The People of Forever Are Not Afraid PDF
Preview The People of Forever Are Not Afraid
Extraordinary praise for The People of Forever Are Not Afraid A Wall Street Journal Best Fiction Pick of 2012 “Stunning … [a] beautifully rendered account of the absurdities and pathos inherent to everyday life in Israel.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Remarkable … Part of this impressive book’s power is that it manages to re-create and rupture that numbness, war’s tedium and the damage it does to memory, intimacy, thought, and affection…. It’s a tribute to Boianjiu’s artistry and humanity that she portrays those on both sides of the barbed wire as loved and feared. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is a fierce and beautiful portrait of the damage done by war.” —Washington Post “Boianjiu is clearly a gifted stylist, and her first novel easily establishes her as a writer to watch.” —Christian Science Monitor “A dark, riveting window into the mind-state of Israel’s younger generation, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid marks the arrival of a brilliant writer.” —Wall Street Journal “A riveting debut novel.” —Marie Claire “The corrosive effects of existing on [the] continual knife-edge of boredom and horror are charted in a prose style that is, by turns, sharply comic, lyrically beautiful, and chillingly flat…. The People of Forever is a modern anthem for doomed youth, a brilliant anatomization of the yearning for normality in a situation that renders it impossible…. If you still need convincing, read this book.” —Financial Times “In this Bildungsroman, life in the army initiates a metamorphosis from girl to woman…. The prose [reads] alternately like a nightmare and a dream, but this feverish indecision is what gives it its power.” —The Economist “That one debut novel to get excited about.” —New York Magazine “[A] powerful novel.” —O, The Oprah Magazine “Boianjiu’s searing debut … draws from the author’s own experiences to render the absurdities of life and love on the precipice of violence.” —Vogue “Must-read.” —Harper’s Bazaar “The novel resonates with considerable power…. This isn’t the constantly detonating Israel of American newspaper headlines. Actually, the country portrayed is a much more interesting and harrowing place. Its citizens and soldiers, we see, live in quiet expectation of calamity.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Shani Boianjiu brings a spectrum of coming-of-age themes to her impressive first novel…. In a humorous, restrained, and beguiling deadpan, she here captures the anxieties of contemporary twenty-something women, while delivering a rare insight into the boredom, fear, and thrills of young Israelis being minced through military service.” —Sunday Times (UK) “Shani Boianjiu’s is an extravagant talent … Somewhere between the sardonic humor of Etgar Keret and the epic storytelling of David Grossman, Boianjiu has created a brave, beautiful, political literature that is entirely her own.” —Telegraph (UK) “This narrative’s power lies in its revelation of hidden histories, the way it opens up the inner emotional worlds of its characters beyond news headlines…. The girls are often lost for words, but the author successfully finds a voice to express the dehumanizing horror of warfare in this fragmented plot held together with a passionate, poetic eloquence.” —Guardian (UK) “An elegantly written debut novel … [Boianjiu] has written the story of a people’s resignation to living in a world that’s been strange for so long, they can no longer remember how strange it is.” —The Jewish Daily Forward “The extraordinarily gifted Shani Boianjiu has published a first novel that is tense and taut as a thriller yet romantic and psychologically astute…. Boianjiu writes with clarity about atrocity and the absurdity of endless war, but it’s her tender acceptance of human frailty that ultimately makes this novel so engrossing.” —More magazine “Boianjiu builds a deeply engaging narrative … and shows considerable range, creating surreal, absurd dilemmas for her characters…. A promising start to Boianjiu’s career.” —Jewish Book Council “An impressive debut.” —New York Post “[A] tour de force…. Powerfully direct … wonderfully vivid … more than just another promising debut from a talented young writer, [The People of Forever Are Not Afraid] warrants our full attention.” —Malibu Magazine “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid provides a fine flavor of what Israeli military life is like for young women—no mean feat—and many of the episodes are engaging and revealing. Read it for that flavor and those stories.” —Washington Independent Review of Books “It is incredibly rare and spectacular to find an author who possesses the literary talent to transport us so completely and persuasively to an utterly foreign realm…. Disturbing and provocative.” —The Jewish Journal “Boianjiu is a writer who should be talked about for literary reasons, not the least of which is that her stories refuse to submit to moral clichés.” —The Times of Israel “Carefully wrought, consciously structured, creatively imagined.” —The New Republic “The term ‘a distinct new voice in literature’ had become a cliché long before Shani Boianjiu was born, but there is no better way to describe her unique, piercing tone. Reading it feels like having your heart sawn in two by a very dull knife. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is one of those rare books that truly make you want to cry but at the same time doesn’t allow you to.” —ETGAR KERET, author of The Nimrod Flipout “This is big literature—the realism that nests inside the word surrealism.” —RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Atmospheric Disturbances “Shani Boianjiu is an enormous new talent. This is one of the boldest debuts I can think of—it reads like it was written in bullets, tear gas, road flares, and love.” —ALEXANDER CHEE, author of Edinburgh “I was hooked on Shani Boianjiu’s remarkable voice from the first sentence of this book. It’s urgent, funny, horrifying, fresh; the kind of thing I’ve been dying to read for ages.” —MIRIAM TOEWS, author of Irma Voth and A Complicated Kindness This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Shani Boianjiu Reader’s Guide copyright © 2013 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. “Extra Libris” and the accompanying colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2012. Portions of this work were previously published in The New Yorker, Vice magazine, and Zoetrope. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boianjiu, Shani, 1987– The people of forever are not afraid : a novel / Shani Boianjiu.—1st ed. p. cm. 1. Military education—Israel—Fiction. 2. Women soldiers—Israel—Fiction. 3. Coming of age —Fiction. 4. Female friendship—Fiction. I. Title. PR9510.9.B66P46 2012 823′.92—dc23 2012008962 eISBN: 978-0-30795596-8 COVER DESIGN BY ELENA GIAVALDI COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: RACHEL PAPO v3.1_r1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Part I Other People’s Children The Sound of All Girls Screaming Boys Checkpoint People That Don’t Exist A Machine Automatic Gun That Shoots Grenades Part II The Diplomatic Incident The Opposite of Memory Means of Suppressing Demonstrations Once We Could Pretend We Were Something Very Else And Then the People of Forever Are Not Afraid 1.5 Bedrooms in Tel Aviv Part III The After War Operation Evening Light About the Author Extra Libris I Other People’s Children History Is Almost Over There is dust in this caravan of a classroom, and Mira the teacher’s hair is fake orange and scorched at the tips. We are seniors now, seventeen, and we have almost finished all of Israeli history. We finished the history of the world in tenth grade. In our textbook, the pages already speak to us of 1982, just a few years before we were born, just a year before this town was built, when there were only pine trees and garbage hills here by the Lebanese border. The words of Mira the teacher, who is also Avishag’s mother, almost touch the secret ones of all our parents in their drunken evenings. History is almost over. “There are going to be eight definitions in the Peace of the Galilee War quiz next Friday, and there is nothing we haven’t covered. PLO, SAM, IAF, RPG children,” Mira says. I am pretty sure I know all the terms, except for maybe RPG children. I am not as good with definitions that have real words in them. They scare me a little. But I don’t care about this quiz. I will almost swear; I don’t care one bit. I still have my sandwich waiting for me in my backpack. It has tomatoes and mayo and mustard and salt and nothing more. The best part is that my mother puts it inside a plastic bag and then she wraps it in blue napkins and it takes about two minutes to unwrap it. That way even if it is a day when I am not hungry I can wait for something. That’s something, and I can keep from screaming. It has been eight years since I discovered mustard-mayo-tomato. I snap my fingers under my jaw. I roll my eyes. I grind my teeth. I have been doing these things since I was little, sitting in class. I can’t do this for much longer. My teeth hurt.
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