Sabra Zoo
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'Sabra Zoo' has won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize South Asia and Europe Best First Book Category 2011. --Commonwealth Writers Prize 2011
Twenty years after the civil war ended, Beirut is again a holiday destination; boutique hotels have risen from the rubble and wealth swaggers once more along the Corniche. This brief, explosive account of the weeks leading up to the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982 is a timely reminder of Lebanon's divided past and precarious future. Ivan is 18, half-Danish, half-Palestinian; his politically implicated parents have left for a safer country, yet he remains to act as interpreter for trauma cases at the hospital within the camp at Sabra. Unbeknown to the international volunteers there he is also an underground messenger for the Palestinians. Time seems suspended; senses are heightened. Worldly-wise though innocent, Ivan is drawn to older Norwegian physiotherapist Eli and enraged orphan Youssef; just two of the exhausted, impassioned characters in Hiller's stunning, defiant debut. --Catherine Taylor First Novels The Guardian 13th February 2010
'Beautifully told, ambitious and important, this is a debut with something to say.' Ronan Bennett 'Mischa Hiller has written a moving and haunting novel, a narrative for our tormented times.' Fergal Keane --Reviews and endorsements
'Beautifully told, ambitious and important, this is a debut with something to say.' Ronan Bennett 'Mischa Hiller has written a moving and haunting novel, a narrative for our tormented times.' Fergal Keane --Endorsements
Twenty years after the civil war ended, Beirut is again a holiday destination; boutique hotels have risen from the rubble and wealth swaggers once more along the Corniche. This brief, explosive account of the weeks leading up to the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982 is a timely reminder of Lebanon's divided past and precarious future. Ivan is 18, half-Danish, half-Palestinian; his politically implicated parents have left for a safer country, yet he remains to act as interpreter for trauma cases at the hospital within the camp at Sabra. Unbeknown to the international volunteers there he is also an underground messenger for the Palestinians. Time seems suspended; senses are heightened. Worldly-wise though innocent, Ivan is drawn to older Norwegian physiotherapist Eli and enraged orphan Youssef; just two of the exhausted, impassioned characters in Hiller's stunning, defiant debut. --Catherine Taylor First Novels The Guardian 13th February 2010
'Beautifully told, ambitious and important, this is a debut with something to say.' Ronan Bennett 'Mischa Hiller has written a moving and haunting novel, a narrative for our tormented times.' Fergal Keane --Reviews and endorsements
'Beautifully told, ambitious and important, this is a debut with something to say.' Ronan Bennett 'Mischa Hiller has written a moving and haunting novel, a narrative for our tormented times.' Fergal Keane --Endorsements
Product Description
It is the summer of 1982 and Beirut is under siege. Eighteen-year-old Ivan's parents have just been evacuated from the city with other cadres of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Ivan stays on, interpreting for international medical volunteers in Sabra refugee camp by day, getting stoned with them at night, and working undercover for the PLO. Hoping to get closer to Eli, a Norwegian physiotherapist, he helps her treat the belligerent Youssef, a camp orphan disabled by a cluster bomb. But events take a nasty turn when the president-elect is assassinated. The Israeli army enters Beirut and surrounds the camp, with Eli and Youssef trapped inside. Can Ivan, unable to enter the camp, salvage anything from the chaos?
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's 1982 and we see the Israeli siege of Beirut and the shocking events which followed through the eyes of 18-year-old Ivan, half Palestinian and half Danish, whose parents have already left. Ivan is in many ways a typical boy/man - getting drunk and stoned nightly, lusting after an older woman, desperate to lose his virginity - but in this novel, context is everything. Working as an interpreter in the Sabra camp hospital, and as a courier of fake documents for the PLO - his father a former cadre - his friends are not the usual teenager's friends, his flat is the hangout for a ragtag of international medical volunteers. I like the understated tone of the narrative, the lack of hyperbole, the small moments of humour. There is a lovely recurrent image of a candle in a Chianti bottle - so ordinary and everyday. As the camp massacre unfolds - as we know it must - and the horrors pile up sentence after sentence, you want to look away - like Ivan, uncomprehending and stunned - but you can't, you keep reading. A novel like Sabra Zoo is important, educating through fiction, fleshing out events which we as readers may not usually wish to 'revisit', but through Ivan we must. This is the power of fiction. And there is hope at the end. I was left with a lump in my throat, and wanting to know how the characters were doing, long after the last page.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sabra Zoo is, among other things, a brilliant rites-of-passage novel set against the backdrop of the Israeli invasion of The Lebanon in the early 1980s. Ivan is an eighteen-year old boy left behind in Beirut by his radical parents but seemingly enjoying a life of enviable freedom and almost adventure in the war-torn city. This all seems regular and routine to him until he's witness to a mass murder committed by Israeli-sponsored neo-fascists. It's a brisk and short, sharp novel that explores how an individual responds to the knowledge of atrocity, how everyday life can be reassembled, if at all. Wire-tight and painfully relevant, it's an important contribution to the literature of the Lebanese conflict and slides in confidently alongside such things as the film Waltz with Bashir and Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Closing 'Sabra Zoo' and looking up after reading the last page, the world seems different somehow. The things that seemed to matter before no longer matter. They take on the irrelevant incongruity of the air stewardess' perfume or the sachet containing a moist towelette that Mischa Hiller describes... after having led you through the hell of war torn Beirut. Hell created by human beings for other human beings, for no discernable reason. Hell that seems to have its own unstoppable momentum, impervious to the futile efforts of the indviduals caught in its path. But Hiller takes us through this hell - presumably having lived through it himself - with an elegant detachment that only heightens the horror. Perhaps this detatchment is a prerequisite for the casual courage required for ordinary people to live through wartime - living in suspicion of every parked car, in fear of every creak on the stairs, even of your old school friends; going about your shopping, ignoring the Israeli soldiers who have appeared overnight - crouching, twitchily in doorways. And through the fear and the chaos, the normal urges of life continue - hunger, thirst, friendship, a Donovan record on the turntable, craving for a cigarette, a young man's libido searching for an outlet, love... It's the small details that bring the reality of life in wartime home to you; the cockroaches being shaken from the ceiling as Israeli bombs make the building shudder, men casually shooting at a barrel floating off the beach, a stray dog injured by shrapnel... There were other details of the massacre at Sabra refugee camp which I'm ashamed to say, I didn't even have the courage to read. Mischa Hiller had the courage not only to face these details, but to relive them and write about them. By doing so, Hiller opens our eyes to the everyday reality of horror. The Beirut war is over, but the refugee camps still exist. And the horror still exists, in Palestine, in the DRC, in Sri Lanka, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Burma, in Zimbabwe, in Darfur... If anything can stop us turning away from such horrors and shrugging 'what can we do?' it is books like this.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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Mischa Hiller's debut novel, winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for Europe and South Asia, is set in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War. Read more
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