers trying to cross the Mediterranean. Let’s go. It’s easier to say than to do. Especially when there are so many other people – poor, dark-skinned, desperate – hellbent on making the same journey. One of them, surely in El Akkad’s mind, was three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi, a photograph of whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach made news headlines across the world in 2015. Amir’s boat, steered by two Ethiopians who have never been off dry land before, runs aground on a Greek island shore. His body is washed up and he’s assumed to be dead. Lazarus-like, he gets up and runs towards a thicket. There he finds an adolescent girl, Vänna. She’s the daughter of expats whose dreams of setting up a guesthouse ran aground during the financial crisis in the 2000s. Continue reading...
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