The Last Pomegranate Tree

Starred review from October 31, 2022
In the kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing latest from Iraqi Kurdish writer Ali (I Stared at the Night of the City), a man’s quest to learn about his son reveals connections between myths and his family’s and culture’s histories. Peshmerga fighter Muzafar-I Subhdam was imprisoned in the early 1990s for taking up arms against the regime of Saddam Hussein. After he’s set free from the desert prison where he has been kept for 21 years, he goes in search of his son, Saryas, whom he’s never known. What he finds instead is the story of Muhammad the Glass-Hearted, whose life—equal parts political phantasm and a myth out of the Arabian Nights—is mysteriously entwined with Muzafar’s own. Through meetings with a giant of a man, revolutionaries, and the shadowy entity known as the Professor of Our Dark Nights (who may be Saryas, or an aspect of him, in disguise), Muzafar learns of the two sisters in white and the last pomegranate tree in the world, said to possess supernatural powers of healing. Retracing his son’s steps eventually leads Muzafar to the foot of his grave—but even this is only the beginning of another legend, as he discovers that Saryas was one of three boys who share a fate that will bring Muzafar into the war-torn heart of history. Ali’s novel is a visionary wonder that plunges into the dreamscape of a people’s fraught memory. For readers, this is unforgettable.

Starred review from November 1, 2022
Superbly realized novel of life, death, and what lies between. Muzafar-i Subhdam has had a rough time of it in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, imprisoned for 21 years. Now he is free--but not really, since his friend and fellow Kurdish soldier Yaqub-i Snawbar is keeping him captive "inside a large mansion, within a sequestered forest" while a plague rages outside. (Ali's novel was first published in 2002, so it's not the plague we know.) Besides, Yaqub adds ominously, "You're dead....You don't exist." Muzafar has forgotten everything about the world except his son, Saryas-i Subhdam, whose life is a series of encounters with danger. Blending magical realism with dark fables worthy of Kafka, Kurdish novelist Ali spins episodes that require the willing suspension of disbelief while richly rewarding that surrender. One narrative strand concerns young Muhammad the Glass-Hearted, a friend of Saryas', who falls in love with a woman who might well be a djinn or ghost: Muhammad dies, brokenhearted, and she visits his grave, there to find that Muhammad is surrounded by many friends killed during clashes with Saddam's forces. At least Muhammad lived long enough to see, with Saryas, a mysterious place where a head decapitated by Saddam's security agents reunites with its body and nourishes the pomegranate tree of the title. Muhammad may be too sensitive for his own good, but he knows the meaning of that tree, proclaiming that it belongs to everyone: "A real father plants for all the children in the world, for all those who come after him." Alas, so many of those children are doomed: One horrific moment comes in a boys home full of victims of bombings and land mines, armless and legless, "strange beings you wouldn't see anywhere else," deathly silent. Muzafar's search for his son never ends; nor, Ali writes in magnificent summation, does his haunting story, "this tale of glass boys living in a glass time in a glass country." Altogether extraordinary: a masterwork of modern Middle Eastern literature deserving the widest possible audience.

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