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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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LIFTED BY THE GREAT NOTHING
LIFTED BY THE GREAT NOTHING is a seemingly light novel (but a heavy story) about how a young Lebanese-American man comes to terms with his country’s—and his own—violent past. His mission to find his mother is an often funny tangle of re-evaluation and renewal. Max fights his way through misadventures amidst Lebanon’s fragmented upheaval; his precocity helps him unravel messy familial relationships.
Max can barely remember his mother. Rasheed, his father, told him burglars murdered her before they emigrated from Lebanon, and precious little else. By the time he’s twelve years old, Max is cooking all of their meals and cleaning their house. His father showers him with gifts, including a tree house, out of a belief that he deserves all and is capable of anything. The only thing that can disrupt their universe is the truth—which it does, with force.
LIFTED BY THE GREAT NOTHING is a startlingly graceful novel about a young man’s coming of age under a loving roof and a very big lie, an often hilarious story about the lengths we can go to conceal the things that make us feel different.
Just as the thoughtful and precocious Max begins to poke holes in his father’s narrative, Rasheed brings home a love interest for the first time. Kelly is a secretary at the warehouse where Rasheed works, and has something of a bleeding heart. Max senses something amiss with Kelly and Rasheed’s connection and can’t quite accept Kelly as the mother figure that Rasheed intends her to be, just as Kelly doesn’t quite fulfill the role. Eventually Max and Kelly begin to connect, mostly through watching violent war documentaries, before sharing other intimacies. But when Kelly takes up with their neighbor, the resulting shock and shouting lead to Max asking a lot of questions. When Kelly confirms his gravest suspicion, Max’s understanding of the world is so rocked that he feels as if he doesn’t even know himself.
Driven by exacting prose, indelible characters and a rare level of insight into human complexity, LIFTED BY THE GREAT NOTHING both breaks and warms the heart. Ostensibly the story of a child’s maturation, the novel appeals to the sophisticated readership of Emma Donoghue’s Room and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, as well as to the fans of Wes Anderson’s films.
Karim Dimechkie is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where he has studied with Denis Johnson and Jim Crace. He won first prize in The Short Story Competition 2011 (UK) as well as the 2013 Nortan Girault Literary Prize and was a finalist for Glimmer Train's Short Story Competition for New Writer’s 2011 and The Masters Review Prize. Before that, he was a high school English teacher in Paris. He has stories forthcoming in The Saint Ann’s Review and Empirical Magazine’s Anthology.
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Book
Published 2015-05-01 by Bloomsbury |