It's never a good sign when you're barely twenty pages into a book and your mind starts wandering to all the little chores you could be doing instead. I found the story monotonous and the style stultifying. The Syrian civil war is a topic that deserves a far better book than this.

Received via NetGalley.

"Planet of Clay", by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price, published by World Editions, tells the story of a young girl from Damascus, during the Syrian Civil War. Rima is a young girl who cannot speak, and whose feet cannot stop walking. To protect her, Rima's mother keeps her tied in her room whenever she's alone, and tied to her mother's wrist whenever she is outside. During a checkpoint stop, chaos ensues and Rima is separated from her mother. Along with her older brother, who fights alongside the Free Syrian Army, Rima finds herself in the besieged Eastern Ghouta, where along other people, she needs to survive the lack of food and water, shelling, and the Ghouta chemical attack.

The story is told in a very unique way, as Rima tries to make sense of the world around her with stories like The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland, colors and imagination. It is precisely this innocence that makes the realities of the war even more heart wrecking, and makes this story a memorable one.

I hesitate to say that I "enjoyed" this novel of war, and harm, and loss, but deeply appreciate the author and translator for bringing it to us.

The story is told by Rima, who is caught up in her own inner world as a mute and possibly autistic young girl, as the civil war in Syria unfolds. It is a first-person description of her life before and after the dramatic break that occurs when war touches a population. Rima takes us directly into the confusion and horrors, told frankly and from a certain distance, but that can nevertheless overpower the reader with the raw emotions they stir.

Meandering and lyrical, this novel proves to be as surreal and masterfully told as Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince, two stories that anchor Rima throughout.

Recommended for anyone with an interest in world literature, in Syria and present-day events/all-too-current history.

This is like nothing else I’ve read. A Syrian teen, who thinks differently, maybe through learning disabilities or neurodiverse, who just wants to walk and draw and take comfort in The Little Prince, but is tied and has no voice, in a world that makes no sense. It’s a really tough, disorientating book. Pure horror.

One of the scenes that will stay with me were the disproportionate deaths of women after gas attacks-because it wouldn’t have been appropriate to remove their clothes, an act that could have saved them.

I was pleased to see this on the list for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Hadn’t realised when I started that Samar Yazbek was the author of The Crossing - a more journalistic nf about the Syrian war, but equally devastating.

"When I get older and my monthly cycles started, my mother decided I should stay at home to protect my honor,. I put a covering on my head, a colorful hijab. I would fix it in the shape of a rose, which made me laugh and feel happy. My mother began to tie me to the bed in our room with a long rope when she was at work. The summer months we spent together."

Extraordinary, terrifying, glorious, literary, upsetting. Read it. Yazbek (whose words reach me through the magic help of her translator, Leri Price) creates such a captivating voice to tell this story--the voice of a naive innocent--and through that voice somehow captures the terror and disorder of life in contemporary Syria in time of war. I'm extremely moved by what I read and I'm in awe of both Yazbek and Price, for allowing me as a reader of English to enter this beautiful/horrifying world. This novel is easily a candidate for my "best book of 2021" ... a short list for me, but one that also includes two other books from the NBA finalists for best translated book of 2021. This novel reminds me again of how grateful I am to the publishers who are bringing these great works of contemporary world literature to the English-speaking world.

If I search my reading past for a book that this novel reminds me of I would say A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION by Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa, told from the point of view of an agoraphobic woman who walls herself in her apartment even as Angola erupts in civil violence outside her doors. There is something about using the perspective of an innocent that allows both authors to explore terrible truths.

Rima, a young woman from Damascus, is the first-person narrator of Planet of Clay, a novel that reads almost like a stream of consciousness, intimate as the perspective is. Intelligent and perceptive – she can recite large tracts of the Qur’an by heart and has a talent for drawing – Rima decides at a young age not to speak and, accordingly, is treated as a social outcast. Making matters even worse is a strange malady: ‘I was born, and I can’t stop walking,’ she explains. Rima thus spends her life at the end of a rope, tethered to her bedpost or her mother’s wrist, finding solace only in drawing and books, understood by few people but her mother, brother and a school librarian. As Damascus begins to seethe with civil unrest, she finds it hard to comprehend what is happening, but when her mother is arbitrarily shot at an armed checkpoint, war overtakes Rima’s already troubled life and turns it into a nightmare.

Translator Leri Price has pitched the register of her work perfectly to capture Rima’s memorable voice: on the one hand extremely childish, on the other eerily adult, this is the essential element on which the entire novel hinges. When we first encounter her, Rima is tied up in a basement in Ghouta, a besieged suburb of Damascus to which her brother has brought her after rescuing her from the clutches of a military hospital. Launching immediately into her story, which she is writing for an unknown future reader, she proceeds to flit back and forth between the past and the present day, recounting events in a series of terrible vignettes that work like flashes of memory – sometimes cut off abruptly, at other times repeated in half-snatches, occasionally at odds with something else she has explained. Rima only ever narrates life as she sees it, making it sometimes difficult for the reader to work out exactly what is happening. If and when we do, the horror is all the more absolute, such as in descriptions of the chemical attack on Ghouta, after which women’s and children’s bodies litter the courtyard of Rima’s building, their gas-soaked clothes being sprinkled ineffectually with water – just one of the many ‘puzzling things that couldn’t be justified’ in the new world she has entered.

Women and children are at the heart of this novel, with Rima herself straddling both categories. While the men in the story, from her brother to the gunmen who kill her mother, occasionally swoop in to perform some act of valour or violence, it is the women and children who are left to deal with the consequences, often suffering in silence. Rima’s muteness is initially self-imposed, yet there is an abiding sense that later on society and then conflict have prolonged it – having become known as someone who doesn’t speak, she finds it impossible to break her silence, opening her mouth only to scream or recite religious passages. It is a damning comment on the options available to women and children to vocalise their experience, leading Rima to turn to writing and drawing instead.

[. . .]

Planet of Clay comes to meet us with a face of innocence, but the depths it plumbs are often shocking. The mindless violence of conflict, religious oppression, torture, mental health and the subjugation of women all bubble up to the surface of this intelligently written, poignantly playful novel. Using fairy tale and fantasy to look at war from a new angle, Yazbek and the considered work of her translator Leri Price have created a vivid, unsettling novel that tests the limits of language itself.

[excerpts from the full review available on my blog]

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy. This story of a mute during the Syrian war is eye-opening, descriptive, and heart-rendering. I didn't care for the back and forth or cyclical retelling, but that was the author's point. Readers can imagine the most-likely ending, since there is not a clear one. It is better if the reader is familiar with the story The Little Prince, as there are mare references to it here. I would recommend this book for the classroom library, but I wouldn't assign it as a teacher. It is depressing, but I appreciate that it is clean (excluding the war atrocities).

Rima is a young Syrian girl whose brain doesn’t work quite like other people’s. She can’t talk and once she starts walking, she can’t stop, so has to be tied up, further restricting an already restricted existence. She lives in a poor neighbourhood in Damascus in 2013 and war rages all around her, and we, as readers, view that war through her eyes, a war that she doesn’t understand. In a stream-of-consciousness non-linear narrative, this most unreliable of narrators nevertheless offers a heart-rending and visceral portrait of war at its most brutal. Sometimes the reader feels as bewildered as Rima, and that I found one of the most powerful aspects of this compelling and moving novel. This is war at its harshest because the victims are mostly women and children. She finds refuge in a fantasy world and in her drawings and stories, as bombs rain down around her, but there can be no escape from this terrible civil war. As we are all only too aware. An original, unsettling and deeply troubling read.

Going into Planet of Clay, I didn’t really know what to expect beyond a novel about the Syrian civil war. I didn’t expect a stream of consciousness novel, from the point of view of a disabled teenage girl – Rima – or the surreal impression of her world that her narration creates. Perhaps writing in such a way is really the only way to depict the horrors and futility of a country tearing itself apart. If all you know of Syria are the images on TV, the pictures that can make it seem as though it is a place very far away from us here in the west, then you should read this book. Yazbek’s narrator might be painting something impressionistic in her own mind, but between the lines and beyond the blurred edges, the picture we as readers are presented with is much more stark.

Planet of Clay, by Samar Yazbek, is one of those books that can break your heart, which makes it all the more worth reading. Set in contemporary Syria, Planet of Clay offers the tale of one young woman's experience of the civil war in that nation. Rima is an unusual narrator—she doesn't speak (by choice), but she sings the Qur'an to calm herself and others; she loves to draw and tell stories of her own devising and from books she's read; she is a restless and endless thinker whose mind takes her to places readers might not expect.

Rima is a compulsive walker. She is *compelled* to walk. As she explains to readers, her brain is in her feet. As a result, she's spent most of her young life tied by a length of rope to her mother's hand or to a solid object of some sort, so she can't roam too far. In the Damascus neighborhood where she lives, she can hear bombings, but they're distant. Then one day on a cross-city trip, her world is torn apart: her mother is shot and killed at one of the city's many check points; Rima is injured and stranded in a hospital that appears to function as a typical hospital, but is also a place where political prisoners are sent to heal between rounds of interrogation. Somehow, Rima's brother, who has become one of the fighters in the uprising again the nation's "President," finds her, and they set off to a rebel community some distance from Damascus. Now Rima doesn't just hear the bombings. She experiences and sees what they can do to frail human bodies.

Rima makes an exceptional narrator. She relates the horrors she's observing without self pity and escapes on flights of fancy, drawing and writing—sometimes in real life, sometimes in her imagination. There are times when her linguistic sophistication seems to fluctuate, and I'm not sure whether that was a deliberate choice by Yazbek. The book has moments when a reader wonders "how can she know about and describe x, when she doesn't know about and can't describe y?" But that's the Rima Yazbek gives us, and given the many facets to Rima's identity, a reader can embrace these discrepancies as part of the unusual person Rima is.

By letting Rima tell her own story, Yazbek takes readers into the Syrian civil war in ways news reportage can't. What we see is one small slice of that conflict, but we see that slice in detail under Rima's tutelage.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

“We are toys made out of clay, small toys, quick to break and crumble, and in fact a simple scratch is enough to turn our bodies into dust. And our limbs are snapped so easily. You don’t think so? You could have seen that for yourself”

This a difficult read, a dark account of the Syrian conflict told by the most endearing voice of a young girl who lives it on her skin. Rima does not speak, but only sings the Quran because she has a “voice that would make the stones weep”. She has rage and fire in her feet and when she starts walking she cannot stop. To protect her, her mom tells everyone she is crazy, and we often see her tied to someone’s wrist or in a room to make sure she does not run away. Rima’s story begins as her mom is shot at checkpoint trying to run after her and will provide a vivid account filtered by the innocent gaze of a child who witnesses unspeakable horrors
Rima loves colouring and makes sense of the world by drawing what she sees. It is an act of telling stories to survive, a bit like in the 1001 Nights. She also warns us that she is not writing a novel with a neat structure, a beginning and an ending, but the truth, to try and understand what happened. For this reason, Planet of Clay reads like a piece of documentary fiction that accurately captures the madness and messiness of war.

Rima is truly a compelling, unforgettable character: the author beautifully captures the voice of a child who addresses us directly, drawing us into her world and trying to explain it to us, through tales, colours, images and using The Little Prince as her personal guide for hope and endurance. Children do not need to embellish, soften or mystify reality as adults do and are not afraid of asking questions we find embarrassing; they relate events exactly as they see them but filtered by their beautiful imagination and their own child language. This is true for Rima, too, as through her candid voice the stark realities she witnesses appear in all their monstrosity. A brave, important book.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book will break your heart into smithereens.

That is literally all I wanted to say in this review because the book left me heartbroken and speechless. How can something so terribly, utterly sad, be written in such a beautiful way? You will probably shed many tears of utter sadness, but not be able to put the book down, even though you can probably imagine the outcome.

Hope IS a thing though, even through the darkest of moments, and we experience hope while reading, just as Rima, the main character, continues to hope and dream as she writes.

Rima is a young girl who lives in Damascus with her mother and brother. She decided at the age of 4 to not use her tongue, and is considered a mute by many people as she only speaks to recite or sing verses of the Qur’an. She also spends her time being attached by ties to her mother or to a pole, as she cannot control her feet: when she experiences freedom she cannot stop herself from walking, running away. When her mother is mistakenly shot at a checkpoint Rima’s life changes forever, and the narrative is her story of war, sadness, and death amidst bombs, chemical attacks, and loss.

Rima writes stories in circles, past and present woven together, each circle part of the next one. She sees everything in color, and paints the world she sees in her words, giving us a view of destruction that is very different but equally, if not more, as painful as a video or photograph. I have always loved how gorgeously Samar Yazbek writes, and Planet of Clay is no exception to this. It’s hard to explain just how much this novel will affect you - Rima’s narrative is both bleak and colorful, and she continues to write, to observe, and to leave her legacy, all the while suffering from the affects of a chemical bomb and losing everything she has ever known. I can’t recommend this book enough. Just be prepared to be devastated, but to also hopefully feel the push to do more to help in any way you can.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

'One of Syria's most gifted novelists'
Rightly so.
Rima comes ironically alive amongst death. Mute, she speaks to us of the world in war around her. She loves books and stories -The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland. She loved Sitt Souad the wonderfully described librarian at the school where her mother cleaned. She loved her brother Saad, but after her mother dies, her brother becomes her only hope. They are tied (literally) together.
Is she crazy? Many think so. But her mind and imagination take in the sight, smells and sounds around her. The injuries, the blood, the death, the limbs, the feral cats and dogs, the gas and then her prison cellar.
I did wonder whether this tale of a trapped child in a cell might reflect 'The Room' novel. It does not. It is different. Distinctive. Superbly written and translated.
Syria. Is there still a war there you might ask.
Let Rima tell you the truth of inhumanity.

Rima, a young girl living in Damascus, takes refuge from the war-torn city in books. One day, her mother is killed when the two are travelling by bus, and Rima tells her life story.

The Syrian Civil War started when I was 12 years old and it’s all I’ve ever really known about the country. So when I saw this book, I knew I’d have to read it, to find out more about the country from someone living there and writing from experience. Planet of Clay is written in childish, innocence prose to reflect Rima’s experience as a young disabled girl living in a war zone. It is therefore very harrowing, and while Rima understands what’s going on around her, her desire to escape into books and make believe worlds is heartbreaking. As a young disabled girl too, she is instantly treated differently by those around her. While it’s never made explicitly clear in which way she is disabled, the lack of awareness from medical professionals and teachers is alarming (to the point where she is tied to objects/people to stop her from walking away) but, I guess, reflects the gravity of daily life in Syria.

I’d recommend this books for fans (although that feels like the wrong word) of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (tr. Elisabeth Jaquette). In the same way that Minor Detail lays bare the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli army, so too does Planet of Clay highlight the suffering of Syrians at the hands of their own army. The mention of checkpoints, restrictions, military hospitals and abuse of power reminded me of Minor Detail hugely. While the two books are narrated in very different ways, they are both necessary books to understand political events in countries where one side is often all that is heard. A truly original book that I won’t be forgetting.

My thanks to Netgalley and World Editions for this eARC.

PLANET OF CLAY
by Samar Yazbek


Have you ever imagine living a life through a war?

A young girl named Rima hardly speaks. Her mother thinks that she has some mental health issues and she is tied in her room. In her mind she longs for walking in freedom wandering the world she wants to explore beyond her one room home. She reads and fills her imagination through The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, crayon drawing and Qur`an recitation.

Her innocence might fool people around her but she understands that the city she lives in starts collapsing in the civil war. She sees her mother gets murdered in front of her eyes, gets taken to a military hospital before her brother save her and take her to an area that later is bombarded by Assad forces.

She begins to narrate her life through letters with a pen and whatever she can write on. Her hopefulness is deteriorating since she sees people are killed and bombed. Her stream of consciousness is fading from the chemical bomb. She begins to accept the fear she has and the fantasy world once she had just can no longer become a refuge for her.

The horror of war in the eyes of disabled girl is portrayed physically and mentally throughout the book. The experience of reading it is haunting and exceptional giving a trembling effect once it is finished. Samar Yazbek successfully depicts the tragedy of Syrian civil war sensibly in the unusual perspective.

This one is a memorable reading experience I’ve never had before.

Thank you to Netgalley and World Editions for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.

#IndahMarwanReads
#TheReadingMama
#PlanetofClay
#SamarYazbek
#WomenAuthors
#SyrianLiterature

This is a look into the war through the eyes of a young girl who doesn't fully understand what's going on around her. There is so much innocence to her, lack of understanding of the world - of not just politics but the reality of the situation in general. It is unclear from the narration - as this is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, the exact kind of mental health issues the girl faces, but it is clear that she is facing some as she has the habit of walking away from home, and her mother ties her to a bed to make her stay put.

Through her eyes, we see war. The young girl clearly has great imagination, has wonderful grasp of words, knows Quran from memory though she has difficulty in communicating. Tragedy strikes and from then on, moment to moment, she struggles to cope. She learns to read fear in eyes of people, and recognize hopelessness in her own.

Yazbek offers an unforgettable perspective of horrors of war at the very ground level.
<i>Thank you to Netgalley and World Editions for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.</i>

I've never read anything like this stream-of-consciousness story told in the voice of Rima, a young teenaged girl living amidst the atrocities of the Syrian civil war. With an imagination built by her love of books (The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland key among them), Rima spins a non-linear memoir that delves into the physical and mental horrors inflicted by Assad and his forces, her own fantasy worlds filled with color, the colorlessness of her bombed-out reality, and her desire to walk away and follow her feet wherever they want to take her. Yazbek infuses the story with a rich and unique voice that I won't soon forget.

Do you want to know what war feels like? Not as a soldier or politician but as an innocent young girl who doesn't know about politics or what this is all about.
In this stream of consciousness novel Rima is sitting in a cellar from where she can't escape. In this cellar there's a lot of paper and one pen. She's writing her story and we'll learn in bits and pieces how she got there.
Her refuge are planets she creates within and around her that are inspired by the books she loves like The Little Prince or Alice in Wonderland.
She used to see the world in colors, but now all the colors are gone. The fear is palpable.

I know some Syrian refugees and after reading this book I understand why they never talk about the horrors of war.

This is a most original tales of the war launched by the Syrians on their own citizens. The narrator is a young teenage girl with some type of mental issues which has caused her mother to tie her to her room to stop her from wandering. She is mainly mute but can recite the Koran. But while she has limited knowledge of the world she has a vivid imagination, an appreciation of literature and a love of drawing to tell her stories.
Around her people are murdered and killed by bombing. She is injured and later suffers from a chemical bomb attack. She spirals from hope to hopelessness. It is a bleak honest tale written full of visual signposts. Sadly this will be for me a memorable book.