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IN A NAMELESS COUNTRY under military occupation, two friends prepare to attend a wedding. The young man is from the occupied region (“This Place”), the woman is from the occupying nation-state (“That Place”). The complicated relationship between these two protagonists with unusual professions—he is a Protest Designer and she is a De-programmer—is tested when, on the eve of the wedding, the occupying power, That Place, formally annexes This Place and declares a curfew.
Suddenly finding themselves confined to the same isolated space, the young woman and man try to kill time but inevitably wind up talking about the ways in which the war between their homelands pervades the unexplored and undeniable attraction between them. Will their relationship become another casualty of war?
This Place | That Place is an evocative debut that functions as a bold allegory for militarized occupations anywhere. As much a visual read as it is a literary one, this brilliant literary debut provides new ways to think about the intersections between the personal and the political; between occupier and occupied; between the kinds of bonds that endure, and those that have no choice but to fracture.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 14, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781612199504
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781612199504
- File size: 6219 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 13, 2022
History repeats itself. The violation of the sovereignty of one nation by another continues to be as relevant as ever. In her rather pedantic debut, Dinesh explores the claustrophobia that tints every aspect of one such occupation, including the personal relationship between a young man from the occupied region ("This Place") and a woman from the occupying country, "That Place." Dinesh's choice in not naming the countries or the characters was probably meant to drive home the universality of their situation, but instead it keeps them at a remove. Prevented from attending a wedding, the friends endlessly debate the circumstances of their lives. In doing so, they indulge in lengthy treatises on modern-day geopolitics. One character asks, "What is a curfew without markers of oppression? We need to come up with another way of naming what you're trying to do. Self-imposed isolation? Durational performance art? Embodied research? Experiential auto-ethnography? Immersive empathy?"" Such didactic discourses strain an already skeletal plot, though Dinesh provides a somewhat hopeful ending.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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July 1, 2022
DEBUT From an author specializing in the role of theater in understanding conflict, this debut novel has a highly unusual structure: all characters are unnamed, and the names of places are generic. For example, This Place has long been occupied by That Place, and the two countries can stand in for any places past or present, where a stronger power holds military control over a weaker one. During a period of curfew, a woman from That Place is embedded with a family in This Place and is developing a curriculum to be used to deprogram That Place's soldiers. The novel consists of stream-of-consciousness dialogue between the woman and the man whose family she is staying with, the woman's curriculum and the man's commentary on it, and the explanations of the elaborate coping system developed by the man who has lived most of his life under occupation. The two central characters try to achieve mutual understanding despite the different ideologies and circumstances under which they were raised, struggling with how to express themselves without offense and fighting against their growing mutual attraction. VERDICT Without a traditional plot, there is a story, and a touching love story at that, underlying a frank and painful look at what opposing governments and ideologies do to individuals.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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