Living in Palestine is dangerous, even getting on a bus could get you blown up. A wall is being built to keep the Ugandans out, but there is a lot of unrest and the Ugandans want their land back.
Lior Tirosh is an author of detective novels that you normally see for sale at airports. Having moved to Berlin to escape the troubles, he has to return to Palestine to visit his sick father, but whilst there he finds out that his niece is missing. As soon as he starts his journey, he soon becomes a person of interest. Can he put what he writes into practice?
This is one book I will probably read again, as I am sure that I have missed something, which made the review quite hard to do. This book switches between 1st and 3rd person POV which I got into quickly as it was seamless, enabling the reader to follow Lior as he steps on the plane and the danger he is going home to and also following the watchers. One of my favourite characters was Special Agent Bloom, not from this world but a man of morals and always wanted to do what's right.
This starts off as a mystery and whilst it was a slower pace, really held my interest as there was always something going on. The addition of the sci-fi element took the story in another direction and I did find myself re-reading parts so I could follow what was going on, although I was a bit confused at the end.
If you like alternative history than this is a good book to read as it does get you thinking what if with its mashup of genres it will attract a lot of readers.

If you like a ride with few bumps and no speed control than this is a novel for you. Blood rushing through veins to pump all the adrenaline that this book gave me was the best feeling I've head in a long time when reading a book.

Let me start with a short statement: this book is weird and you can find yourself confused at the time but believe me you will love every single page of this adventure.

As a romance lover and hater of sci-fi I am amazingly surprised at how much I enjoyed and learnt from this read. It was very well written, engaging and full of surprises.

This is a book that needs to be on your shelf to re-read at least one a year. Very enjoyable read.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with a copy for an honest review.

The nitty-gritty: Tidhar's latest is a challenging but ultimately satisfying read that deals with histories, both real and imagined.

Reading a Lavie Tidhar book is like being in a fever dream. Events, characters, places and impressions swirl around you, creating a sense of unease, or confusion, or sadness. Tidhar pieces the parts of his stories together with magical thread, and connections which seem tenuous at first turn out to make sense later on. I’m in awe of his writing abilities, and although this book may be classified as speculative fiction, I can see this sitting comfortably on a shelf alongside more traditional literary works.

In all honesty, this was a tough book for me to get through, and that’s especially hard to admit when many reviewers are lauding Unholy Land as one of the best books of 2018. I was surprised, because I loved Central Station and I was hoping for more of the same. But that’s an easy trap to fall into, believing that all of an author’s books are similar to one another, or that you will love them in the same way you loved that first one you read. Central Station was a collection of stories set in the same world, with characters that crossed over from one story to the next. It wasn’t a traditionally plotted novel at all, but it really worked for me. To my surprise, and dismay, I could not figure out what was going on in Unholy Land for a long time, but I’m very happy that I pushed through, because the last quarter of the story made up for the confusing and scattered beginning.

Tidhar is known for tackling controversial subjects such as politics and religion in his works, and Unholy Land is no different in that respect. This time around, the author takes a historical event that could have happened—in the early years of the twentieth century, a Jewish settlement almost came to fruition in the heart of Africa—and posits what might happen had it actually existed. He takes it one step further, though, and gives us a world where alternate realities exist side by side. In one world, our protagonist Lior Tirosh arrives in Palestina to visit family, but in another world, one that occasionally bursts forth from his memory, Palestina never existed at all, and his life was completely different.

It’s hard to break down the plot for you, because the narrative and setting are constantly shifting, making it hard to piece everything together, but I’ll give you the basics. At its heart, Unholy Land is a mystery. The story opens as Lior Tirosh arrives in Palestina to visit his father, but soon becomes embroiled in several mysteries. His sister-in-law Deborah turns up missing, and a former classmate is found murdered in Tirosh’s hotel room. As he navigates the city of his childhood, surrounded by a wall to keep the rest of Africa out, and rife with suicide bombers, border patrols and unexpected dangers at every turn, the past keeps creeping up on him. But the past he’s remembering has nothing to do with Palestina, this present. He remembers having a wife and a young son named Isaac, but what’s become of them? He keeps seeing the mysterious woman who was on the plane with him, and unbeknownst to Tirosh, an inspector from the airport is following him. How these two fit into the story becomes clear later on, but Tidhar keeps the mystery going for quite a while.

Tidhar has infused his book with autobiographical touches: the main character’s name—Lior Tirosh—is a reflection of his own. Lior is also a novelist who writes detective novels. He’s even penned a book called Osama, which of course is one of Lavie Tidhar’s most well-known books. He’s also writing about his own homeland, as he grew up in both Africa and Israel, and Unholy Land seems to be his vision of fusing the two countries together, in the hopes of creating a better, happier life for thousands of Jews. Reality and fantasy have become intertwined, and it’s quite the heady reading experience when all these connections are made.

One of the more frustrating things about reading this book, however, was the constant change in point of view. I can honestly say I’ve never read a novel where all three POVs—first person, second person and third person—are all used together. Not only that, but the POV changes at a moment’s notice, with no visual breaks to guide the reader. The first time it happened, I had to go back and reread a certain page several times, before I came to the conclusion that perhaps the uncorrected proof I was reading was formatted wrong. But no, it happened again and again, and it finally dawned on me that this was Tidhar’s unique style, which gives the novel a slipstream-like reading quality. This style also made it hard to figure out which character was holding the reins at any particular time, but having finished the book I can understand, or at least I can appreciate, what Tidhar was trying to do.

Unholy Land is one of those stories that requires the reader to let go and trust the author. His stylistic choices didn’t necessarily make sense while I was reading, but at the end I finally saw the “big picture” and was reminded of why I wanted to read this so much. This is a story of ideas and concepts that seem to shift and change along the way, much the way Tirosh keeps falling into different realities. Readers who aren’t afraid of challenging material will surely love this book, although those unfamiliar with Tidhar probably shouldn’t start here.

My first Lavie Tidhar book, although not the first book of his I have acquired (that would be Central Station). I found it a somewhat wistful and poignant read at times (if that makes any sense) but just in an overarching sense as the voice felt rather prosaic - the premise is rather intriguing (for me anyhow) an alternate history of the Jewish resettlement that ended up somewhere in Kenya... going into a multi-verse/parallel universe/earth/history skein that I sort of found myself stumbling along whilst feeling about as foggy as the MC. The seemingly meandering plot, the commentary and open ended-ness reminded me somewhat of an Ursula K. Le Guin book ( more in terms of the feeling it left me with if not the overall writing and style). I feel like reading more Tidhar now - should probably look into getting to my copy of Central Station 😅. Reading this was made weirder for me as I am also currently reading Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union atm, both books share the alternate resettlement history & noir-ish mystery strains.

Also the cover for this book is just lovely (can’t see it via the b&w e-reader obvs) - going to get a copy ... probably. Central Station needs a friend!

In Lavie Tidhar’s new novel Unholy Land, a suspiciously similarly named pulp writer Liro Tirosh returns to his homeland of Palestina, a Jewish state on Lake Victoria between Kenya and Uganda. Tirosh has been out of the country, living in the Reich for years, in a Germany that never perpetrated a Holocaust. But his father, a larger than life national figure, is dying, so he returns. He presses through his dreams of Berlin in the plane above Palestina, and then through customs, where he is interrogated by the secret police, and then pushed out into the strange, bright streets of his homeland.

Revisiting one’s home town, one’s native country, after a long period always causes a sense of dislocation: the smell of things and the quality of the light tend to remain the same, but the buildings, the cars, often the very scale of the place feels off, forcing the memory to stutter and warp. Tirosh’s uneasy reintegration to the place of his origin seems the usual kind of dislocation—until he is visited by an old classmate, who barges into Tirosh’s hotel room and harangues him with his very presence. Tirosh knew him as young man, but now he’s run to the thin-haired middle age, both thicker and thinner than he remembers.

The guest drinks Tirosh’s hotel liquor and rants about how Tirosh’s niece, the daughter of his war hero brother, has gone missing amid her investigations of the folklore of the wall, The Wall, the wall—the one going up now to partition the Jewish state from the displaced African populations around it. And then, the old classmate dies, poisoned, and Tirosh is blamed for it, and arrested. Even though the secret police were watching Tirosh, they missed both his friend’s entrance into the hotel room, and his death.

Here, the slippages begin in earnest: Tirosh begins thinking of himself as a detective in one of his novels, interrogating old drunks and rich socialites as he plays the flatfoot. He answers his phone and speaks to his ex-wife, but the connection is staticky, and when he looks down, the phone is a glasses case again (there are no cell phones in Palestina). These are not the only holes in Tirosh’s reality: in a remembered conversation with the literary agent who is pressing him to write more marketable fiction, Tirosh snarls, “Why don’t I write a book about, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler as a private detective?” Which is, of course, precisely the plot of Lavie Tidhar’s novel A Man Lies Dreaming. You see: Tirosh, Tidhar. We are in that kind of novel, the kind that doubles back and dodges sideways. Keeping up provides its own kind of pleasure.

There are three point of view characters in Unholy Land. Tirosh’s portions are the only in the third person, but strangely remain the most intimate, lingering in the strange fallow between his life in Berlin and his return to Palestina, running forward and back through his young life, his exodus and return, and intimate in their close observation of his thoughts and feelings. Conversely, the first person narrator, Bloom, a member of the secret police, is the most impersonal. Bloom is a terrible person, filled up with his own righteousness and fully believing in the structural and institutional cruelties he perpetrates.

The final sections are narrated in second person, and follow Nur Al-Hussaini, who is a sort of detective herself, sent to Palestina to shadow Tirosh (and Bloom, and any others influencing the ouroboros of the overt plot.) At times, the various points of view meet up, and the result is an altogether dizzying and masterful use of narrative voice. The clashing narrative perspectives produce something like parallax—looking out of one eye, and then the other, and then both focused together on a third point. Which is the operative metaphor of Unholy Land: one of partition and perspective, the same thing seen over and over and over again through different eyes.

I believe there are a number of hat tips in this novel to China Miéville’s The City & the City, which is about two central European cities superimposed onto one another, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, even down to rooms in the same domicile. The people of Bresźel and Ul Qoma unsee one another when they pass on the street, and any perforation of the lines between the two cities, even sightlines, results in harsh consequences. It is not quite clear if the separation between the cities is mystical or cultural, or if the difference would matter.

The Palestina of Unholy Land does not have this kind of cross-hatching, exactly, but the metaphor of partition, separation, and division operates throughout the narrative. This Jewish state in Africa is building a wall between the African people who were Palestina’s original occupants and the Jewish people who have resided in Palestina for several generations. Both, certainly, have rights of residence, and birthright, and colonization, and all the other things nations use to decide and mark citizenship. Still, there are suicide bombers on buses, unrest in the streets, and resistances on both sides of the wall.

The people of Palestina are known as Palestinians, which surprised me every time I came upon the word, this inversion of the state of things in my reality. The partition between the real Israel and Palestine is called a “separation barrier” by the Israelis, and an “apartheid wall” by the Palestinians. It is the same thing seen by two very different points of view, occupying the same space (more or less, depending on granularity): a physical manifestation of both difference and sameness. Unholy Land plays in the strange, uncomfortable DMZ between the national founding myth and the uninterrogated childhood, between the person who leaves the homeland and the one who returns.

In Unholy Land, Lavie Tidhar imagines an alternate history for Palestine and Israel, where the Jews relocate to the African continent before Hitler's rise to power, evading the Holocaust. Travelling from one history to the other is Lior, who is leaving behind him a few complicated relationships in order to go on a lecture tour.
Lior arrives in the alternate history and his past starts to slip away...or maybe come back...while people die and spies and time travellers follow him. To what end?
Tidhar is excellent at the politics, the confusions of secret policing and the slipping between pasts and memories. Echoes of Christopher Priest and China Miélville, this is a quick read that turns from one thing to another and back. Satisfying as an alternate history book, science fiction and pure entertainment.

I absolutely loved Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (and was not alone in that), and while his newest, Unholy Land, didn’t blow me away quite to the same extent, it kept me on the couch in “don’t talk to me I’m reading” and “uh-huh, uh-huh, ya don’t say, uh-huh” mode all afternoon while my family just rolled their eyes and gave up, as they know to do when all the signs of being engrossed in a great book are manifest (luckily, they live those moments as well so it’s a fond eyeroll . . . )

The novel is set in an alternate universe setting where the Jewish homeland of Palestina appears not in the Middle East but in East Africa, a homeland formed before the Final Solution occurred (a forward explains how this is based on an actual idea pre-dating the creation of Israel). The book follows three characters: the main character Lior Tirosh via typical third-person narration, a ruthless security agent via first-person, and a mysterious third actor via second person.

Lior Tirosh (suspiciously similar to Lavie Tidhar) is a middling science-fiction and mystery writer who had left Palestina for Europe long ago but has now returned. The country is in turmoil, with terrorist attacks, protests, and the construction of a huge wall to keep out refugees (those who had been expelled from the land so Palestina could be formed). In short order Lior witnesses a horrific bombing, is caught up in a murder, and learns his niece, an anthropology/folklore student who’d been protesting against the wall, is missing. Things actually spiral downward from there.

But things had begun to go strange well before then. The reader is teased from the beginning by all sorts of weird tidbits: the way Tirosh’s memories don’t seem to cohere, vaguely foreboding hints about his young son, an odd emphasis on the word “outsider,” references to “strange sightings of ice age carnivores the locals had named Ngoloko or Kerit . . . ,” or to how “organisms can disguise themselves visually in a foreign environment.” All of these, combined with the disorienting and often sudden shifts in POV, including that unnamed second person “you,” create a wonderfully surreal, unnerving, and compelling atmosphere, where, similar to Tirosh, the reader is never ever on firm ground.

And it all creeps in at such a wonderfully glacial pace. Such as that reference to his son that you’re so smugly sure you know where it’s going, what Tidhar is doing there, but then it takes a little sidling hop and suddenly you think you know but then again, maybe . . . and then the light slants in a different way, and then there’s a change in temperature, and then and then and somehow, in as dully mundane and banal a fashion as you can imagine (think airports, think bureaucracy) you’re in a completely different world than you thought you were.

That sense is both metaphorical and literal, because — and since it’s noted on the back of the novel, I don’t feel it’s too spoilerish to say this — eventually what comes clear is this is not simply an alternate history but a book set in a multiverse (the “sephirot”) full of alternate histories, complete with people who can travel between them — some more easily than others, some more intentionally than others. Such a set-up allows Tidhar to explore several themes: the creation and guarding of borders, questions over do walls shut out or shut in, ethical conundrums over what acts are allowed if done with good intentions, the old stand-by of is it OK to kill some to save more, the construction of memory and self, the desire to belong somewhere, the bond between people and land, determinism, the possibility that different historical choices would lead to different results (or not), and more. And of course, explorations as well of the political morass that is the Middle East, though such questions can easily be broadened to conflicts around the world and throughout history.

It’s a heady mix and one can easily linger a while to think such moments through as they appear on the page. And it’s not the only esoteric facet, as one could argue for a metafictional point here as well, what with the main character being an author, one oddly similar to his creator, and one who muses on or is questioned about the impact of writers in the world. And after all, what do authors do but create a sephirot of their own?

But I don’t want to make it sound as if Unholy Land floats along in some airy realm. Tidhar keeps things grounded by offering up alongside the more esoteric aspects of the book an old-fashioned, solid mystery — what happened to Tirosh’s niece — which, combined with a ticking bomb scenario wherein someone is trying to either break down the walls between worlds or destroy the worlds, keeps things gripping throughout. You read just as much to find out what happens as you do to explore the themes.

And then there is the language, which is vivid and precise and always adapted to the moment. As just one representative illustration (out of many to choose from), here’s an early segment as Tirosh’s plane takes off for Palestina:
The flight attendants went through the safety routine. The inside of the plane smelled of warm plastic, stale breath. There was a piece of gum struck to the underside of the food trey. The engines thrummed alive. Tirosh watched small grey figures through the window, moving with a clear but unguessed at purpose. He watched the runway move past and tensed as the plane began to accelerate, then took to the air with a bump. The airport grew wider before growing smaller. For some moments there was a flash of fields, the density of a city, the silver snail trail of cars on a highway. Then they entered the clouds the world turned white and grey, and fine strands of fog drifted past outside the wind. Tirosh put his head back and closed his eyes.

Take a look at the progression here. We begin with the routine. Literally, the same old same old safety talk. We get the concrete smell of stale breath, the concrete mundane image of gum stuck to a tray. Dull language, dull syntax (sentence begin with The, The, There). Then we get “thrummed” and a bit of personification with the engines coming “alive.” Then we get mysterious “grey figures” doing who knows what. And once the plane has left the ground, the prose shifts from, well, prose to a more lyrical poetry. The alliteration of “flash of fields.” The near rhyme/echo of “density-city.” The alliteration, rhyme, and metaphor of “silver snail trail of cars.” The consonance and assonance of “white-fine-outside, strands-past, fine-fog-drifted, that strings of D sounds.” All of it ending with Tirosh, and us, in a world removed from reality, a drifting, untethered, non-distinct, blurry world of white and grey. That is an author in full control of his craft. And as noted, this isn’t an isolated example (I haven’t even touched upon the maddening teases of some of the other worlds: “the mechanical warriors under the banner of the Crimson Emperor in Jund Filastin,” “the fish-frog men abomination of Ash-Sham,” “the green swamp villages of Samaria where the Awful Ones live”).

I read Unholy Land straight through in one sitting, blowing off work, family, and the first few minutes of dinner to do so. And had I not finished I most likely would have just skipped dinner entire until I did. For such a short book — under 300 pages — Tidhar crams in a world (worlds) of thoughtfulness, suspense, imagery, and beautiful prose. Highly recommended.

This is a bewildering and brilliant alternate history. Tidhar imagines a Jewish homeland that might have been, a tract of land actually offered (really offered, I mean, in real history) by the United Kingdom in high Imperial mode in Central Africa and considered, however briefly, as an alternative to Palestine. (The views of the previous inhabitants weren't, of course, canvassed).

What might our world be like, if that offer had been accepted? How would things stand in Africa? How would they stand in Palestine? What else would be different?

A man, Lior Tirosh, a writer, flies back to Palestina (that might-have-been state) from Berlin. He's a writer of pulpy detective novels, son of a famous general, returning to visit his ill father. Tirosh remembers, sometimes, a son Isaac; sometimes he doesn't. In his conversations with his agent he refers to a possible book casting an alternate universe Adolf Hitler as a seedy private detective.

Hang on... I read that book... it was A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar.

Tirosh has also written a book called Osama.

As has Tidhar.

There are layers and layers to this book. A writer returns to his homeland. A people find, or are given, a homeland. Another people loses theirs. Many are saved, or lost, and the world pivots. In the world Tirosh inhabits, for example, things turned out sufficiently differently that in a refugee camp, the "Red Swastika" is an equivalent symbol to the Red Cross, Crescent, or Star of David. Tidier isn't afraid to take his idea to shocking conclusions any more than he was in A Man Lies Dreaming. Yet even in this different world, echoes remain, with the same tragedy of people displaced, with echoes of genocide, camps, an armed struggle, and the same security response, as in our present day.

It's a deeply unsettling book, asking questions, perhaps, both about individual responsibility and about the shape of history. Through them all, Tirosh ambles, a bit lost, seeming to forget, at times, who he actually is. Affected perhaps by all the possibilities Tidhar has granted, he remembers who he might have been, as it were. That is both engaging - Tirosh is very human and hapless, not, for most of the book, a fictional protagonist and also frustrating: he doesn't provide any answers (this isn't a book of answers).

The story also follows two others. There is Bloom, a security official in Palestina, and Nur, who seems to work for another agency from outside. It's not clear to begin with whether they are working together or at cross purposes, but they both seem to have an interest in the blundering Tirosh who himself increasingly assumes the persona of a gumshoe, setting out to ask questions and find the truth. But while he may have written about private eyes, he doesn't seem well fitted to actually be one. Is this real life, one may ask, or is it just a fantasy? Either way, bullets kill and walls divide. There is a kind of dead heart at the centre of this story with real consequences for those who might - or might not - have been saved if history had taken a different course.

It's a deeply troubling, deeply thought provoking read, no less for the lush evocation of the Jewish State in Africa: the colours and light of that continent, as well as the imagination Tidhar uses to weave his imaginary country. You might almost swear he'd been there.

I don't want to say exactly what happens in the end because there are twists that should only emerge slowly. It's the kind of book you may want to go back and reread, looking out for little hints once you really understand them. It's also a book that refuses to be sidetracked by action or plot, however tempting that may be: the final third could, for example, have been a great deal longer with much that is sketched out given in detail, but that would I think be to obscure the central idea behind too much running around and shooting. Instead Tidhar gives the bigger picture and leaves much of the detail to the reader's imagination - a risky judgement but one that really pays off since it lets this book be much, much odder that you might expect.

It's probably a bit trite to say that given the facts of actual Jewish history in the 20th century, alternatives, might-have-beens, other turns and possibilities, will always fascinate. As Tidhar explains in his Historical Afterword, speculative fiction was anyway part of the events leading to what would become Israel, long before that awful historical weight became a factor. But it's impossible to read this book without it provoking that sense of how different things might have been, and the good and bad that might have followed from that.

But perhaps that is true of all history, and isn't it really the basis of any fiction?

As you may guess, this book has left my head buzzing.

I'd strongly recommend you read it, and set yours buzzing too.

Israeli author Lavie Tidhar gives a fairly lengthy prologue to explain the inception of his most recent book. Back around the turn of the century, Zionists in Europe were looking to Ottoman controlled Palestine as a potential homeland but negotiations stalled. Looking for an alternative solution within the British Empire resulted in a proposal to establish a Jewish homeland British East Africa, land in Kenya that bordered Uganda. The idea split the Zionist movement, with many holding that there could not be an alternative homeland for the Jews. An expedition in 1905 to explore the area and report back did not support the idea and the scheme was rejected. The rest, as they say, is history. In Unholy Land, Tidhar wanted to consider what would have happened if the plan had gone ahead.
When the book opens, pulp science fiction author Lior Tirosh (a fairly obvious stand-in for Tidhar himself) is flying back from Berlin to his homeland of Palestina, nestled between Uganda and Kenya. He is flying home to visit his ageing father, a famous general from earlier wars. As he arrives the narrative switches and it appears that Tirosh is being followed by local security forces. When an old friend dies in his hotel room, Tirosh feels obliged to investigate, slowly falling into the role of one of his pulp novel detectives.
In the history that Tirosh inhabits, Jews established Palestina in the early twentieth century and while there were world wars, the Holocaust never happened. But the tide of history is hard to shake and in this funhouse mirror reflection of our own reality, Palestina has been at war with neighbouring Uganda and Kenya, the army walks the streets of the capital Ararat city where the Jewish population are facing bus bombings from displaced African groups, and the government is building a wall along the border to control the movement of workers. Tidhar digs deep into the parallels and differences between this world and our own.
But then, not far into the narrative it turns out that his alternate history is just one of many and that there are operatives who are able to move between different versions of reality and history. These planes of reality are called sephirot after the Kabbalistic idea of different planes of existence.
In Unholy Land, Tidhar wants to have his cake and eat it – he wants to examine an alternate history but also explore with multi-world theories at the same time. And he pretty much succeeds. Along the way he manages to revel in some pulp fiction tropes as his author protagonist finds himself living in the plot of one of his novels. That plot revolves as much around the threat to the multiverse as it does around Tirosh’s personal quest.
That mix makes Unholy Land provocative and mind bending but also gives it some emotional heft. A combination that, while it does not always work, provides a fascinating and insightful read.

Lior Tirosh, a pulp-fiction writer, returns to Palestina, his homeland in East Africa to see his father. With an enormous border wall being built, and terrorist bombs going off in the capital of Ararat, it is not the place he once knew.

After a visit from an old friend who is concerned about Tirosh’s niece and implores Tirosh to find her, Tirosh discovers he is being pursued by Special Investigator Bloom of the state security. All the while Tirosh’s reality seems to be shifting in subtle and alarming ways.

This is an intricate novel of ‘what ifs’ and genius use of points of view to convey an intriguing narrative of alternate realities. Unholy Land begins simply enough as an obvious alternative reality story, where Hitler never came to power (although he does make a fleeting appearance in Tirosh’s world) and the Jewish homeland was established not in Asia but East Africa. What could be a bewildering narrative of Tirosh’s life seemingly fracturing and reassembling itself is held together by the underlying detective story of Tirosh’s search for his niece.

Science fiction/fantasy is often used to discuss real life. Plenty of the tumultuous events of the last few years (terrorist attacks, the building of walls to keep people from entering a country), as well as historical events (the Israeli/Palestinian conflict) will resonate uncomfortably with a reader.

The addition of alternate realities in any other author’s hand might have been a confusing mishmash of concepts. In Lavie Tidhar’s it becomes something to make a reader consider their world, while enjoying a gripping story and experiencing the same unnerving disorientation as the hapless Tirosh who, despite everything that happens to him, remains single-minded in his pursuit for the truth.

Tidhar’s complex network of threads within this tortuous narrative can at times verge on the bewildering. So, in deciding to read Unholy Land, you need to commit yourself completely to the story, applying total concentration, because this is the kind of novel which only rewards if you soak in every detail. As usual with Tidhar’s writing, this relatively short read feels as rich as an 800 page epic.

Lavie Tidhar tiene un claro fetiche con las historias alternativas. Desde el anhelo de lo que pudo ser (o la revancha) en «A man lies dreaming» hasta el triste y melancólico inmovilismo de «The violent century» (siendo estas novelas sólo dos ejemplos), el autor israelí parece deleitarse con el ejercicio intelectual de imaginar posibilidades. No os voy a engañar: mientras que con otro autor/a esta obsesión por un tema o una estructura podría hacerse cansina, hay algo exquisito en las historias de Tidhar, aun compartiendo claros late motivs, y que me hace disfrutar como un enano. También es cierto que es lo suficientemente consciente de su propia obra como para encarar cada libro de forma distinta y original.

¿A qué viene esta chapa introductoria? Pues a que quizá por sinopsis, y para alguien que ya haya leído algunas de las obras que he citado en el párrafo anterior, este «Unholy land» pueda no resultar tan atractivo a primera vista: Lior Tirosh es un escritor de novelas pulp que, debido a un suceso traumático que nos acompaña de manera difusa a lo largo de la novela, vuelve a su país natal para descansar y pasar página. Ese país no es otro que Palestina, pero no la Palestina que conocemos. En 1904, Nahum Wilbusch, un joven judío de origen ruso, encabezó una expedición a una región al norte de África para juzgar la viabilidad de que un territorio, supuestamente no reclamado y que sería cedido por los británicos, se convirtiese en el nuevo hogar de su pueblo.

Esto es historia; como también lo es que Wilbusch falló en favor de los «Holy Landers» —un grupo que sólo veía con buenos ojos la ocupación de Jerusalén— y el proyecto fue abandonado. A partir de aquí, como cualquiera podrá imaginar, comienza la ucronía. En la novela, este informe fue muy favorable y finalmente esta Palestina imaginaria se convertiría en el estado oficial de Israel. Al regresar a su hogar, Tirosh descubre de manera desagradable que su sobrina ha desaparecido y a partir de aquí la novela tiende más hacia el género negro (al menos momentáneamente).

Como iba diciendo, me gustaría desterrar ese pensamiento de que «esto es más de lo mismo» de la mente de cualquier posible lector. ¿Me dejas intentar convencerte?

Otro elemento clave en la obra de Lavie Tidhar es la experimentación salvaje con los recursos formales de su arte. En esta novela, eso no podía ser distinto y lo apreciamos desde el mismo nombre del protagonista: Lior Tirosh. Este personaje es un trasunto descarado de Tidhar y a lo largo del libro incluso se le atribuyen con bastante gracia parte de sus obras; se hace con «Osama», por poner un ejemplo, o con «A man lies dreaming» (aunque de forma distinta y muy divertida). Además de este elemento meta-literario, que aunque divertido, no deja de ser algo a mayores, otro recurso interesante es la elección del narrador: una arriesgada mezcla de primera, segunda y tercera persona que evoluciona a lo largo de la novela y que, a pesar de resultar algo extraña al principio, a medida que se avanza en la lectura va cobrando significado. La verdad es que me ha parecido un poco innecesario. Si bien agradezco que un autor/a pruebe cosas distintas, en este caso me parece que aporta poco para lo mucho que complica las cosas (y lo mucho que se las tiene que haber complicado al autor).

Como he dejado caer antes, no estamos sólo ante una historia alternativa. La historia —en la que al principio podríamos apreciar de forma clara la rima con «A man lies dreaming»—, se va tornando cada vez más fantástica; creciendo la especulación y la crítica social conforme esto ocurre y ampliando la riqueza de la novela más allá del mero ejercicio intelectual de la ucronía de partida. La prosa de Tidhar es elegante; evocadora y bella sin caer en lo barroco; precisa a pesar de las complicaciones que su propia elección de narrador le impone. Su pluma acompaña divinamente este in crescendo, creando una atmósfera de extrañamiento cada vez mayor que consigue transmitir con la habilidad suficiente como para que el lector no se quede por el camino.

No quiero contar mucho más porque la gracia de la novela es ir descubriendo todo lo que esconde Tidhar detrás de esta sinopsis de apariencia repetitiva y que podría parecer una simple variación de «El sindicato de policía yiddish» de Michael Chabon. He disfrutado muchísimo de esta novela. Creo firmemente que Lavie Tidhar es uno de los mejores escritores que tenemos hoy en día y me encantaría ver este libro ganando algún premio en 2019. Muchas gracias a Tachyon por el ejemplar.

A great story, as usual with Tidhar. It starts like an ucrony, but that's not all, although it might have been enough. An emotional and intriguing mixture of literary genres and points of view.
A review in spanish: https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2018/11/unholy-land-lavie-tidhar.html

(I'll be posting this review, maybe with minor corrections, to thefantasyinn.wordpress.com tomorrow.)

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar is a highly inventive mindfuck of a book, but one I wish had been more fleshed out.

The story is set in an Alternate Universe Jewish homeland called ‘Palestina’, located in East Africa. (This is based on a real early 20th century plan, “the Uganda Scheme”, where a part of British-colonised East Africa would be made into a country for Jewish people.) Lior Tirosh is a SFF pulp-fiction author who had emigrated from Palestina to Europe but is now returning. Things aren’t going well back home: tensions are high between the Jews and the Africans, with occasional terrorist attacks and a huge wall to keep out refugees under construction. When Tirosh finds out his niece, who’d been protesting the wall, has gone missing, he too gets caught up in the larger conflict.

This book is a weird, twisty mess that I think will be right up a lot of people’s alley. Although, to be honest, the twistiness is making this review hard to write: partway through, the book changes from just Alternate Universe to have more sci-fi elements — and I think it’s funner to just go in blind. Note: the meta elements, e.g. the author’s and main character’s initials, professions, and very, very broad life stories mirroring each other, is deliberate. The POVs chosen for the book are also fun. There’s standard third-person for Tirosh — and then also a first-person from the secret agent shadowing him (and a second-person later too).

However, putting those elements aside, as with most Alternate Universes, the similarities and differences to our worlds push the reader off-kilter in a delightful way. Palestina’s bloody relationship with the original inhabitants is depressingly familiar; the kind German nurse with a neat little swastika patch on her uniform is not. Nevetheless, the world is described convincingly enough that it’s easy to slip right in:

Soon they were stuck in traffic, going slow, radios blaring outside: kwasa-kwasa music from the Congo, kwaito from Johannesburg, and Malawi reggae, intermixed with klezmer, orchestral music, and the latest Europop hit. Tirosh took it all in. He was home again, and it felt good.

Thematically speaking, the book obviously primarily explores the question of a Jewish homeland. There’s empathy for the European Jews of early 20th century Europe, but there’s equally a sharp critique of Israel’s brutal policies. I wouldn’t say the conclusions the book draws were particularly eye-opening for me, but it’s definitely intriguing to see how the issue can be explored through SFF. As I mentioned above, another important question is there in part through the “meta” aspect: to what extent history can change through some decision and to what extent certain paths are inevitable?

However, although I enjoyed the concepts in this book a lot, I felt it needed more space to really hit its potential. There’s a lot of things happening in 288 pages; the climax, in particular, did not feel as hard-hitting as it could have been. There’s tons of tiny details put in (I ended up googling a lot of Jewish history and mysticism — basically everything mentioned is “real” in that sense, not made up by Tidhar). But I think it would have been great to see all of it, from the slightly abrupt plot developments to the theme exploration to those tiny allusions get a bit more space to breathe.

Altogether, this is a very concept and theme-oriented work, and the concept is strong enough that I recommend checking it out. I recommend the book especially for:

- Fans of Alternate Universe books
- Can this book be considered New Weird? It gave me some New Weird vibes anyway
- Fans of China Mieville’s The City & the City
- People interested in Jewish history and mysticism
- Fans of noir mysteries

In the early 1900s, the Sixth Zionist Congress authorized an expedition to British East Africa to determine its suitability as a Jewish homeland. The British Government had offered to settle Jews in what is now Kenya, and with the increasing number of pogroms in Czarist Russia, the Zionists wanted to investigate every possibility for a Jewish state. The author of the expedition's report, though, was biased against any option but a return to the Holy Land, and he unsurprisingly found the land unsuitable as a Jewish homeland. Thus in our time the "Uganda Plan" became a historical footnote, a minor thread in the grand tapestry of European politics. But in another timeline...

Lior Tirosh, hack mystery writer and disappointment to his war-hero father, is returning to his homeland---Palestina, the Jewish homeland wedged between Kenya and Uganda. But this is not the idyllic land he remembers from his youth; the government is building an impenetrable border wall to control the flow of African refugees and terrorist suicide bombers. Unrest roils in Ararat City's shadowed streets. The bumbling Tirosh finds himself embroiled in a larger conspiracy, with his niece missing and one of his childhood friends found dead in his hotel room. Fancying himself like a character in one of his novels, Tirosh starts hunting for clues... and finds himself between the transient borders of history, slipping back and forth between alternate realities.

As a history buff, I'm enthralled by this tidbit of history Tidhar's novel has introduced me to. It draws obvious similarities to Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, but Tidhar's choice is much more Philip K. Dickian, turning a historical oddity into an ingenious flight of fancy, where a multitude of realities are just the shadowed daydreams of one another. The concept of a Jewish homeland set amid a savanna full of giraffes and elephants seems so surreal to me, a homeland that ended up saving most European Jews from the Holocaust. Yet Tidhar takes the idea and uses it to make poignant allusions to modern society: history, he posits, is cyclical, alternate timelines be damned. The lack of a Holocaust changes little: instead of Arab-Israeli Wars, there are African-Israeli Wars and a displaced population of native Kenyans; Palestina's border wall is a direct parallel to the the West Bank Barrier Wall, and suggests the proposed Mexican Border Wall here in the US.

Even then, the Jewish homeland in Africa isn't the strangest part of the novel; Tidhar doesn't just toy with history, he dives through the now-porous borders between space and time. The way Tirosh (and other characters) slip between competing realities and worlds reminds me of Mieville's The City & The City and Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn , two other novels that examine where political borders meet metaphysical ones. In many ways Unholy Land is the natural evolution for the series of pulpy metafictional alternate-history detective novels Tidhar has been writing since Osama. Heck, he even alludes to Tirosh having written that novel, and another one titled Central Station; that's the type of metafictional panache I associate with Tidhar, the subtle (and tongue-in-cheek) implication that Lior Tirosh is the Palestina reality's version of Lavie Tidhar.

Tidhar is certainly not a simple hack like Tirosh; coming hot on the heels of his award-winning Central Station , Unholy Land is no slouch. The writing is just as sharp, but it trades Central Station's more relaxed tone---something of a family drama set in futuristic melting-pot Tel Aviv filled with rusted futurism and the scent of orange groves---for something more befitting an alternate reality noir. The narrative is more puzzle-like, the intricate and tightly-knotted plot centered on Tirosh's investigation before expanding to include a pair of other time travelers and their motivations. (An interesting note, Tirosh's story is told in the normal third person, while the others are in the first-person and second person, making each narrator instantly identifiable.). Central Station and Unholy Land take older SF genre elements and filter them through modern literary sensibilities; both are vividly written, and both are wondrous science fiction visions, but beyond that they are unique masterpieces.

Unholy Land is a gem of modern science fiction. The elements and themes used in its construction are uncommon but not unique, which should be obvious since I just compared it to a half-dozen other novels. And yet it's that rarest of books, the kind of novel that takes those elements and transcends them through the strength of its writing and ambition of its story. I find myself digesting its implications and pondering its many layers weeks after I finished reading it. Lavie Tidhar takes those building blocks and weaves a spellbinding story that's both gripping and quite unlike anything else being published today. I've long been convinced of Tidhar's genius, and Unholy Land just further cements that in my brain. What Tidhar writes today is where science fiction will go tomorrow. Unholy Land is a stunning achievement, a masterful and thought-provoking novel, and I look forward to seeing where Tidhar goes from here.

When Lior Tirosh, a writer of pulpy science fiction detective stories, returns from Berlin to his home Palenstina, a Jewish country in central Africa, weird things start to happen. Lior forgets details of his life, people around him find some of his actions perplexing, and he takes on a missing persons case to search for a niece he doesn’t know.

I love the slow, surreal unraveling of Unholy Land, both in terms of plot and genre. Without quite realizing it himself, Lior transitions from writer to detective, from an uneventful life to one filled with murder and intrigue, narrowly escaping multiple factions who want him dead. Then, it’s not just Lior’s memories that slip away, but reality itself, as Lior finds he can travel through alternate realities.

Author Lavie Tidhar’s relationship with Tirosh reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s complicated relationship with his own fictional character Kilgore Trout. Tirosh mentions some of the books he’s written, including Central Station, Osama, and even Unholy Land, books which in our world were written by Tidhar. Tirosh feels he is a character is one of his own novels. Tidhar blurs the lines between realities both within the book, but he keeps the possibility open that he is also Tirosh.

The alternate history includes a Palestina in conflict with it’s neighboring state of Uganda, even going so far as to build a wall to keep out refugees and terrorists. The Nazi regime is alive and well, but the Jews settled in Africa well before their rise to power.

At first blush the plot seems over-the-top and action-packed, and it is at times. But at its heart, the novel is slow and subtle and abstract and unnerving.

Lavie Tidhar – Unholy LandLavie Tidhar follows up his 2016 Mosaic Novel/Short Story collection Central Station (John W Campbell winner, Clarke shortlist, and book of the year for me) with Unholy Land, an alternative history concerning a Jewish Homeland in Africa which turns out to be much more more.

It's not as light, not as dancingly sparkling with ideas and concepts as a lot of the former is, but at the same time it's maybe heavier, worthier, loaded with thought-provoking takes on identity, the fluidity of reality, and weighty moral questions which are exhibited rather than discussed or preached.

It starts simple enough, though – we follow one Lior Tirosh (a thinly disguised alter ego, it appears), a moderately successful writer of 'inconsequential fantasies' in some personal crisis, as he is headed to Ararat City, Palestina. Which is set in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley. And so we know we are in an alternative history – or, to be more precise, in a world where the Wilbush expedition to British East Africa returned a different report, had a different outcome, and a Jewish state, a Nachtasyl, was created instead of the country we are familiar with. At first this is, like all such conceits, mightily disorienting. We see Palestinians, who speak Judean, and a culture which inevitably has taken on parts of the area it has settled in and the people it displaced, whilst retaining a lot of the tensions and drivers that brought it here.
But back to Tirosh – he is here to visit his ailing father, a general and famous figure, we learn later on. But instead he gets, more or less from the go, caught up in strange happenings involving Border/Secret police, multiple agencies following him, murder (it's actually an attempt on his life which catches an acquaintance), a disappeared niece who campaigned for the rights of the native population, a builder who builds the wall designed to keep the terrorists and suicide bombers out... it's a fascinating and dizzying world, and you get absolutely no time to get used to it before the action kicks off.

“Then he asked you if you thought the world was real”



And just when you think you know where you are with the premise and the setting then the story takes a sharp turn into the leftfield. Tirosh is a damaged man – not just from the loss of his son and his wife, but there is something else. He comes from “Outside”. He has visions of other worlds, of concentration camps. We see several agencies who work across different worlds, across possibilities. We learn that the wall has other aims than simply keeping Suicide Bombers out. That time can run differently on the Outside. There is more, so much more, and most of it only gets hinted at, is never explained or barely shown. And boy would I have wanted to see, learn, read more.

“The world is the sum of what it could be, what is might have been, and how it could have been”

The story is told through the eyes of the protagonists – and the viewpoint frequently shifts fluidly between them which can be rather disorienting; and occasionally it does so in ways evidently designed to actively mislead the reader. Tidhar also heavily uses foreshadowing, giving the reader (sometimes misleading) information advantages, again occasionally, purposefully, and skilfully misleading us.

I was surprised at how little there is here in terms of looks, skin colour, racial origin. It's not that book entirely omits this, but given the setting I would have expected more variety warranting comments, descriptions, and assignations. This is a minor quibble – what bothered me more was that we learn so little about the parallel worlds, the sephirot, and how they hang together; how people travel between them; who this mysterious Border Agency is which seems to look after some of it; or also the rather mythically infused final denouement, which I found to be a bit of a let-down after all that had transpired.

Still, this is great and all too short book, delivering much more than it originally promises, and for this alone it deserves your attention.

Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer, who has spent long periods of time in South Africa, Laos, and Vanatu, and who is now living in London. He writes across genre boundaries, and is the author of the World Fantasy Award–winning novel Osama, of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station, in addition to a number of other books and many short stories.

More Lavie Tidhar

Title: Unholy Land
Author: Lavie Tidhar
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: Tachyon
Publisher URL: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Publication Date: October 2018
Review Date: 180925
ISBN: 9711616963057
Pages: 196
Format: ePub
Topic: Alternate History
Topic: Parallel Worlds

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Lavie Tidhar’s sci-fantasies swirl around in a nexus of dreams and memories and imagined realities, straining through pages of pulpy detective potboilers and silver-age sci-fi brain benders. They are also intensely personal, perhaps none more so than his new novel, Unholy Land. The novel’s hero, a writer named Lior Tirosh, bears not only his creator’s initials but seems to have also written all his novels in this fictional reality. This is typical of Tidhar’s metaphysics, where the truth of one reality is the daydream of another.
In Unholy Land, Tirosh travels from Berlin to the Jewish homeland of Palestina in east Africa, where he was born and much of his family still lives. Not long after he arrives, Tirosh finds an old schoolmate murdered in his hotel room. His niece also goes missing while protesting the construction of a wall meant to keep refugees out of the country. Tirosh, confusing himself with the low-rent detectives he often writes about, “takes the case.” His profession isn't the only thing he is confused about: this reality might not even be the only one he occupies.
Palestina has real historical precedent: Tidhar’s introduction explains how the Zionist Congress had once surveyed land in British East Africa as a proposed solution to Europe’s “Jewish problem.” They found the land unsuitable, but many years later, one surveyor remarked that if they had established a Jewish Homeland there, the Holocaust may never have happened. With Unholy Land, Tidhar slips into the role of Leguin’s George Orr, willing one solution to the disaster of history that, hydra-like, sprouts new disasters in its place. All the anxiety, horror, and heartbreak attending the endless cycles of injustice that haunt our world find vivid expression in his works, and Unholy Land may cut the deepest.

Ever since I read Exodus by Leon Uris in high school, I have been fascinated by the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine and the prickly nation-building that comes with it. This novel has a premise that suits my interest. In the early 20th century, a group of explorers came to Uganda to examine a site that might become a homeland for the Jews. If only I had known that particular history before I visited Uganda two years ago, I'd have another perspective. Obviously, whatever result the team came up with, it was not enough to convince the site was suitable. Unholy Land tells a story where the exodus to Uganda did happen. An alternate world where World War II occurred but the Holocaust as we know it did not.

It was truly fascinating. But that's not all.There were also different realities and the barriers among worlds, timelines, histories, might be broken. China Mieville's The City and the City and many Doctor Who episodes came to mind. Started with what looked like a detective/missing person investigation in the 'Unholy Land', the novel became much more intricate.

I enjoyed the first 2/3 of the book but lost my grip in the later parts. I did not understand the resolution and the reasoning/motivation of some characters during the hasty big reveal. The issue of a "Wall" and conflicts with the Ugandan natives provided a hazy background. Last but not least, there are many POV jumps from first to second and third person, here to fro, in a very quick succession, it was rather disorienting.

Overall, however, I am still impressed with the execution and the ideas. This is my first Lavie Tidhar novel and since I had come to enjoy his atmospheric writing, this won't be my last.

My thanks to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for the opportunity to review this book.

Tirosh goes back to his home in Africa, an alternative Palestine bordering Uganda. Which could have happened. Alternative history, what-might-have-beens, detective novel, hints of an autobiography and choices we make or that are taken from us.

I am really struggling with writing a review. I am not even sure if I liked this or how much. It certainly is ambitious and has lots of potential and plot bunnies that ran off into the great beyond. And the author has won awards and gets many excellent reviews.

It‘s just that this indeed very interesting story does not really go anywhere meaningful for me. Perhaps I just like plot-driven stories too much. Or this just went over my head. I don‘t know. I finished the book two nights ago and still haven‘t made up my mind.

I wish the alternate timelines would have been explored more. All these hints and then we are left dangling. Nur‘s story was a bit of a non-event. Tirosh‘s story took off in an interesting direction, developed little over the middle of the book and was sort of meh at the end. Really disliked Bloom as a person, although he was the most complex character.

I think it‘s going to be 4 stars just to honor the inventiveness and intended scope of the plot.

I received this free e-copy from the publisher/author via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

This book works in a meta cognitive fashion, sweeping and engaging in a cultural sense. There is fine characterization here with a protagonist like no other.

There are notes or writers like Orhan Pamuk, but also uniqueness.