the attack by yasmina khadra

The book club had done this book - some people liked it, some did not.
Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of a former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul.


Dr Jafari is an Arab-Israeli (like how we have Indo Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese and Oversease based Guyanese) surgeon who enjoying nice middle class life in Israel, until he gets the shock out of his life when his wife becomes a suicide bomber - not for the cause of the middle class Arab Israelis, but for the Palestinians.
The man becomes a suspect.. he thought that he and his wife were separate from all of that. He then tries to go look for answers as to how and when his wife decided that she would kill herself.
He has to go back to where he and his wife came from and the journey is not pretty.  He has his Israeli friends and so on who are trying to get things back to what they were.

It is a novel story, not an easy one but one could imagine when in some families where people do things like kill themselves, they ask why why, what on earth, how did we not know, who to blame. I of course trying to wonder why Mohammed Moulessehoul trying to pass himself off as a woman writer.
There is some interesting dialogue and quotations - one book club member noted 'men invented war, women invented resistance'
I empathise with Dr Jafri though, trying to find a way to live in the madness.. remembering how I used to cuss up the Hindu right wing friends who were prepared to 'fight' for India and the Ram Janam Bhoomi case at Ayodhya (a mosque built on the ground of a temple which was destroyed by Muslim invaders)..
He tells the man who recruits the suicide bombers "I came naked into this world, I'll leave it naked, what I possess does not belong to me, and neither do other people's lives.. No earthly thing belongs to you really.. Neither the homeland .. nor the grave where you'll be dust.." and the trainer of suicide bombers responds.. "You may refuse to have one [a country], but you cannot force others to renounce theirs... there's either decency or death, dignity or a tomb;; and then he goes on to say .."story done - we aint talking no more"
So is one right and the other wrong?

The books is worth a read.