23 Mar / Fencing with the King by Diana Abu-Jaber [in Shelf Awareness]
In Diana Abu-Jaber’s absorbing novel Fencing with the King, 31-year-old Amani is in “free-fall,” her marriage over, her writing (which once garnered her a “big literary prize”) stalled, and her teaching career threatened. She’s even returned to living with her parents in Syracuse. Amani’s Uncle Hafez invites her father, Gabe, to Jordan as an honored guest at the king’s 60th birthday celebration. Gabe was once the royal’s favored fencing partner, but after more than three decades away, Gabe requires convincing: “To Amani, Jordan was almost illicit; a story to which her father had never returned.” With her mother unable to attend, Amani becomes Gabe’s guest during the six-week trip in October 1995.
Amani, who knows little of her family history, expects the trip will reveal greater understanding about her origins, especially more insight about her enigmatic paternal grandmother, Natalia, who died before Amani’s birth. Yet as welcoming as her extended relatives initially appear, straightforward answers are hardly forthcoming. Mrs. Ward, a family servant over multiple generations, gives Amani a literal link: Natalia’s Nefertiti pendant necklace. “Her Arab family seemed to prefer a gentler, more oblique or decorative narrative. An arabesque,” Abu-Jaber writes. But Amani continues to expose layers of deceptive family secrets.
While Abu-Jaber (Birds of Paradise) clearly favors Amani as protagonist, her clever polyphonic presentation provides readers with virtual omniscience: powerful Hafez is a cheater; his wife, Carole, knows him all too well; and Gabe remembers more than he realizes. This intricate family drama manages seamlessly to examine shifting borders, mutable identity, forced dislocations, and paralyzing longing, all against a backdrop of historical and personal revelations.
Discover: Diana Abu-Jaber presents a Jordanian American family drama that confronts multi-layered, multi-generational secrets woven into a complicated history of loss and longing.
Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, March 22, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2022