Review of An Unlasting Home by Mai Al-Nakib

*An Unlasting Home* by Mai Al-Nakib (2022). Published by Mariner Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

As a book blogger, something I’ve always been super clear about and dedicated towards promoting are local libraries. I know having access to a good library is a privilege, and there are countries where people don’t really have access to books at all. I am so grateful every day that I have access to a decent library system, especially in today’s world.

Especially as I am unemployed, I’ve been going to my local library and checking out books and movies to play on my DVD player. I’ve been watching all the somewhat new releases as they hit the DVD system at my library, which has been fantastic considering I don’t need to pay for AMC A List at my local movie theater chain anymore.

I go to the library almost every week and check out all the new arrivals and anything that catches my eye among the regular fiction and nonfiction shelves. Today’s blog post is about a book I requested to be shipped to my library though.

This book is one I found out about through my library’s promotions about Arab-American month. This blog post is coming out much later due to the nature of how I schedule blog posts, but basically they had a lot of curated lists for Arab American month that had me really interested in the books they were showcasing. This was one of them!

Onwards with the review—I can sense this introduction is getting a little long already.

A philosophy professor in Kuwait is charged with the crime of blasphemy, leading to revelations of family lineages and a changing country.

This novel begins in 2013, although it changes decades and a century as we go into the family history of Sara, the main character of the book. Sara is an adult in the contemporary period of the novel, and teaches at Kuwait University. Despite primarily having her education in the United States and her brother living there, as he’s gay, she decided to come back to Kuwait after her mother’s death to help run her progressive bookstore.

However, Kuwait is drastically changing after the war, and Islamic conservatism is taking over in what was once a largely liberal area. Sara doesn’t recognize the Kuwait she came back to, how more women are wearing niqabs and free speech is increasingly being challenged. She doesn’t fully understand the ramifications of this until one day a student records one of her philosophy lectures and accuses her of blasphemy.

As this is now a federal crime in Kuwait (in the world of the book), Sara now potentially faces the death penalty for questioning the fundamentals of Islam and whether it, and religion as a whole, makes you a free person. Throughout the course of her narrative, she meets with her lawyer, grapples with unexpected change, and we learn more about what exactly led her back to the same country she sought to leave.

It’s through her narrative that we also meet both of her grandmothers, who, at this point, are no longer alive. There’s Loula, who was born in a Kuwait that really no longer exists, and was married to a merchant family operating out of India. She spent much of her youth and upbringing in India, but was tricked back into coming to Kuwait by her estranged mother.

Then there’s Yasmine, who finds herself in a marriage that makes her extremely unhappy. The Kuwait of their stories, which is full of Western dance halls and opportunities for women to cross borders across Arabia to teach, no longer exists. One prominent image is one of the big pools and dance halls was bombed during the war and is now abandoned when Sara seeks it out, showing that the past is still haunting us, but not taken care of.

We also meet Sara’s mother, Noura, and her story. She left Kuwait behind with her husband and children to raise their kids in the United States, and she dreamed of changing Middle Eastern politics and policies within the United States. There’s also Maria, who’s still alive at the beginning of the book, who was the family’s maid.

She left behind her village in India to ensure her kids could afford to go to school and eat, which led her to working for the family in Kuwait. Even all these years later, with the family fractured across Kuwait and the world, Maria still remains loyal and helps Sara out even in her darkest moments.

All of these stories combined show us about lineages and the dramatic changes Kuwait saw, especially when Iraq invaded. That’s when everything began to change for the country, and we can see a stark contrast from what it used to be in the beginning of the family’s recorded history (in this novel) to what it has become today.

Overall Thoughts

I have to admit, I knew nothing about Kuwait going into this novel. I knew of its existence and that it was invaded during the Iraq War, but I had never encountered stories or narratives about this tiny country. That’s partially why I wanted to read this book, as I was curious about it.

This was such a well-written story though. I don’t think Sara’s story could sustain an entire novel in the way it was written, so I’m glad we got to see a more holistic story of this family, as it adds so much depth and nuance to what is unfolding in the present day.

What’s most interesting to me, though, is how women-focused this story is. Usually we learn about families through the lineages of its men, and if we look at the men even of this family, they’re influential people, academics, and those of “notable” pedigree. But we don’t focus on that much at all, which leads us to focus on the women, whose stories after are buried by history.

And that I appreciate a lot as a writer and aspiring academic who focuses on women’s history. This novel feels very special to me because of how it centers these perspectives, and I really liked it because of that.

Go read it if you get the chance! I think it’s worth picking up at least once if you’re interested in it.

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