Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel

by Ibrahim Nasrallah

“I could not believe that human beings could forget so easily. . . .”
Love and life, sex and death, childhood and oppression are Inside the Night. Vivid moments of remembrance, disparate yet interconnected, come together to form the body― torn but not broken―of this novel. Beginning with a scene of departure, the two nameless narrators roam back and forth in time, veering from childhood mischief to a Palestinian refugee camp massacre; from ardent first love to necessary migration to an Arab oil country for employment; from spirited adolescent fantasies to the grim reality of life in an Arab country whose claims to progress are mounted on the bent backs of its people.
A forest of interwoven tales and strange destinies, Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel carves the history of a people over half a century into fragments that are poetic, multi-sensory, and richly evocative. Inside the Night’s self-contained freedom is a refreshing development in the corpus of Palestinian, and human, literature.

Genres: Literature, Contemporary

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Ibrahim Nasrallah (Arabic: إبراهيم نصرالله), the winner of the Arabic Booker Prize (2018), was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were forcibly displaced from their land in Al-Burayj, Palestine in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in a refugee camp in Jordan, and began his career as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked in the media and cultural sectors till 2006 when he dedicated his life to writing. To date, he has published 15 poetry collections, 22 novels, and several other books. In 1985, he started writing the Palestinian Comedy covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history in a series of novels in which each novel is an independent one; to date 13 novels have been published in the framework of this project. Five of his novels and a volume of poetry have been published in English, nine in Persian, four works in Italian, two in Spanish, and one novel in Danish and Turkish.

Nasrallah is also an artist and photographer and has had four solo exhibitions of his photography. He won nine prizes, and his novel Prairies of Fever was chosen by the Guardian newspaper as one of the most important ten novels written by Arabs or non-Arabs about the Arab world. Three of his novels were listed on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for the years 2009, 2013, and 2014. In 2012 he won the inaugural Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity for his literary work. His books are considered one of the most influential and best seller Arabic books, as new editions are released frequently and many young readers are attracted to his books.

In January 2014, he succeeded in summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in a venture that involved two Palestinian adolescents, a boy and a girl, who have lost their legs. The climb was in support to a nongovernmental organization dedicated to providing medical services to Palestinian and Arab children. Nasrallah wrote about this journey in a novel entitled The Spirits of Kilimanjaro (2015). In 2016, Nasrallah was awarded the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels for this work.

His novel The Second Dog War was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arabic Booker) for 2018. In 2020 he became the first Arabic writer to be awarded the "Katara Prize" for Arabic Novels for the second time for his novel "A Tank Under the Christmas Tree".

Reviews

[Kathleen McKim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as part of the collection development project I've been working on at school: "Lost in Translation: Arabic into English." Surely, there was much that was lost on me in Nasrallah's book. I was unaware of the Tel al-Zattar massacre which seemed to be the most central and compelling plot of the novel. At least, that's the thin red line that kept me reading through the short 182 or so page novel. The rest was an interesting mish-mash of stream of consciousness-type rehashing of what I know to be the displaced Palestinian in the Levant and Gulf regions. There was a bit of being in Saudi in a seedy hotel, a bit of a man whose hand had been blown off, a bit of an illicit love affair, a bit of a refugee experience where black abaya-clad women and children were patiently pulling luggage. There was even a bit of suicide-bomber jihad. Things I can only relate to as "the other." I think that was okay for first reading, though, because what came through was a frustration, a small proportion of the frustration that the author has been though in his own experience and in his nation's experience. The futility of waiting. The futility of talking. The book challenged me to learn more. The end was definitely clincher. It funneled down like a tight poem. And, there were some pretty immortal lines, one of which will stay with me forever: "We deserve to see at least one miracle that isn't covered in blood." Think about that. Are there really any true miracles which haven't been covered in blood? That's one of the most ancient things I've ever seen in print. It took my breath away.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nasrallah’s nameless narrator tells three interwoven, splintering, fragmented stories of loss, dispossession and alienation all sent against the nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes – but that is a distant although always present event. Although the timeframe is shifting and unclear, the narrative turns around the central figure’s trip abroad as a guest of a cultural festival, which quickly becomes obscured and obfuscated by the machinations of the host state and the sense of exile. Other, emerging, narratives turn on a brutal assault on a refugee camp (it seems either Sabra or Shatila, in Beirut, in 1982), and the narrators emerging erotic life – I’d hesitate to call is a sex life, it seems more ‘desire’ than ‘fulfilment’.

It is likely that all three story lines centre on the same person even though the narrative engages with life events that could be more ‘historical’ event (1982 War or 1st Intifada), the ‘exile’ ‘home’ to a seemingly unspecified Gulf state and the Palestinian-specific references held back until late in the story. Despite its fragmented character, Nasrallah manages his characters well – perhaps because none are named but known only in relation to the narrator: the ‘little neighbour’, the ‘woman in the lift’, the ‘other one’. This novel of relationships therefore flows better than a novel of named individuals, even if it risks reducing those characters, individuals all, to figures who exist only in relation to the one (narrator). At the same time, they become, paradoxically, generic everypersons hiding in shelters, managing their dispossession, dealing with their loss. With all of this, the fragmentation works well to create a richly rounded and cast narrating figure who may also be one of those everypersons.

Nasrallah has given a fabulous novel of dispossession, a tale of colonialism and exile, of shattered lives, shattered persons and shattered homes and of so many of the absurdities that flow from that. It is far from an easy read, the visceral accounts of the camp attacks, if nothing else, ensure that, but it is a rewarding read hovering on the brink of the surreal and magic realism with a solid underpinning of realism.

[Yara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps there is no coherent way to describe this book except to say that this is what it feels like to be inside a hallucination. A hallucination in the form of a refugee’s segmented memories.

The book is heavily symbolic. The main plot revolves around the events of a massacre happening in a Palestinian refugee camp. The rest is a mash-up of a variety of scenes with nameless characters, nameless fighters, nameless murderers, a nameless refugee camp, a nameless massacre, a flight to a nameless gulf country. The significance of the book's opening page (slide 2) won’t make sense until you read the book and understand the power of names. A lot of what is mentioned comes straight out of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s own experiences, including the massacre and the traveling to a gulf country part.

Readers later assumed this nameless massacre refers to the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, although no specifics are mentioned in the book. Tel al-Zaatar massacre took place during the Lebanese Civil War in 1976. Tel al-Zaatar (literal translation: The Hill of Thyme) was an UNRWA administered Palestinian Refugee camp housing approximately 50,000-60,000 refugees in northeast Beirut.

Original title in Arabic:
‎مجرد اثنان فقط- إبراهيم نصرالله