The Clothesline Swing

I had to force myself to finish this book. It was okay at the beginning - I was hoping it would get better, and it did not. The Clothesline Swing is the the story of two gay Syrian refugees. It's an interesting framework; the narrator, one of the two, is telling stories to his husband to keep him in the world of the living. (The husband is dying from an unnamed illness.) There's a catch, though - Death is also with them, as an actual presence that can be talked to and interacted with. He smokes a join with the narrator at one point, and tells stories of his own - even plans a party - at another point. The story flicks back and forth between their past and their present with some unpredictability as the narrator tells his stories.

Because of the presence of Death, and the kind of hazy, in-between space that the stories reside in (between life and death, between awake and asleep, between fantasy and reality), the entire book is a little dream-like. I don't particularly enjoy ever-shifting books that don't have some kind of solid foundation for me to start on.

The book did a good job of showing the dangers of being gay in middle-eastern society, and also showed how hard it is to be a citizen of a country at war with itself. The list of friends who have died in violent ways is threaded through the entire book of stories. She was caught in a crossfire in an alley - he killed himself after being forced to marry a woman - he died when his office was shelled - she died from a car bomb.

I don't know. It's a strange book. I'm hesitant to say don't waste your time, because it covers important topics, but the dreamy quality just ruined it for me.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.