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Khaled Khalifa
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Death is Hard Work: A Novel Audio CD – Unabridged, March 1, 2021

by Khaled Khalifa (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars 334 ratings
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Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria's ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination.

Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There's only one problem: Their country is a war zone.

With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings' decision to set aside their differences and honor their father's request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.
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  1. Print length
    1 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Highbridge Audio and Blackstone Publishing
  4. Publication date
    March 1, 2021
  5. Dimensions
    5.2 x 5.7 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1665128771
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1665128773
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Refusing to look away from its characters' challenges, the novel is clear-eyed in its presentation of living in a war zone...with a style that is straightforward, true, and profound."

-- "Booklist (starred review)"

"The journey recalls Faulkner's As I Lay Dying...Like Faulkner too, Khalifa employs a shifting array of voices and reflections, moving from perspective to perspective, present to past and back again. The effect is a persistent deepening, as stories are introduced and then revisited, details added through the play of memory."

-- "Los Angeles Times"

"Wrestles with themes of societal demise and rejuvenation on a tableau every bit as haunted by violence as the swamps and redclay roads of Faulkner's South."

-- "New York Times Book Review"

[A] brilliant, blackly absurdist road-trip novel, a restaging of As I Lay Dying in the thick of the world's most brutal civil war."

-- "Wall Street Journal"

About the Author

Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He has written numerous screenplays and is the author of several novels, including In Praise of Hatred, which was short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013. He lives in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Highbridge Audio and Blackstone Publishing
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 1, 2021
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ Unabridged
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 1 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1665128771
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1665128773
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 5.7 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 out of 5 stars 334 ratings

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Khaled Khalifa

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3.9 out of 5 stars
334 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Kathleen/Pumpjack
    5.0 out of 5 stars A masterful work, highly recommended
    Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    “Death is a solitary experience, of course but nevertheless it lays heavy obligations on the living.”

    This is both an astonishingly simple and deeply complex story set in the devastated, war-wracked contemporary landscape of Syria. The novel is among the more intellectually and emotionally satisfying books I have read in some time. The novel demonstrates the truism that reality—in this case, the Syrian war—can often be best understood through the lens of fiction. 

    As elder Abdel Latif is dying, he extracts a promise from his adult son Bolbol to transport his body back to his ancestral village to be buried next to his sister. Bolbol enlists the help of his estranged brother Hussein and sister Fatima. The trip to the father’s birth-village would, under normal circumstances, take two hours. But in the ravaged and bitterly territorial countryside, the journey stretches into a harrowing five days. The siblings quickly realize the folly of their promise to their father but will not turn back, even as their journey becomes increasingly absurd. 

    As the journey progresses, through the narrator Bobol, the history of the individual family members is presented—their loves, losses, hopes and disappointments. We see in these stories the spectrum of human frailty, strength and cruelty, the sometimes-stultifying confines of family and cultural expectations, and the redemptive power of love, even love among the ruins. 

    Through this unspooling of interwoven family stories, we begin to understand how a once-fervent optimism that the fight in Syria would become a revolution for all humanity has been reduced to the same rubble as their homes. The people are starving, terrorized and, by necessity for survival, increasingly immune to the savagery of their new reality. 

    Death is Hard Work is acutely disturbing in its depiction of the Syrian war and its traumatizing psychological effects on Syrian survivors, seen through the microcosm of one family’s past, present and future. This is not an easy book, but it is an important book. In today’s world, looking away from evil and violence and human suffering can be all too easy. Don’t look away. Read this masterful book. Khalifa has done a great service for his people, for those outside of Syria who seek to understand, and for history itself.
    7 people found this helpful
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  • Bernard . Pucker
    4.0 out of 5 stars Honoring the Dead is Hard
    Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2019
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    An intense and pain filled tale of the eventual burial of the Father by his 3 disconnected children and their journey in a mini van together with their father's dead body. A bizarre trip in the midst of war torn Syria. There is little that can redeem the the 3 children. I am reminded of a quote from the Talmud " weep not for the dead, weep for the living ". Unresolved feelings are intensified by the claustrophobic space within the mini van. It was one hell of a ride.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • explainer guy
    3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not outstanding
    Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2019
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    Paints a vivid portrait of daily life in a war ravaged country in a story similar to "as I lay dying". To its credit it doesn't explain or over explain a culture that may not translate -- but at the same time I can't help but feel like I didn't get new insight into Syrian culture beyond the war-time struggled.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Queen Margo
    5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional
    Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2022
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    This is an exceptionally well written work that looks into the roots of a dysfunctional family, with details coing out little by little as three siblings travel together across war-torn Syria to bury their father in his birth place as was his last wish. It takes to read the whole book, which is not very long, to find out why he wished to be buried in a place he never visited once he had left. The author is an excellent judge of human character. Everyone is portrayed so well that you feel like you have met all these people. Although the presence of the war is felt, the book is not about the conflict, but rather how the conflict forced everyone to show his or her true self. As they travel with a decaying corpse, the siblings reflect on their lives, but they do not get any closer. Once they get rid of the body, each plans to go back to his/her own life and never see the other again. To say more, would spoil the read. Highly recommended.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • James W. Fonseca
    4.0 out of 5 stars The Nightmare That is Syria
    Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2020
    This story is from the front-lines of the on-going terror and civil war in Syria. It’s almost a manual of what it is like to live in a dystopian society that is disintegrating while we watch.

    The title tells us what we might expect from the continuing headlines we’ve seen for five years: such terror and chaos reigns in the country that many of those who cannot flee the country have given up hope of living. When a mother’s second son dies in the rebellion, her first reaction is “I’m not surprised.”

    The main character is a young man whose father has just died. He has promised his father that he would bury him next to his sister back in his father’s hometown, a few hundred miles away. Although the son has had only cursory interaction with his older brother and sister over the last ten years, he convinces them to accompany him to take the body in a Volkswagen bus on what would be in normal times, a one-day-or-so trip to the burial site. He’s not a guy with a lot of self-esteem: “I’m just another worn out pair of shoes walking the street.”

    The author uses the chaotic trip to illustrate conditions in Syria and to tell us the stories of the man, his father and his siblings. I’ll leave out those details as spoilers. Instead I’ll focus on what is revealed about the chaotic conditions people in that country are surviving on a daily basis. The trip turns into a hellish journey, an insane, Kafkaesque nightmare. And we are reminded of Kafka not only by the byzantine bureaucracy the three-some encounters at military checkpoints, but also by the body metamorphosizing into worms. You’ll need a strong stomach to handle all the description of the bodily decay, not to mention the violence in this book.

    We see through the eyes of the author and the main character how the brutality of the regime created its own revolution. Many rebels deserted the army with their weapons when they were disgusted by orders to shoot to kill demonstrators with no restrictions: women, children and elderly were fair game. They opened fire on funeral processions. There is no accountability for soldiers of the regime: they can shoot or torture anyone for any reason – no questions asked. So giving a soldier at a checkpoint a flippant answer can get you killed.

    Hospitals are prohibited from taking in rebel wounded. Doctors who privately treat such wounded are targeted for murder by the regime. One woman whose doctor son was killed that way asked his medical colleagues to piece together his body after it was released by the police. Nor can rebels be buried in traditional graveyards, so private ones spring up.

    As the family travels back to the father’s hometown they cross numerous military checkpoints; first those of the regime; then, as they pass into rebel territory, those of the rebel resistance. There is the absurdity of the military wanting the body placed under arrest because he was a man wanted for joining the rebels. It takes hours and sometimes days to get through a checkpoint. One checkpoint is manned entirely by Chechen soldiers who hardly speak Arabic. One rebel-held checkpoint requires men to pass a test of religious knowledge to continue through.

    There is constant gunfire, explosions, the roar of streaking jets, helicopters, troop and tank movements in the main character’s neighborhood as well as on the road. His father chose to live in a shell of his former home with walls missing. The streets are filled with amputees. There are snipers along the highways, and bodies can be seen along roads left for the wild dogs that feed off them. One night of the trip the family tries to sleep in the van in a field but dogs throw themselves at the van trying to get at the decaying body.

    Not a pleasant book to read but neither are the daily headlines. It reminds me of other books I’ve read that describe life in chaotic worn-torn countries. So many! Two recent ones are Hotel Silence by, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (also set in the Mideast) and Made in Yugoslavia by Vladimir Jokanovic. The author (b. 1964) is a Syrian novelist, playwright, poet and screenwriter. Much of his work has been banned or suppressed in his country.
    One person found this helpful
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  • SD
    3.0 out of 5 stars Good but long drawn in some parts
    Reviewed in India on August 30, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    3 siblings are reunited to carry out their father's last wish and have to travel through war-torn Syria.

    I wasn't sure what the author wanted to highlight. The narrator's complacency, the war, or just human relationships. The story does highlight the war in the background but not enough for you to feel any sympathy for anyone. Although the situations in the characters' lives are familiar with regards to family ties or discontent in general, you don't empathise and that is the biggest drawback I felt.
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  • ParcForêt
    5.0 out of 5 stars Prenant, original, poignant
    Reviewed in France on April 6, 2023
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    Le fil directeur du roman est particulier : on suit les pérégrinations de trois frères et soeur qui entreprennent un voyage de 200 km pour aller enterrer leur père en pleine guerre civile en Syrie.
    On suit, d'une part, les méditations des personnages et leurs souvenirs du défunt, et d'autre part on voyage en Syrie. On passe une quinzaine de checkpoints, tenus par des factions différentes, et on surmonte avec les personnages les divers obstacles qui surgissent sur leur chemin. On entre par ce biais en contact avec le les réalités de la Syrie c'en guerre.
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  • James Hartley
    5.0 out of 5 stars Grim but Rewarding Stuff
    Reviewed in Spain on April 21, 2021
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    This is a genuinely horrifying, darkly, darkly comic novel which repays your patience if you stick with the style. If you're fine with the idea of three mismatched adult siblings taking their slowly decomposing father's corpse back to their hometown during a time of confused civil war, you're already halfway there as far as enjoying the book goes. What takes a little bit more effort is Khalifa's meandering narrative which jolts off one way and another as the minibus with the doomed family jolts down yet another potholed road.
    I have to admit there were times when I was ready to give up on the book - it's not easy reading, especially at first, until you get to grips with it - but I am glad I persevered. The problem isn't so much trying to keep track of who's doing what or who's who but more who's story are you being told at whatever point and why. But this passes. What settles, like the odour of dad's rotting body in the back of the van, is the helplessness of those caught up in a civil war which is nicely highlighted by Khalifa's weary, wise, worried cynicism.
    The end of the book - which is hard to describe without spoilers - is wonderful and horrible, a bit like the title.
    Recommended.
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  • Kardy
    5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful heartbreaking work
    Reviewed in Australia on October 25, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    Profoundly sad about the impact of the war in Syria on it's citizens and the nature of family and identity.
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  • L.E.A.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting informative and entertaining read
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2020
    Verified Purchase
    Good read. Educational albeit disturbing. Has humour and humanity
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