Michael Mohammed Ahmad

The Tribe is a collection of three novellas portrayinglife in an extended Muslim Allawite Lebanese-Australian family, as seen by oneof its youngest members. The first novella describes the family house in theSydney suburb of Alexandria, and the three generations who live, often in somediscord, in its rooms; the second details the marriage of a cousin, and thethreatened appearance of an estranged branch of the family at the ceremony; thethird rounds off the cycle with the death of the family matriarch, the boy'sgrandmother. Together they offer an intimate insight into a communitynegotiating the conflict between tradition and modernity, and the complextribal affiliations of the extended family.

The Tribe

Jayarna La Bozzetta

There were some parts of this I really enjoyed, however for a short book it felt very long in some places. The author has some serious pacing issues - there's a lot of detail included that is really irrelevant in the big picture narrative, like copious amounts of physical description, repetition of standout facts I already knew as if they had never been said before. The last chapter was definitely the strongest, but I found myself disengaged for a good portion of the story in the lead up to this chapter. I also found the end jarring, with Bani mentioning he was writing this down. 

I wish we also got more of Bani's personal thoughts. At times I felt like he was simply rattling off everything he could see and didn't talk about the ways he related to that picture. At times he feels like an narrator that is not actually present in the story. I did appreciate in some aspects you could really see where his family influenced his opinions and the ways he saw the world. However there was too many parts where he was simply narrating without a character voice. 

However I do think the author achieved his intention - I just think he could've done it better.

The Tribe

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