Reading Khaled Khalifa Through the Lens of William Faulkner with Elizabeth Howard

Khaled Khalifa, born in a village in Syria in January 1964, was considered one of Syria’s most celebrated writers before his death, at the age of fifty-nine, in 2023. His novel No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was awarded the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. One of the recurrent themes in Khalifa’s novels is the struggle between the individual and the political system, and the suffering of Syrians at the hands of the government. In 2012, when he was hospitalized, he began to imagine what it would be like if it was necessary for a family to transport a corpse through a war zone. Death Is Hard Work, a finalist for the National Book Award, restages the narrative through the lens and the influence of William Faulkner’s, As I Lay Dying. The novel was published in Arabic in 2016, translated by Leri Price, and published in 2019 in the UK.

We will read and discuss Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying before reading Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work and consider the influence of Faulkner and the connection between the body and its surroundings: political, economic, cultural, and natural. How a contemporary author has used Faulkner’s structure to bring the universal into contact with the specific.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Read As I Lay Dying through page 84 – through the chapter Vardaman – “My mother is a fish.”

What to expect from this reading group: This course will be participant-driven and conversational.

Reading List:

• Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner