NORA E.H. PARR. Novel Palestine: Nation through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023). 232 pages. $34.95 paper. ISBN 9780520394650

Palestine: Nation through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah, locates a means for narrating that "can absorb internal Palestinian contradiction" (4).Parr's sophisticated and beautifully rendered tribute analyzes what she names Nasrallah's "Palestine Project," or his "linked series" that elucidates structures of violence "without allowing them to impose limitations on life or imaginative possibility" (4).Despite being hailed as the author of Palestine's national epic, Nasrallah has received a paucity of attention, given that, as Parr suggests, he does not fit neatly into the main camps surrounding Palestinian literary production, among the "Nakba generation" or the "Post Oslo" writers (9-10).In fact, Nasrallah holds a "bridge position," undermining "the very idea of a clear divide" (10).Parr aims to rectify this "patchy" reception and argues for the ways in which his novels may reorient the nation (5).Rather than a "nation of fragments" or in "waiting" (9), Palestine is depicted through a series, comprising the Palestine Comedies (al-Malhat al-Filastiniyya) and the Balconies (Shurafat), which Parr deciphers as a single literary project.She posits that "what holds them together as a unified body of materials also is what binds the vision of Palestine that they co-create" (17).Her deft explication leans on the theoretical works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Gerard Genette, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes, among others, demonstrating how Nasrallah's Palestine is an intertextual compilation, permitting "all the possibilities" of the nation to be explored, as well as an openness to "change to come" (20).Organized into eight chapters and three parts, Novel Palestine moves from Nasrallah's series of linked texts, to forms of narration and vantage points, to the Palestinian subject.From each of these perspectives, Parr reveals how Nasrallah "eschews expectations of linearity, retrospectivity, and geographic contiguity"