I decided to try reading some of the finalist books for The National Book Award. This is the first one on my list. I could not stop reading; it’s touching, lyrically written, and timely. Although this is a novel, it is based on the life of Assadi’s father. Like her father, Sufien, the central character, a Palestinian, was driven from his home in the 1948 Nakba. One day the soldiers just show up and tell the whole family they must leave, abandoning the property that has been in their family for hundreds of years and their house with the blue door. This is the story of the rest of his life, first at a tent camp in Syria until his father finds a good job in Kuwait. As the oldest child in the family he and his father decide he should study abroad–he is brilliant at math. He gets a Visa and goes to Italy to study, runs out of money because father loses his job, starts running a rug shop, meets the person who becomes his best friend for life, Bernardo, a very wealthy Jewish guy trying to escape his mandated life in NYC.

Eventually, Bernardo has to go back to NYC and convinces Sufien to do the same. At times homeless, other times living off money Bernardo gives him, and finally finding that his love for driving can help him make a living, he becomes a taxi driver. Then at a club–he tends to drink alcohol too much–he meets the woman who will become his wife, a Jewish woman whose father owns a factory in Brooklyn. Finally, he feels called to the West, to the Arizona desert, where he lives the rest of his life. The two stay together and have a daughter who attends Columbia University, the place Sufien dreamed of attending but could only go there and wander around and visit the library.

This is the story of a man’s life, a man who, driven from his original home, keeps looking for “home”, a place he feels he belongs. It raises the question of what is home, what does home mean, where and what is it. And to quote Dante, the book begins, “You shall leave behind all you most dearly love, and that shall be the arrow first loosened from exile’s bow. You shall learn how salt is the taste of another man’s bread and how hard is the way, going down and then up another man’s stairs.”–Paradiso canto 17.