It's 1914 and Midhat Kamal is travelling from his home in Nablus (now on the West Bank, then part of the Ottoman Empire) to study medicine at Montpellier. Lodging with the Molineu family he is soon attracted to the daughter Jeanette, and gradually his feelings are reciprocated. But Midhat's chance discovery that Docteur Molineu, a social anthropologist, is in fact studying him as an anthropological specimen for his paper 'The Effect of a New Language on a Primitive Brain' leads to a rupture between the two:

He felt a cramp in his stomach. He was a guest, but the host had trespassed. And he too had trespassed, and transgressed, with the host's daughter. Whose then was the crime? The spectre of his ignorance rose now before him. He thought he knew their public codes now, more or less — but the private ones? He had thought himself in the bosom of the family, capable — almost — of sitting in a chair in the study. He had thought it made no difference. But if he was the father's subject, how could he be the daughter's husband? One did not study one's sons-in-law.

When Jeanette turns away from him to support her father Midhat knows that he can no longer stay in the house and, abandoning his medical studies, he leaves for Paris ....

The war ends, Midhat returns to Nablus, the Ottoman Empire collapses and change is in the air in the city of Nablus. And the book follows Midhat's life as the world changes around him, almost until the start of Second World War. But his time in Paris and his early love for Jeanette continue to influence his life in unexpected ways ...

This is a well written book, but there are major faults with its construction in my opinion. There seem to be three novels competing for attention in [The Parisian] whose individual themes do not necessarily sit well together:
- a memoir of Midhat Kamala's life
- a history of Palestine and its politics between 1914 and 1936. This requires bringing in more characters and events as Midhat himself is somewhat apolitical.
- a social history of the inhabitants of Nablus and the different peoples making up its population

Any one of those themes could have worked well, but they in combination there are just too many characters, most of whom are not well defined, and too many unconnected events. A book that needed a really good editor. ( )

4.5 rounded up ( )

In 1914, young Midhat Kamal leaves Constantinople, where he’s graduated from a French lycée, for Montpellier, France, to study medicine. The relocation has two objects: to keep Midhat from being conscripted into the Ottoman army, therefore safe from the world war; and to become someone of whom his father can be proud.

Father will demand his reckoning, that’s certain, for he’s a wealthy cloth merchant from Nablus, Ottoman Palestine, and a firm believer in traditional, hierarchical values.

Midhat, however, doesn’t quite see his father’s tyranny, despite having suffered from it his entire life. Such thoughts are unthinkable. But once in France, everything is thinkable, even sayable, often doable, and Midhat’s inner romantic flowers like a tree blooming in the desert.

He falls in love with Jeanette, the daughter of the professor who offers him room and board, and maybe she returns his feelings. Subsequently, he goes to Paris, where he continues his studies, talks politics with Palestinian nationalists, and becomes a dandy and a seducer.

However, his inevitable return to Nablus shocks him to the core, and as he dutifully tries to reconstruct his life according to the traditions he’s been taught, he mourns his lost freedom, even as he makes the best of his circumstances. That’s what a man must do, he decides, fulfill his role as a proper son and heir to the family business.

Midhat’s inner struggle mirrors that of the Palestinian fight for independence. Hammad shows how his trust in French values gets crushed by colonial realities. But she also portrays the nationalists falling prey to rigid codes of honor that lead to self-destruction, when “flexibility,” as one broader-minded politician remarks, would be saner. So it is that telling one man’s fictional story depicts history.

Nevertheless, this brilliant, impressive novel — a debut, no less — almost sinks in the first hundred and fifty pages. The Montpellier narrative develops slowly, and Midhat’s character seems maddeningly concrete and restrained.

To be fair, that’s culturally appropriate, and Hammad does a terrific job portraying her protagonist’s confusion as to language, customs, and behavior, suffering with an obsessive, overdeveloped sense of what people must think of him. Every failure, whether or not it really is a failure, feels like dishonor to Midhat.

Still, though you understand why — especially in retrospect, which means those first hundred and fifty pages can feel like wandering — you want the young man to let looser within himself, even if no one else sees it.

But once our hero connects with politics, then returns to Nablus, his character opens. Don’t be put off by the untranslated Arabic, usually honorifics or exclamations, which you don’t need to understand, nor the occasional French phrase. The plot, though simple, wields a very sharp blade, and I defy you to put the novel aside.
Ninety-nine percent of jacket blurbs are fluff and nonsense, but here’s an exception — Zadie Smith astutely remarks that Hammad has written in the tradition of Flaubert and Stendhal. Though I’m not yet ready to place Hammad on that exalted shelf, I see the comparison, visible in the filigree approach to the characters’ interactions as well as the prose.

Also like the two nineteenth-century masters, Hammad has written a biography of one character standing for a time and place — think of Emma Bovary, Julien Sorel in Red and Black, or Fabrizio del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma. (If you don’t know these novels, grab a glass of wine, a comfortable chair, and dig in.)

This is the most successful kind of biographical novel, I think, true to history yet unconstrained by having to set down the complete historical record, which doesn’t always squeeze into a fictional frame. Another similarity is that all three protagonists, like Midhat, have been educated in romantic ideals, which leave them unprepared for the cruelties of real life.

But perhaps the most compelling aspect of The Parisian, as with these predecessors, is Hammad’s authority as a storyteller. ( )

Sprawling novel of the birth of modern Palestine, from the last years of the Ottoman empire to the end of the British Mandate. Told through the story of Midhat, a Palestinian who goes to France a a young man, returns to his home town, Nablus, through the years. Many other families are involved.
I wondered if the novel used partly family memories--the author's last name being the same as one of the families in the book. One of Midhat's daughters figures in the story and the author gives credit to someone with the same name in her Acknowledgement. Well written. One of the themes: carrying a torch for for a French girl through his whole life finally driving Midhat to an insane asylum seemed a bit contrived.
As a whole, recommended. ( )

I found this book interesting, but a bit disjointed and long. There's a lot going on, starting in France just as WWI is starting and ending around the start of WWII in Palestine. It's really the life story of Midhat who starts out as a student in Montpellier, falling in love. It felt like more of the threads would come together than actually did, but I guess that's what life is like. It's a big ambitious book but didn't quite pull it off for me. ( )