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خمسة أيام لم يسمع بها أحد
«دقائق فقط، هي آخر ما تبقّى في ساعتكَ الرمليّة!. ماكنتَ ستفعل بها يا صاح لو كنتَ في مكاني؟!!.. هناك أشياء كثيرة سترغب في فعلها، ولا تتّسع لها دقائق ولا ساعات، وربّما أيام.. لكن، من ذا الذي سيمنحكَ وقتاً لتفعل كلّ ما تشاء، للمرّة الأخيرة في حياتك؟!. أكثرهم رأفة سيمنحكَ جرعة ماء، ودقيقتين للصّلاة»..
- GenresFiction
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2021
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February 16, 2022
Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
In June 2021, the British Council published an article by a translator from Arabic who together with eight of his peers recommended a list of 10 Arabic titles (the majority novels) which should be translated into English (https://literature.britishcouncil.org...).
One of the list was recommended by a US diplomat Christiaan James (https://www.state.gov/biographies/chr...) who recommended “Five Days Untold” by the Yemeni author Badr Ahmad and who it seems then followed through on his views by working with a new to English language publication UK small press – Dar Arab (so new that their website is still under construction, albeit they have published their first set of four books) – to translate and publish the novel.
Five Days Untold was described in the British Council article as bringing “into sharp focus the horrors and senselessness of war while offering a dark meditation on how the past, both collective and individual, impacts the present” and painting “an unflinching portrait of war on a micro level and weaves together themes related to fate, agency, and the sustaining power of family bonds.”
The book is set on New Year’s Eve 2012 and then the eponymous first five days of 2013 in and around a small town in an unnamed country at Civil War.
The country is I think heavily based on Yemen although not named and the briefly outlined colonial history of the country (literally an Arabic Banana Republic) and the origins of the Civil War (with the “War of the Fingers”, and the “Al-Kook” dispora) are (I think) fictional, albeit the Civil War which started in 2013 seems much closer to the Yemeni one.
The book’s main character is Ziad Al-Niqash – a third generation craftsman (a plasterwork sculptor and carver). He lives with his father (now sunken into a form of silence), mother (now by ncessaity the family matriarch) and three younger sisters – but at the book’s opening is, together with the remaining young men in the town, handed a notice by Naji Awad (a violent and corrupt officer of the local Political Guidance Committee) ordering him to report for immediate conscription to the government army (any previous exemptions from conscription being invalidated due to the manpower crisis the army is suffering).
The book alternates between three sets of chapters: one telling in first person the story of Ziad and the horrors he suffers after his conscription; the second - still effectively told in Zaid's voice - the story of Zaid’s family (strictly his father’s family) and which concentrates on the equal horrors suffered both by the town at the hand of armed forces and by Zaid’s family and the hands of Naji Awad; the third the equally unflinching close third party story of Naji Awad himself (as we understand a little too of how his own past leads to his terrible actions).
This book is a difficult and at times very harrowing read. It is one perhaps I think more distinguished by (and worthy for) the power of the story it tells and its links with what remains one of the worlds most intractable wars (the now 7+ years Yemen Civil War and its associated humanitarian crises – currently one of the worst in the World: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-midd...) than on literary experimentation (as the writing is relatively straightforward albeit I think this is a correct choice reflecting the thoughts of the narrators).
It is ultimate a tale of people in the midst of the suffering of an impoverished country and society ripped asunder by the almost unfeasibly awful violence of a capricious civil war (and the associated arbitrary exercise of corrupt power) – and how through this one family tries to retain some agency in its struggle to survive.
It is also a tale (as my opening quote implies) of how the past nourishes and sustains the present, both in positive ways (family histories and bonds and how they aid the ability of present generations to hold together in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles) but also negatively (in particular how historical divisions, even ones that are believed by many to be quasi-mythological, can cause the horrors of war in the present).
Recommended
I will tell you the story from the beginning. Not from its beginning but from its roots, for pain and stories are like trees. They have roots that nourish and sustain them, granting them the power to endure and to last.
In June 2021, the British Council published an article by a translator from Arabic who together with eight of his peers recommended a list of 10 Arabic titles (the majority novels) which should be translated into English (https://literature.britishcouncil.org...).
One of the list was recommended by a US diplomat Christiaan James (https://www.state.gov/biographies/chr...) who recommended “Five Days Untold” by the Yemeni author Badr Ahmad and who it seems then followed through on his views by working with a new to English language publication UK small press – Dar Arab (so new that their website is still under construction, albeit they have published their first set of four books) – to translate and publish the novel.
Five Days Untold was described in the British Council article as bringing “into sharp focus the horrors and senselessness of war while offering a dark meditation on how the past, both collective and individual, impacts the present” and painting “an unflinching portrait of war on a micro level and weaves together themes related to fate, agency, and the sustaining power of family bonds.”
The book is set on New Year’s Eve 2012 and then the eponymous first five days of 2013 in and around a small town in an unnamed country at Civil War.
The country is I think heavily based on Yemen although not named and the briefly outlined colonial history of the country (literally an Arabic Banana Republic) and the origins of the Civil War (with the “War of the Fingers”, and the “Al-Kook” dispora) are (I think) fictional, albeit the Civil War which started in 2013 seems much closer to the Yemeni one.
The book’s main character is Ziad Al-Niqash – a third generation craftsman (a plasterwork sculptor and carver). He lives with his father (now sunken into a form of silence), mother (now by ncessaity the family matriarch) and three younger sisters – but at the book’s opening is, together with the remaining young men in the town, handed a notice by Naji Awad (a violent and corrupt officer of the local Political Guidance Committee) ordering him to report for immediate conscription to the government army (any previous exemptions from conscription being invalidated due to the manpower crisis the army is suffering).
The book alternates between three sets of chapters: one telling in first person the story of Ziad and the horrors he suffers after his conscription; the second - still effectively told in Zaid's voice - the story of Zaid’s family (strictly his father’s family) and which concentrates on the equal horrors suffered both by the town at the hand of armed forces and by Zaid’s family and the hands of Naji Awad; the third the equally unflinching close third party story of Naji Awad himself (as we understand a little too of how his own past leads to his terrible actions).
This book is a difficult and at times very harrowing read. It is one perhaps I think more distinguished by (and worthy for) the power of the story it tells and its links with what remains one of the worlds most intractable wars (the now 7+ years Yemen Civil War and its associated humanitarian crises – currently one of the worst in the World: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-midd...) than on literary experimentation (as the writing is relatively straightforward albeit I think this is a correct choice reflecting the thoughts of the narrators).
It is ultimate a tale of people in the midst of the suffering of an impoverished country and society ripped asunder by the almost unfeasibly awful violence of a capricious civil war (and the associated arbitrary exercise of corrupt power) – and how through this one family tries to retain some agency in its struggle to survive.
It is also a tale (as my opening quote implies) of how the past nourishes and sustains the present, both in positive ways (family histories and bonds and how they aid the ability of present generations to hold together in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles) but also negatively (in particular how historical divisions, even ones that are believed by many to be quasi-mythological, can cause the horrors of war in the present).
Recommended
February 20, 2022
Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
In the Prize’s 6th year, it has now featured books from 44 small independent presses in the UK and Ireland, and this, Dar Arab, was a completely new press to me.
I believe Dar Arab was founded in London in 2017 where its publisher ناصر البدري (Nasser Albadri), a poet and television producer, relocated after being arrested and detained in Oman (http://anhri.net/?p=157068&lang=en). It started out publishing Arabic books, and the house has a particular interest in “unexplored topics that will educate, open hard conversations and challenge /change perceptions.” In 2021 it brought out its first translations into English of which this was one.
The original novel was published in 2021 خمسة أيام لم يسمع بها أحد by Yemeni author بدر أحمد (here Anglicised as Badr Ahmad).
It has been translated into English as Five Days Untold by Christiaan James, a former diplomat (including in Yemen) and now a translator from Arabic.
The novel is set in the first days of 2018 in an unnamed and fictitious country, but with strong nods to the situation of Yemen. The country is embroiled in a vicious civil war between Free Nationalists and the Revolutionary Liberation Movement, one whose origins lie in the country’s history, a complex and at times mythical tale based on the banana industry, with the benumbed population largely the innocent victims on either side.
Four years on, the war had turned everything in this country to dust. Were all our values bullshit? Four years had passed, leaving those who had survived as shadows, bewildered and dejected, content with starvation, sickness, and death. We experienced a contentment born of having grown numb to the catastrophes and famine brought on by the war.
The story centres around the figure of Ziad Al-Niqash, son of Muhi Al-Deen Al-Niqash, Ziad the third generation in a line of plaster sculptors, a family that had tried to stay apart from political strife:
As I went on watching the deserted street, which heaved with dreariness and haze, I saw two shadowy figures quickly cross the road. My mother was talking on the phone, the sound of a helicopter whirred in the darkness above, and a cold wind blew. I slipped into the depths of memories—memories that this little family had kept to itself for twenty-five years, remaining aloof from the commotion of the world and the vicissitudes of fate. I will tell you the story from the beginning. Not from its beginning but from its roots, for pain and stories are like trees. They have roots that nourish and sustain them, granting them the power to endure and to last. I can’t find a more suitable place to begin the story other than that which started it all, at least as it relates to me. This point is Muhi Al-Deen Al-Niqash, my father.
It opens on New Year’s Eve in 2017:
That day (on which it was said the number of cats and dogs surpassed the population) was an exceptional one in the history of my small town. Not because a year of war had come and gone while another was about to begin, but rather because peculiar events had taken place during that day.
Amongst a number of events, the most important for Ziad is the ruling government (the Free Nationalist) announcement of the scrapping of conscription exemptions, meaning Ziad and others in their town will be called up for military service, something of a suicide mission.
His call-up is delivered with relish by the villainous Naji Awad, a corrupt and highly violent officer of the Political Guidance Committee.
The story then unfolds over the eponymous five days starting in January 3rd, the day that Ziad begins his military service, plunged almost immediately into bloody conflict. It is told in three alternating strands, one chapter each for each day:
- "Ziad Al-Niqash" - Ziad's own first person account;
- Ziad's story of "The Family of Muhi Al-Deen Al-Niqash", some of which is the family history but part what happens to the family after he is called up;
- "Naji Awad" - his story and what happens to him during those five days, narrated in the third person.
There is an interesting duality between Naji Awad and Ziad Al-Niqash - both end up surviving a massacre, but are initially presumed dead, and both end up, bloody and wounded, as fugitives from those seeking to kill them.
Naji Awad’s own origins are obscure and linked to another ‘five days’. He was discovered as an infant in the ruins of a house in the town owned by a Jewish shoemaker which was destroyed in a terrible flood, wiping out everyone except the baby, but with no one clear if the child was actually the family’s or had been carried on the waters from somewhere else:
Forty-five years ago on a Tuesday afternoon, four seagulls landed on the minaret of the mosque. Not two or three, but four seagulls. No one knew how they had traversed such a distance that separated our town from the nearest sea, and the villagers considered it a bad omen for the town. A Jewish shoemaker based his interpretation on the principle of “like for like”. He explained that a flood would inundate the town. He didn’t say “flood” exactly, but he did say the town would turn into a sea. Nobody believed him, because there was no river or sea nearby and the rainy season had not yet begun. Five days after this prophecy and precisely in the afternoon of the fifth day, the inhabitants of the village heard a terrifying clatter that sounded like a dozen tree trunks crashing down. When they came out of their houses to see what was going on, they saw a huge cloud of dust obscuring the horizon.
Riad and his sisters also have their origins linked to five special ‘days’ (technically four, but I am counting Ilham’s birthdate twice as doubly auspicious):
My three sisters—Hinaa, Nadaa, and the youngest, Ilham—were all younger than me, each separated by only a few years. My father notated the birth of each one on the inside cover of his large Quran. Hinaa was born the day the Pakistani president Mohammed Zia passed away, and Nadaa was born the same day Saddam invaded Kuwait, while Ilham was born the day the war in Yugoslavia ended, which happened to be the very same day phone lines came to our village.
…
My name is Ziad. Yet on happy occasions, my father calls me Abu Tariq. I was born on a day the world stopped in its tracks. My father jotted down the date of my birth on the inside cover of his large Quran without noting anything else, as he had done for my sisters. But the many drops of ink that fell from his pen next to the date betrayed that he had spent more than a short while thinking of the nature of the event that he would connect to my arrival into the world. After some time, and in a different pen, he added: Ziad was born two and a half months after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded.
Much of the novel is a graphic description of the violence suffered (and in Naji Awad’s case also inflicted) on the characters, both horrifying and yet, as per the opening of the review, oddly numbing. The new conscripts which Ziad joins are led like lambs led to the slaughter:
Do you know what my mind drifted back to as I watched them fall upon person after person? I remembered my mother’s fingers as she thumbed through the beads of her misbaha in the early morning, each one making a snapping sound. My entire soul filled with the scent of rosemary and her morning coffee. I heard the crowing of our only rooster and the mutterings of my father that he had, somehow, extricated with great difficulty from behind the cruel wall of silence. I also recalled the Eid sheep and the butcher’s hand dispatching one right after the other with the glint of the blade and splattering of blood on the tiled floor and onto his high rubber boots. We departed the camp like an army of ants, walking in a long, silent formation led by a member of the military police.
...
We left behind the people that stood along the road craning their necks and looking toward us apprehensively. In their eyes, we were mere ewes, forcibly driven to the knife of a butcher for whom mercy found no pathway to his heart, who chopped off heads without batting an eyelash. What pained everyone was that these lambs knew where they were being led and the fate that awaited them.
And this is not a story of heroism, indeed Ziad's head echoes with his mother's parting words, his only aim to survive: “Be a coward, my son! Be a coward! Nothing in this world is worth spilling your blood!”
A novel that at the sentence level is perhaps a little conventional for my tastes, but as an insight into the horrors of conflict, and (fictionalised) Yemeni culture, fascinating, and another great find by the UK's finest literary prize.
In the Prize’s 6th year, it has now featured books from 44 small independent presses in the UK and Ireland, and this, Dar Arab, was a completely new press to me.
I believe Dar Arab was founded in London in 2017 where its publisher ناصر البدري (Nasser Albadri), a poet and television producer, relocated after being arrested and detained in Oman (http://anhri.net/?p=157068&lang=en). It started out publishing Arabic books, and the house has a particular interest in “unexplored topics that will educate, open hard conversations and challenge /change perceptions.” In 2021 it brought out its first translations into English of which this was one.
The original novel was published in 2021 خمسة أيام لم يسمع بها أحد by Yemeni author بدر أحمد (here Anglicised as Badr Ahmad).
It has been translated into English as Five Days Untold by Christiaan James, a former diplomat (including in Yemen) and now a translator from Arabic.
The novel is set in the first days of 2018 in an unnamed and fictitious country, but with strong nods to the situation of Yemen. The country is embroiled in a vicious civil war between Free Nationalists and the Revolutionary Liberation Movement, one whose origins lie in the country’s history, a complex and at times mythical tale based on the banana industry, with the benumbed population largely the innocent victims on either side.
Four years on, the war had turned everything in this country to dust. Were all our values bullshit? Four years had passed, leaving those who had survived as shadows, bewildered and dejected, content with starvation, sickness, and death. We experienced a contentment born of having grown numb to the catastrophes and famine brought on by the war.
The story centres around the figure of Ziad Al-Niqash, son of Muhi Al-Deen Al-Niqash, Ziad the third generation in a line of plaster sculptors, a family that had tried to stay apart from political strife:
As I went on watching the deserted street, which heaved with dreariness and haze, I saw two shadowy figures quickly cross the road. My mother was talking on the phone, the sound of a helicopter whirred in the darkness above, and a cold wind blew. I slipped into the depths of memories—memories that this little family had kept to itself for twenty-five years, remaining aloof from the commotion of the world and the vicissitudes of fate. I will tell you the story from the beginning. Not from its beginning but from its roots, for pain and stories are like trees. They have roots that nourish and sustain them, granting them the power to endure and to last. I can’t find a more suitable place to begin the story other than that which started it all, at least as it relates to me. This point is Muhi Al-Deen Al-Niqash, my father.
It opens on New Year’s Eve in 2017:
That day (on which it was said the number of cats and dogs surpassed the population) was an exceptional one in the history of my small town. Not because a year of war had come and gone while another was about to begin, but rather because peculiar events had taken place during that day.
Amongst a number of events, the most important for Ziad is the ruling government (the Free Nationalist) announcement of the scrapping of conscription exemptions, meaning Ziad and others in their town will be called up for military service, something of a suicide mission.
His call-up is delivered with relish by the villainous Naji Awad, a corrupt and highly violent officer of the Political Guidance Committee.
The story then unfolds over the eponymous five days starting in January 3rd, the day that Ziad begins his military service, plunged almost immediately into bloody conflict. It is told in three alternating strands, one chapter each for each day:
- "Ziad Al-Niqash" - Ziad's own first person account;
- Ziad's story of "The Family of Muhi Al-Deen Al-Niqash", some of which is the family history but part what happens to the family after he is called up;
- "Naji Awad" - his story and what happens to him during those five days, narrated in the third person.
There is an interesting duality between Naji Awad and Ziad Al-Niqash - both end up surviving a massacre, but are initially presumed dead, and both end up, bloody and wounded, as fugitives from those seeking to kill them.
Naji Awad’s own origins are obscure and linked to another ‘five days’. He was discovered as an infant in the ruins of a house in the town owned by a Jewish shoemaker which was destroyed in a terrible flood, wiping out everyone except the baby, but with no one clear if the child was actually the family’s or had been carried on the waters from somewhere else:
Forty-five years ago on a Tuesday afternoon, four seagulls landed on the minaret of the mosque. Not two or three, but four seagulls. No one knew how they had traversed such a distance that separated our town from the nearest sea, and the villagers considered it a bad omen for the town. A Jewish shoemaker based his interpretation on the principle of “like for like”. He explained that a flood would inundate the town. He didn’t say “flood” exactly, but he did say the town would turn into a sea. Nobody believed him, because there was no river or sea nearby and the rainy season had not yet begun. Five days after this prophecy and precisely in the afternoon of the fifth day, the inhabitants of the village heard a terrifying clatter that sounded like a dozen tree trunks crashing down. When they came out of their houses to see what was going on, they saw a huge cloud of dust obscuring the horizon.
Riad and his sisters also have their origins linked to five special ‘days’ (technically four, but I am counting Ilham’s birthdate twice as doubly auspicious):
My three sisters—Hinaa, Nadaa, and the youngest, Ilham—were all younger than me, each separated by only a few years. My father notated the birth of each one on the inside cover of his large Quran. Hinaa was born the day the Pakistani president Mohammed Zia passed away, and Nadaa was born the same day Saddam invaded Kuwait, while Ilham was born the day the war in Yugoslavia ended, which happened to be the very same day phone lines came to our village.
…
My name is Ziad. Yet on happy occasions, my father calls me Abu Tariq. I was born on a day the world stopped in its tracks. My father jotted down the date of my birth on the inside cover of his large Quran without noting anything else, as he had done for my sisters. But the many drops of ink that fell from his pen next to the date betrayed that he had spent more than a short while thinking of the nature of the event that he would connect to my arrival into the world. After some time, and in a different pen, he added: Ziad was born two and a half months after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded.
Much of the novel is a graphic description of the violence suffered (and in Naji Awad’s case also inflicted) on the characters, both horrifying and yet, as per the opening of the review, oddly numbing. The new conscripts which Ziad joins are led like lambs led to the slaughter:
Do you know what my mind drifted back to as I watched them fall upon person after person? I remembered my mother’s fingers as she thumbed through the beads of her misbaha in the early morning, each one making a snapping sound. My entire soul filled with the scent of rosemary and her morning coffee. I heard the crowing of our only rooster and the mutterings of my father that he had, somehow, extricated with great difficulty from behind the cruel wall of silence. I also recalled the Eid sheep and the butcher’s hand dispatching one right after the other with the glint of the blade and splattering of blood on the tiled floor and onto his high rubber boots. We departed the camp like an army of ants, walking in a long, silent formation led by a member of the military police.
...
We left behind the people that stood along the road craning their necks and looking toward us apprehensively. In their eyes, we were mere ewes, forcibly driven to the knife of a butcher for whom mercy found no pathway to his heart, who chopped off heads without batting an eyelash. What pained everyone was that these lambs knew where they were being led and the fate that awaited them.
And this is not a story of heroism, indeed Ziad's head echoes with his mother's parting words, his only aim to survive: “Be a coward, my son! Be a coward! Nothing in this world is worth spilling your blood!”
A novel that at the sentence level is perhaps a little conventional for my tastes, but as an insight into the horrors of conflict, and (fictionalised) Yemeni culture, fascinating, and another great find by the UK's finest literary prize.
March 4, 2022
Several years ago I acted as an extra in a docudrama about a conflict in Afghanistan where I played a soldier. I was given a crash course in military training and how to handle a real weapon which was only armed with blanks. When filming started I fumbled with my weapon and found it difficult to keep pace with the other actors as they raced across the set re-enacting a war. The arms expert, crew and other actors got quite annoyed at what an incompetent soldier I made and it's safe to say my performance wasn't convincing. Luckily this was just a fictional situation and I've not ever been conscripted or made to perform compulsory military service. Ziad Al-Niqash, a young man who is one of the central characters of “Five Days Untold”, isn't so fortunate as an order delivered to his home commands him to join in the civil war occurring in his country. Though the specific location and conflict isn't named in the text, one can assume this is set during the civil war in Yemen given the author Badr Ahmad's nationality and because it takes place over the New Year of 2017-2018. We follow his harrowing journey being drawn into military service, the experiences of his family and the malicious plot of a local tyrant named Naji Awad. It's a terrifying insight into what it means to be a frightened young man who is suddenly forced to be a solider.
Read my full review of Five Days Untold by Badr Ahmad at LonesomeReader
Read my full review of Five Days Untold by Badr Ahmad at LonesomeReader
March 5, 2022
My son brews beer for a living. The other day, someone posted a 1-star review of an experimental sour beer he had brewed with text that said “I don’t like sour beers”. My son was very amused by this. I mean, why go the trouble of buying, tasting and then reviewing a beer when you know you won’t like it? And what use is a review that says “I don’t like sour beers”?.
By the way, the beer is delicious. If you like sour beers.
All this is by way of explanation as to why I should not be reviewing this book. I read it because of its inclusion on The Republic of Consciousness 2022 long list. I knew by the time I had read the first few pages that I didn’t like the writing style (or translation style - I don’t know which, but I know I wasn’t enjoying it). So, I probably should have stopped at that point except that I wanted to read the whole list. Nothing improved for me as I read. In fact, I’d say, given the gruesome subject matter, things got progressively worse.
I can’t remember the last book I regret reading more than this one.
So, my suggestion is that you ignore my review and look at the (very small number of) reviews posted by others who have read this and had a more positive experience.
By the way, the beer is delicious. If you like sour beers.
All this is by way of explanation as to why I should not be reviewing this book. I read it because of its inclusion on The Republic of Consciousness 2022 long list. I knew by the time I had read the first few pages that I didn’t like the writing style (or translation style - I don’t know which, but I know I wasn’t enjoying it). So, I probably should have stopped at that point except that I wanted to read the whole list. Nothing improved for me as I read. In fact, I’d say, given the gruesome subject matter, things got progressively worse.
I can’t remember the last book I regret reading more than this one.
So, my suggestion is that you ignore my review and look at the (very small number of) reviews posted by others who have read this and had a more positive experience.
March 6, 2022
Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2022
I appreciate the range and diversity of the Republic of Consciousness list, and I think this is the first book I have read by a Yemeni writer.
I found it rather heavy going, as it is relentlessly bleak and violent, and I didn't feel I really got to know any of the characters, but as a description of the barbarity of war it is brutally effective.
I appreciate the range and diversity of the Republic of Consciousness list, and I think this is the first book I have read by a Yemeni writer.
I found it rather heavy going, as it is relentlessly bleak and violent, and I didn't feel I really got to know any of the characters, but as a description of the barbarity of war it is brutally effective.
did-not-finish
March 1, 2023Too macho, violent, and misogynistic for my tastes. Some nuanced characters would also have helped. Bailed 60% of the way in.
March 26, 2022
As Paul Fulcher notes in his review, the descriptions of violence in this book, and there are a lot of them, are "oddly numbing." This is a book about civil war. The country in which it is taking place is unnamed, but the author is from Yemen and Yemen had a civil war in 2013. However, it is not historical in the sense that the causes of the civil war and the names of the two sides are fictional. It is historical in the sense of the impact on those not attached to either side of the conflict. In other words, the civilian population that just wants to get on with life without conflict. In some ways it is similar to In The Dark, which, like this book, is on the longlist for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, which also concerned a civil war -- the Spanish Civil War -- and focused on civilians. In other ways, it is not, as here we are taken into the fight as Ziad Al-Niquash is "drafted."
There are 3 sets of alternating chapters in the book. One is Ziad telling his own story about going off to the induction center and then to battle. It is a crazy story. He has to get himself to the induction center where he joins a hundred or so other inductees. They scramble to grab uniforms and shoes out of piles and then trade to get ones that fit. They are given guns, told how to shoot them, and allowed 10 practice shots. Then they are divided into barracks that have holes from prior bombings. During the night, the camp is bombed and some of them are killed. In the morning, those remaining are told to get on trucks to be driven somewhere. On the way, the trucks are attacked .... and so it goes. Ziad is captured, not once but twice and in between he gets to shoot an automatic rifle during an attack on "base" where he is at the moment. He is interrogated and beaten. The whole experience is, well, "oddly numbing."
The second story line concerns Ziad's family, both its paternal history and what's happening to them while Ziad is on his 5-day civil war experience. They also experience war, as the town is bombed and many are killed. And then volcanic ash coats the town.
The third story line concerns Naji Awad, a most unpleasant political officer. His story line is also full of atrocities, some which he inflicts and some which he suffers.
3.5 rounded down to 3 stars.
There are 3 sets of alternating chapters in the book. One is Ziad telling his own story about going off to the induction center and then to battle. It is a crazy story. He has to get himself to the induction center where he joins a hundred or so other inductees. They scramble to grab uniforms and shoes out of piles and then trade to get ones that fit. They are given guns, told how to shoot them, and allowed 10 practice shots. Then they are divided into barracks that have holes from prior bombings. During the night, the camp is bombed and some of them are killed. In the morning, those remaining are told to get on trucks to be driven somewhere. On the way, the trucks are attacked .... and so it goes. Ziad is captured, not once but twice and in between he gets to shoot an automatic rifle during an attack on "base" where he is at the moment. He is interrogated and beaten. The whole experience is, well, "oddly numbing."
The second story line concerns Ziad's family, both its paternal history and what's happening to them while Ziad is on his 5-day civil war experience. They also experience war, as the town is bombed and many are killed. And then volcanic ash coats the town.
The third story line concerns Naji Awad, a most unpleasant political officer. His story line is also full of atrocities, some which he inflicts and some which he suffers.
3.5 rounded down to 3 stars.
February 19, 2022
What an odd book. I quite liked it for about the first half, and then it's almost like a different translator took over. It became overly dramatised and awkward, with some phrases as if they came from Google Translate. It became unclear who the terrible people were and why they were doing the terrible things they did. Odd, because early on it was coherent and interesting.
Edit to add: I read the version available in Kindle Unlimited (I signed up for a free trial in order to read this.) Perhaps the version there is not the same as the printed book.
Edit to add: I read the version available in Kindle Unlimited (I signed up for a free trial in order to read this.) Perhaps the version there is not the same as the printed book.
April 15, 2022
Five Days Untold is set in an unnamed country and takes place over the five harrowing days a civilian spends as a conscript in the army fighting a civil war. It tells of the unnecessarily brutal and barbaric nature of war and the impact on individuals and families and it left me reeling. Not for the faint hearted or those that like happy books.
February 28, 2024
Brutal and very raw. I didn’t really get to know the characters as deep as I wanted, there wasn’t a character development or anything. However the linear display of events was really really interesting . I recommend to this read if you don’t mind that there will be a larger focus on events than characters. Very happy that Najis wife got a good ending
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 14, 2024
Fine. Bit of clumsy narrative at times, probably down to translation. Grim and pretty interesting but nothing too unusual in the story
August 5, 2021
رائعة تحكي واقعنا المر واقع الحرب
وزياد النقاش صورة مصغرة
او مثال للواقع الذي يعيشه الشباب العربي
وزياد النقاش صورة مصغرة
او مثال للواقع الذي يعيشه الشباب العربي
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