Sad, detailed and enlightening, this Palestinian writer's first work to appear in English covers events in the lakeside village of Samakh during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Yakhlif's chronicle (published in Arabic in 1991), opens by evoking prewar village life, exploring Samakh's terrain and its residents' daily routines on the day a British soldier offers to sell a bulletproof vest to young Radi while his uncle is away from the shop. The vest and its eventual wearer, Najib, soon go off to war, where an Iraqi poet in Najib's battalion takes over the narrative; the poet tells of yet another soldier and his struggle to win the heart of his hometown love. Yakhlif switches points of view frequently (at one point, he entrusts his story to Radi's dog); he aims less to build a plot than to depict, via anecdote and description, a Palestinian village as war destroys it and drives its inhabitants into exile. The very readable English of translators Jayyusi and Tingley evokes sometimes Hemingway, sometimes folktales; its simplicity plays against Yakhlif's bounty of facts. Like the Palestinians' real-life history, this book lacks a satisfying ending: will the soldier find his beloved, the poet get home, or the people of Samakh ever reunite? Yakhlif's meticulous picture of mid-century Palestine (down to lists of fish and plants) helps him evoke the distress of the events Palestinians still call "the disaster"; if Yakhlif's most sympathetic Anglophone readers may still find his plot diffuse, or undramatic, his skilled depictions will more than compensate. (June) FYI: This book is part of the Emerging Voices series: international fiction from writers who are known in their homelands but not abroad.
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A Lake Beyond The Wind ($12.95 paperback original; Jun. 1; 160 pp.; 1-56656-301-1): This absorbingly detailed realistic novel its veteran Palestinian author's first to reach English translationoffers in impressively compact form a panorama of the diaspora his country experienced during the watershed year of 1948, when Zionist military forces defeated a (hastily assembled) Arab Liberation Army. Yakhlif focuses on the village of Samakh, deftly juxtaposing accounts of rudimentary military ``training and reconnaissance'' (especially as recounted in the journal kept by an Iraqi mercenary soldier) with vignettes of village life dominated by ingenious symbolic foreshadowing (a cow bitten by a rabid dog; ``two rams butting one another with their heads''). A fine, bitter, bracing work, distinguished by precise construction and resonant understatement. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.