In Novel Palestine: Nation through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nora E. H. Parr provides a thorough analysis through which readers can engage with Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novelistic output. Specifically, Parr provides a road map to understanding how Palestine is formed, gathered, and emerges within Nasrallah’s oeuvre, engaging the novel–nation paradigm in uncharted and beguiling ways. The book is divided into three key parts: “Intertextual Palestine,” “Seeing, Telling, Power,” and “Novel Citizen.” All three sections provide a literary guide to understanding Nasrallah’s endeavor to capture the entirety and the multiplicity of the Palestinian experience, both on the land of historic Palestine and in its numerous diasporic manifestations.

This career-long effort, as Nasrallah has referred to it, is known as the Palestine Project and is comprised of two series, the Palestine Comedies (al-Malhat al-Filastiniyya) and the Balconies (Shurafat), which Parr analyzes dexterously and with precise detail from introduction to the final pages of “(Not a) Conclusion: An Imaginative Universe,” in which the author underscores the renewed capacity of the novel as a site of national belonging within Nasrallah’s literary repertoire. The book is well-researched and emerges at a time when Palestinian life and land are, yet again, facing unimaginable violence and military brutality in the Gaza Strip and accelerated settler encroachment across the occupied West Bank. It provides a near-complete portrait of Nasrallah—who is among the most important living Palestinian novelists—and elucidates his lifelong dedication to the novel as a medium, one capable of housing the history of Palestine and the Palestinians.

The book begins with a table that allows the reader to visualize the titles across the Palestine Comedies and the Balconies, their respective publication dates, and their subsequent incorporation into the series that would become the Palestine Project. As a visual companion to Part 1, this table demonstrates the narrative alchemy and thematic scope of the Palestine Project, specifically pertaining to its nonlinearity. This mapping is applied throughout Part 1, and the Palestine Project emerges as a constellation of representations that moves through and across Nasrallah’s literary Palestine temporally, thematically, and inter- and meta-textually. As Parr more aptly puts it, “The Palestine conjured in Nasrallah’s fiction holds space for the whole [of a] population. It accounts for their shifting locations that only begin with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Palestinians of Israel, and those in the remaining fifty-nine official refugee camps. . . [in] Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, as well as the long lives lived in exile and the diaspora” (p. 11). The Palestine Comedies and the Balconies, then, are at once linked and exist across a continuum that challenges dominant configurations of Palestine and instead privileges the emergence of a native, national history, one that encompasses all of Palestine and its people before, during, and after its encounter with British and Zionist colonialism. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the second chapter, “Al-Muthannā,” and its treatment of a “simultaneous singularity and multiplicity [that] is used to express relations in [and to] the nation” (p. 34), and in the third chapter, “Accumulating Meaning,” in which Parr, in part, convincingly argues that the Palestine Project is accumulated in a manner reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, allowing Palestine to accumulate in both meaning and volume across Nasrallah’s project. It does so despite the nonlinear chronology and despite the colossal sense of loss after every catastrophe (in 1914, 1948, 1967, 1982, etc.).

Part 2, titled “Seeing, Telling, Power,” examines the structural boundaries of violence and its impact on Palestinian narrative by and large. Whereas the primary foci in Part 1 were the historical and intertextual components of the Palestine Comedies, Part 2 moves the spotlight to Nasrallah’s Balconies, owing to their expansive thematic engagement with violence in all of its dimensions and manifestations: neocolonial, spectacular, slow, and accompanied by social, patriarchal, and religious oppression. Departing from the Foucauldian description of “a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain” (p. 66), or, as described in the world of physics, a boundary condition that limits the range of outcomes given the factors at play, Nasrallah, in Parr’s analysis, instead chooses to transcend the limitations of the Zionist occupation and exile through the vantage point of the balcony: to reconstruct the national narrative outside the suffocating confines of violence on the ground. This alternative perspective allows Palestine to both conceive of and be conceived in an alternative, more powerful, and nationally constructed reality, one that refutes and negates the hegemonic discourse of the colonizer. The vantage point of the balcony, then, alters and redistributes the concentration of power, and affords Palestine the panoramic perspective that is necessary to identify and counter structural manifestations of violence through language and text.

Part 3, titled “Novel Citizen,” moves from the vantage point of the balcony and the panoramic examination of geographies to zoom in on the individual. Parr asks what exactly Nasrallah’s Palestine Project puts forth in terms of parameter, that in turn allows readers to engage with the individual characters or character archetypes in both series. In short, what makes a Palestinian in the literal and metaphorical senses, and what is a novel citizen? Among the archetypes that Parr considers across three chapters are the freedom fighter, the (national) hero, the mother, and the child, many in correlation with martyrdom. Through this analysis, the composition of the Palestinian, as suggested in Chapter 6, is rather than becomes. The archetypes and tropes that persist in Palestinian cultural and political identities are not necessarily the result of a conscious or deliberate construction of national identity or foundational myth; rather they develop as the result of dynamic and difficult lived realities necessary for survival on the micro and macro levels, individually and communally. On the whole, the final section illuminates new dimensions of citizenship: how it can be perceived or achieved in the absence of a physical nation–state. Parr concludes that Nasrallah’s Palestine Project, and the regenerative possibilities for citizenship and history it produces, subverts the dual concepts of citizen and nation. So long as Palestinian narrators are active and creative agents of national production, Palestine and its people can be gathered in their own constellation; the nation is unlimited and ubiquitous.

The “open-ended delirium” that Parr calls for culminates in the author’s “(Not a) Conclusion,” in which the imaginative universe (the constellation) in Nasrallah’s Palestine Project is solidified through three key themes: intifada, Nakba, and literary heritage. The Palestine Project collects what is there and analyzes the connections between moments, people, and various experiences to reconfigure Palestine as more powerful, more connected, and more imaginative through the vehicle of the novel. The nation is narrated, amplified, and united throughout Nasrallah’s series.

Parr’s monograph is a refreshing and meticulously researched intervention on the Palestine Comedies and Balcony series, and it achieves its principal aim: an integrated, panoramic, and essential analysis of Nasrallah’s novels in English. Given the prolific nature of Nasrallah’s artistic career across the genres of poetry and the novel, as well as his work as a photographer and as a regular contributor to various news outlets, it is impossible to claim that any study of his work is exhaustive in scope. Nonetheless, Parr has achieved an admirable feat with this monograph and emerges among the foremost specialists on Nasrallah’s oeuvre.