The Thirty Names of Night

March 15, 2020
A fable of being and belonging from the author of The Map of Salt and Stars (2018). This is the story of two artists who are connected by secret histories. This is also the story of a trans man struggling to come out to the people closest to him and a woman who found new love even though her way of desiring seemed impossible in the time and place in which she was born. This is a story about immigrants. This is a ghost story, and the specters that haunt its pages are literal and figurative. And this is a story about birds. What binds all these disparate strands together are Joukhadar's deep sympathy for his characters and his powerfully poetic voice. One-half of the novel is set in contemporary New York. The narrator is unnamed because the name he was given at birth no longer fits him. As he tries to express his true gender, he addresses his dead mother as if her absence makes his transition impossible. "There is so much of you--and, therefore, of myself--that I will never know," he writes. Laila Z's tale begins in 1920, in French-occupied Syria. After her family immigrates to America, she becomes an acclaimed illustrator of birds. The unnamed narrator knows her work because she was his ornithologist mother's favorite artist, and, when he stumbles upon Laila's diary, he finds the key to unlocking himself. Joukhadar is writing for a general American audience about people who are often categorized as "other." Both narrators are Syrian American, as are most of the significant characters. Many of these characters are also queer. The author creates a world for his characters in which readers who are perhaps unfamiliar with the communities being represented can find their way around, but he does not feel compelled to translate and explain. And Joukhadar's prose style--folkloric, lyrical, and emotionally intense--creates its own atmosphere. Gorgeous and alive.

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March 30, 2020
Joukhadar’s evocative follow-up to The Map of Salt and Stars explores a 20-something Syrian-American trans man’s journey of self-discovery. The unnamed protagonist—he later goes by the name he gives himself, Nadir—is an aspiring artist in Brooklyn who likes to go out dancing with friends and enjoys listening to his friend Sami play the oud. Nadir lives with his grandmother, Teta, and is haunted by the death of his mother years ago in a fire. After Nadir finds a diary belonging to a Syrian artist named Laila, in an old tenement inhabited by Syrian-Americans, he becomes obsessed with finding the print of a rare bird by Laila. As the story unfolds, Nadir’s narration and direct addresses to his mother (“your presence is still here, everywhere, your hand on everything”) expands to include Laila’s voice (“The day I began to bleed was the day I met the woman who built the flying machine”) as Nadir blossoms into his trans identity. Scenes with Sami, with whom Nadir falls in love, are particularly affecting. Quietly lyrical and richly imaginative, Joukhadar’s tale shows how Laila and Nadir live and love and work past the shame in their lives through their art. This is a stirring portrait of an artist as a young man.

Starred review from April 1, 2020

Exceptionally beautiful writing is the hallmark of this well-crafted novel about Syrian immigrants in New York City. In alternating chapters, our initially unnamed narrator (with a scratched-out name) relates the family story of his "Little Syria" Brooklyn neighborhood. The ghost of his ornithologist mother leads him to discover the secrets of Laila Z, whose paintings of birds were just becoming famous beyond the Syrian American community when she mysteriously disappeared six decades ago. Reading her journal, our anonymous narrator realizes that his mother and grandmother had a special relationship with Laila, which helps ease him out of the closet and exposes him as transmasculine. Throughout, birds are powerful, poetic images. The elusive rare bird that Laila sought to capture in paint becomes the symbol of our protagonist, who finally resolves to become masculine and gives himself the name Nadir, which means rare. VERDICT Joukhadar conveys the protagonist's gender confusion with such a sense of turmoil and angst that the reader can also become a bit confused, but overall this is a brilliant novel from the author of the celebrated The Map of Salt and Stars. [See Prepub Alert, 11/4/19.]--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

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Starred review from May 1, 2020
Nadir, a trans Syrian American man, mourns his mother daily. He even sees her interacting with the world around him, like a ghost. During the day, Nadir cares for his grandmother. At night, he paints murals of birds across New York City, an homage to his ornithologist mother as well as to Laila Z, an artist his mother admired and whose journals Nadir pours over. Both Nadir and Laila Z's stories are told in the second person?Nadir to his mother, Laila Z's as letters to B ?lending an extra intimacy to Joukhadar's stunning prose, which is already vivid, visceral, and urgent, as readers of The Map of Salt and Stars (2018) can attest. Nadir's journey probes into both the fleeting nature and permanent influence of art, while also exploring the human body as limitation?because Nadir is misgendered in the first part of the novel, yes, but also because he often longs to escape into something completely other, such as a flower or a bird. Ultimately, both Nadir and Laila Z learn how to make space for themselves in a world that tries to reject them, and that space allows their worlds to open up to even further possibilities. This clarifying and moving tale has far-reaching significance and appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)