#hala alyan
What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.
Hala Alyan, from “Spoiler” in The New Yorker
Our Book Tuesday pick is Salt Houses by Hala Alyan: http://qnslib.org/ralM30bE3CA
This debut novel tells the story of a Palestinian family being displaced and separated during the Six-Day War of 1967 between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria — and later again during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Scattered across the globe, the family struggles with war, assimilation, and new beginnings.
Reserve a copy of this celebrated book today!
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Everyone wants a rock bottom. Some Icarus shit.
But the truth is some holes keep going, yawning, heady, one mistake
becomes three:
there’s always a dark darker than the dark you know.—Hala Alyan, from “You’re Not a Girl in a Movie,” The Twenty-Ninth Year
“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. It’s continuing.”
― Hala Alyan, Salt Houses
