I know very little about Arabic literature and don’t recall ever having read anything by a Syrian novelist before starting Khaled Khalifa’s most recently published book.  Shame on me.

The dying wish of Abdel Latif is that he should be buried next to his sister in their native village of Anabiya. What would have been a simple enough request at any other time becomes in Syria’s civil war a terrible three-day odyssey for his children as they transport his remains from Damascus to the family burial site.  In a landscape shattered by years of violence, the siblings pick their way through one checkpoint after another, bribing or negotiating with soldiers and militia men loyal to the regime or rebel groups, and racing against time before the corpse begins to decay.

Death is Hard Work is a meditation on loss. Lost lives, lost loves, lost freedoms. Don’t read it to learn about what happened in Syria. Read it to learn about regret, disappointment, and loyalty.

What has happened in recent years in Syria will stand as one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our era, an episode of appalling brutality and cruelty, and an indictment of those Western governments that did little or nothing to stop it.  Khaled Khalifa refused to leave the hell that is Syria today, staying to be a witness to what happened in his country, and he has given us an important, beautiful, and sometimes darkly comic chronicle of what really happens in a time when evil prospers.

I almost never abandon novels before finishing them. I can’t remember the last time I did. It isn’t a matter of stubbornness.  I tend to choose books that have been recommended by friends or by reviewers and that generally has the effect of weeding out things I’m likely to end up hating. But then I bought Julie Orringer’s latest novel, The Flight Portfolio.

The signs were so positive.  A glowing review in The New York Times and a recommendation from a friend who knows me well and whose taste in novels I trust.  So, why did I dislike The Flight Portfolio so much, to the extent that I had to abandon it because every day felt like a miserable slog? Three reasons. First, the writing is often clunky, clichéd, and over-elaborate.  The author simply can’t resist extraneous adjectives and adverbs and inevitably chooses the most obvious ones. Second, the novel is far too long.  Cutting by a third would have improved it. Third, such a promising plot (the true-life extraction from Occupied France of artists, writers, and intellectuals threatened by the Nazis) was almost suffocated by a silly, romantic sub-plot. What do these mistakes have in common? A bugbear of mine: insufficient editing.  Far too many literary novels in my experience are being published without any obvious editing (or with an obvious lack of editing). The Flight Portfolio could have been so much better with judicious, expert editing.  Without it, it ended up bland, uninspiring, and slightly pretentious.

Kate Atkinson writes the kind of novels you gulp down greedily and quickly.  That’s especially true of her Jackson Brodie series, in which Big Sky is the fifth and most recent installment.  It’s a novel that zips along quickly, thanks to Atkinson’s wry, easy, slightly conversational style. And it’s precisely that style that’s the problem here.  Big Sky is about corruption in high places and more specifically about human trafficking and child abuse. Few subjects are as serious as that, yet Atkinson’s tone throughout is unwaveringly light and jocular.  It seemed hugely inappropriate and it spoiled completely my enjoyment of a novel by a writer I usually admire very much. I can only assume her intention was to make the horror of abuse even more horrific by setting it in a quiet seaside town and populating it with slightly clownish characters.  If so, her plan didn’t work.  The effect (on me in any case) was to trivialize an enterprise that destroys everything it touches and that’s inexcusable.