Reflections

• What did I learn about Libya? I'd only known the recent history in broad strokes from the news, so I definitely learned a lot about the socio-political situation surrounding the Libyan part of the Arab Springs. And as usual, it's so different hearing the story from a character you can relate to on a human level (that's why we love fiction!), and in particular the intersecting paths of Khaled and his family and friends as they navigated the unrest, oppression, rebellion, and so on revealed how complex, dynamic, and chaotic it was... and how personal, and un-personal at the same time. I also really loved hearing about the general vibe, because I never made the connection that Libya has a Mediterranean climate: cypress trees, olive oil, swimming in the sea.

Quotes

Chapter 1

• "These past years since 2011, since the Libyan Revolution and all that had followed it—the countless failures and missed opportunities, the kidnappings and assassinations, the civil war, entire neighborhoods flattened, the rule of militias—changed Hosam. Evidence of this was in his posture but also in his features: the soft tremble in the hands, perceptible each time he brought a cigarette to his mouth, the doubt around the eyes, the cautious climate in them, and a face like a landscape liable to bad weather."
• "No one is more capable of falsities nor as requiring of them than those who wish never to part ways."

Chapter 2

• '"We are in a tide," he had said back in the passionate days of the Arab Spring, when he was trying to convince me to return to Benghazi with him, "in it and of it. As foolish to think we are free of history as it would be of gravity."'

Chapter 7

• "London was, in a way, where Arab writers came to die."

Chapter 11

• "I tried to teach him not to judge too quickly, that some books, like some people, are shy."

Chapter 23

• "The genius of rumors is that they can coexist with the truth,"

Chapter 33

• A quote from Jean Rhys: "Still, there were moments when she realized that her existence, though delightful, was haphazard."

Chapter 34

• '"To be from countries such as ours," Rana told him, "is to continually feel obliged to explain them."'

Chapter 36

• "The sea was beautiful and unchanged, and its beauty was part of its fidelity."

Chapter 39

• "It turns out it is possible to live without one's family. All one has to do is to endure each day and gradually, minute by minute, brick by brick, time builds a wall."

Chapter 46

• "I began to see novels and poetry—indeed, the entire human event—not as a field of demarcations, made up of languages and periods and styles and schools and civilizations, but rather as a great river with its own internal ancestry, that no matter the surface changes, from T. S. Eliot to Badr Shakir al Sayyab, from Chaucer to Derek Walcott, there was a unity in the depths that stood ready and available for the next writer."

Chapter 64

• "Friend. What a word. Most use it about those they hardly know. When it is a wondrous thing."

Chapter 68

• 'I remembered Aristotle's words, which were read to me by my father, and therefore in Ibn Rushd's Arabic, that "Not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at."'

Chapter 71

• "We need our families and the obligations of others to silence the unsaid and the unsayable."
• "I wanted, more than anything else, the wants and demands of others. Those are versions of myself that continue in the dark."

Chapter 88

• "Young faces unable to keep from smiling, all quickly united by the song that became the rallying cry of the 17 February Revolution: We will live here Till the pain is gone We will thrive here Till the melody turns a sweeter tune."
• "It is a myth that you can return, and a myth also that being uprooted once makes you better at doing it again."
• "My friends never stopped wanting a different life, I wanted to tell her. But I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement."

Chapter 98

• "At first I thought, to be a parent you have to be an idealist. Then I learned that to be a parent is to be continually coming up against everything that is not ideal about you."