Name: Salt Houses
Rating: 3.95 (20 reviews)
ISBN: 9781328915856

Hala Alyan

From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home

Salt Houses

Bekki

She was barely three when the Israeli army rolled through Jaffa’s streets, the tanks smashing the marketplace, the soldiers dragging half-sleeping men from their homes. 

There would be the birth of a new nation, they declared. 

Salma and Hussam’s villa sat atop a small hill that overlooked the sea, with orange groves banded beneath it in strips. 

Within days the groves were mangled, soil impaled with wooden stakes, oranges scattered, pulp leaking from battered flesh. 

Alia had cried not at the sound of gunfire but at the smell of the mashed oranges, demanding slices of the fruit

They stood on the veranda while the children slept, watching the fire streak across their land, listening to the muffled shouts. 

The smell of burned oranges rose to them, scorched and sweet.

Still, her heart stirred when Alia, even at six, seven years old, spoke with the reverence of a mythologist about the enormous Jaffa pomegranates, the seeds that could be spooned out and sprinkled with either salt or sugar, depending on their ripeness. 

“They were as big as the moon,” little Alia would say, holding her starfish hands out, her voice confident. 

It would become the girl’s most endearing and exasperating quality, how she could become enamored of things already gone.

Some mornings he wakes early, full of energy and purpose, sets out to the marketplace before work and returns with bags of tomatoes, cheese wedges, pita bread still steaming. 

Other times he scrounges, making meals of almonds and a handful of figs, a desultory bite of fruit.

He’d known girls like Aya, poor girls who lived by different standards than his female friends and relatives. These girls had their faith, but their lives were hard and bitter and full of death. The ones that weren’t married by their early twenties had a recklessness about them, giving their bodies with abandon. They hadn’t been raised on European summers and dinner parties; they had removed shrapnel from their brothers’ legs, had washed their sisters after rape. There was no chamber for love in their bodies, and they appreciated Mustafa’s banter.

“Imam Bakri, Allah is watching,” the men tease him and he grins back. “Allah knows how sweet tobacco is.”

During that long month of June, she often dreamed of icy lakes, of walking into an enormous refrigerator the color of lilacs.

“Those bastards. Those sons of dogs, they’ve done it.” 

In her distress, Umm Omar knocked her stool over as she jumped to her feet. She waved her arms around. “What? What?” Alia rushed over, careful not to snag the dress on the counter. 

Explosions of light filled the screen, the camera shaking as it followed the arc of a swooping plane. 

The plane released something from its belly, something that ignited in the air. “What?” Alia stared dumbly at the images. Umm Omar practically leaped, spittle flying as she spoke. 

“The Israelis! They’ve done it. They’ve done it. Tiptoeing like cowards, sneaking around at dawn. They’ve snuck up on our boys. They’re in Sinai.” 

“Not yet! But we’re prepared, you can bet on that! Palestine, Jordan, Iraq. We’ve been waiting for this. They don’t know what they’ve done, those motherless bastards. They don’t know what they’ve started!” 

“It’s gone. Palestine is gone. The fools. They saved nothing,” Ghazi said on the sixth day as the sun rose to reveal bodies tossed in ditches. 

When she dialed, the telephone lines still rang. 

By sunset that day, Alia no longer startled at the televised images of dropped bombs, the debris clouds swelling out into frothy edges, like something edible.

Easier, she thinks, to remember nothing, to enter a world already changed, than have it transform before your eyes. In the palaces, the grandparents must sit in their extravagant rooms, remembering sand. Nostalgia is an affliction. Someone said that once in front of Alia, and the words reach her now, years later. Like a fever or a cancer, the longing for what had vanished wasting a person away. Not just the unbearable losses, but the small things as well.

How tiny our lives are, he thinks, swelling to impossible size with love, then shrinking again.

“Come here, habibti,” Alia will say sometimes, her arms extended, and Riham goes to her mother gratefully. 

“Aroos,” the women call her. “Little bride.” 

“We’re going to marry you off,” they tease. 

“Good God, so long as he’s not Kuwaiti.”

 Alia wrinkles her nose, and everyone laughs. 

“They’re awful. With their terrible country. Not a single decent restaurant!”

“All those deaths, the bloodshed. And then I think about what’s happening in the world now. Sometimes it seems—” Riham falters. “That Allah is cruel.” Riham nods. Her grandmother leans down and, unexpectedly, kisses Riham on her forehead. She speaks lightly. “There’s nothing wrong with having questions for Allah. It means you’re taking Him seriously.”

“You must remember.” Salma spoke urgently. Sitting up, Alia saw in the dark that her mother’s eyes were wide open, staring past Alia, toward the window. 

“When it happens, you must find a way to remember.” 

“When what happens, Mama?” An icy fear seized her. She had never heard her mother speak this way before.

 “I was wrong. I thought I could make myself see something that wasn’t there. But it was a lie. I saw the houses, I saw how they were lost. You cannot let yourself forget.” 

Her mother began to cough, her voice frenzied. Light, Alia thought. She needed light to see her mother, the dark suddenly terrifying for her. 

In panic, she rose and stumbled to the window, pulled at the curtains until they finally gave and slid open. 

Outside, rain churned in sheets, blurring the streetlamps. Above, nothing was visible, the sky dark. 

When she turned back to her mother, Salma was dead, her face tilted toward the window. Her open eyes glistened in the limp, streetlamp light.

“Are you a student at the college?” Alia finally asks. 

The girl looks animated, as though Alia has asked the correct question. 

She begins to talk rapidly, her bracelets clanging as she moves her hands. 

“As if the dogs would let us go to school. My education? Mortar and gassing. One hundred nights of death, while that bastard sleeps in his marble bedroom.” 

Alia’s mind whirs. She puts it together, guesses. 

The girl spits, as though the very name is something bitter in her mouth. 

“He drove us to the wasteland; he took the gold from our flesh.”

 Alia watches her, sidelong, with interest. 

The reddish hair, kohl thick beneath her lower eyelashes.

 There are stories about the Kurds, whisperings about magic and gypsies living in the underbellies of cities.

“Those men hand out lines like candy; they’re trying to brainwash our boys.” 

Abdullah lifted his eyes reluctantly to meet Alia’s. 

“You listen to me. What those men are trying to do, what they’re trying to sell you, this idea that you’re lost and they’re saviors and the rest of the world is evil, that what you need is to bow and surrender and fight, they’ve been doing that for decades. You think you’re their first one? They’ll pick up anyone hungry enough to listen. So don’t sit there thinking you’re special. Don’t sit there thinking you have some great secret. We’re all a mess. Iraq’s a mess, Lebanon’s a mess, don’t even get me started on Palestine. But if you think those hypocrites are going to save anything, those liars wearing God like some gold to attract boys . . . well, then you’re an idiot.”

Motherhood doesn’t suit me, she once confessed to Budur, drunk. I don’t have the stomach for not knowing what comes next.

Atef hears the tremor in Manar’s voice. He remembers an argument years ago, between her and Abdullah, when she’d stood up during dinner and yelled at him, 

“I thought I had more time—” Manar stops, embarrassed. 

He can feel their eyes upon him. Poor innocent things, he thinks. 

What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. 

That’s all life is, he wants to tell her. 

A testimony, she decides. On the wet sand, she writes letters with her finger. Alia, she traces. Alia Yacoub. 

She pauses, considering. Atef Yacoub. The sand is soft beneath her toes, ticklish. She draws a line between the two names and another one below. A family tree. Riham, Karam, Souad, she traces. Next to her mother’s name, Manar writes Elie. She draws an X between them. A handful of stars, like white freckles, are still visible in the sky. 

Looking at the names, she speaks again. “We were all here.” She speaks slowly. She holds her wet palm to her cheek, then runs it through her hair. She imagines her whole family standing on this shoreline, in a row. Oddly cheered by the image, she pulls her knees to her chin and muses to the waves, “Even you, Teta.”

From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia's brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can't escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia's children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand--one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again.

Beautiful prose, foreign/exotic locale. Plot revolved around a complex multi-generational family. So good.

Sarah Erle

Daryl Houston

Just a really nicely done book that navigates generations and cultures and nationalities and national tragedies with what feels like (but surely wasn't) ease. Although the family's experience is vastly different from any of my own experiences, I felt like I was right there with them -- they felt familiar and lovely and awful, as families do -- across all these navigated boundaries. One of my favorite reads of the year so far.

'A piercingly elegant novel . . . with the power to both break and mend your heart.' Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane 'Epic in scope and uniquely relevant in its concern for displacement. Particularly well-suited for our times, then.' Red Where do you go when you can’t go home? On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. Although she keeps her predictions to herself that day, they soon come to pass in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Caught up in the resistance, Alia’s brother disappears, while Alia and her husband move from Nablus to Kuwait City. Reluctantly they build a life, torn between needing to remember and learning to forget. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Alia and her family yet again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it. Scattering to Beirut, Paris and Boston, Alia’s children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens and blessings of beginning again.

Salt Houses

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