Karim Kattan
The Palace on the Higher Hill
Translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman
PALESTINE
ISBN: 978-1-0686934-0-3
Faysal receives a mysterious letter about the death of aunt he can’t remember. Leaving his lover and his life in Europe behind, he returns to the village of his birth in Palestine and to his family’s extraordinary, deserted house, the palace on the higher hill. With a backdrop of violence and the permanent threat from settlers, Faysal wanders the once-lavish rooms as characters from the past return to shed light on his family story and on the story of his people.
In beautiful, angry prose, Karim Kattan introduces us to an intimate Palestine of the imagination where dreams and nightmares are in constant conflict. With hints of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Brideshead Revisited, he gives a nuanced deeply moving vision of the tragedy of war and a picture of his homeland that feels entirely new to English-speaking readers.
The book won the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie.
Palestinian writer KARIM KATTAN was born in 1989 in Jerusalem and holds a doctorate in comparative literature. His 2017 short-story collection, PRÉLIMINAIRES POUR UN VERGER FUTUR, was a finalist for the Prix Boccace. THE PALACE ON THE HIGHER HILL, his first novel, won the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, and his most recent novel, L’EDEN À L’AUBE, is shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Renaudot.
JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN is a translator from French of numerous writers, including Jean Genet, Hervé Guibert, and Ananda Devi. In addition to the many awards and honours he has received for his work, he was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
PREVIEW:
Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of vomit, pissing against walls and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia. And the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night, whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.
Martin lives in an Airbnb. In a nine-euro-a-night room, in a tiny villa in Rincón de Loix behind the endless row of nineeuro-a-set-menu Chinese restaurants. The room has two beds, he uses one for sleeping and the other as a kind of table where he eats, writes his songs, and leaves his things. Not that he’s got much. Dirty t-shirts and Alan Moore comics. There’s a photo drawing-pinned to the wall, a postcard of some compact, white clouds and beneath each one, some blocks of ice floating on a grey ocean, like exact reflections of the clouds. The postcard is from Canada. It says so underneath. Canada. There’s also a White Stripes poster.
“Where the fuck are you?” growls Michela. She opens the drawer on the bedside table. It’s lined with floral vinyl. Empty. Ants. There’s only one plug in the room and if Martin wants to turn on the water heater to wash or charge his phone, he has to unplug the lamp and do it in the dark. The phone charger is plugged in. So, Martin hasn’t gone anywhere, or won’t have gone far, he’s almost definitely in Benidorm. Where is the question. Michela picks up a pair of jeans from the bed and checks the pockets. She finds a receipt from the Multipollo chicken shop at the bus station. She looks at the date. It’s from 11.47. 11.47 this morning.
