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Brother Alive

Brother Alive

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A novel with the polish and warmth of a stone smoothed in the hand after a lifetime of loving worry—original, darkly witty, sometimes bitter, and so very wise. And certainly the debut of a major new writer.”— Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Brother Alive is a remarkable work. Zain Khalid creates an immersive world rich in compelling detail. But even more impressively, Khalid achieves a kind of resistance text against our endemic inhumanity. The thrill lies in witnessing such a cogent and powerful intellect tune in to the music of life. An inspiring reminder of the great capacity of novels.”— Sergio de la Pava, author of A Naked Singularity

I’m taking the unusual-for-me step of abandoning this when I’m already three quarters of the way into it. Now, this is not to say that Khalid has intended to make these moves within philosophical and scientific history—nor that it matters what his intention might be. Rather, as Khalid himself tells the New York Times, Brother Alive is “not an answer to anything, I simply want to give voice to the reality.” And so, precisely as Haldane recommends, he has gobbled up all of that reality that he can reach, and he has fed it into his Brother as Youssef feeds his Brother. In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are an inseparable if conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother. The way the author looks at terrorism as both a concept and an act foreign to the boys, but still bound to them by virtue of their faith and appearance, is disarming. He uses dark humor to demystify the threat, to neutralize and subvert emotion. What follows is the boys' bleak, untouched acceptance of life's burdens, the prejudices that brand them outsiders in the West.FINALIST for the second annual Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction. Winners were announced on her birthday, 21 October, last year, so might be again this year, but no formal announcement of that was made that I found. As both Youssef and Imam Salim are gradually disassembled, and their emotional lives thinned to match the wilting shape of their bodies, the prose takes on the feel of a stripped, floundering nerve. It leaves the characters tender, in a state of agonized exposure, controlled by the force and texture of emotion, the cooling breath of every passing moment. And since Khalid's world is a sensory one, the reader is left thrashing in solidarity. Zain Khalid’s first novel, “Brother Alive,” is full to bursting with imagination and literary references…It’s the kind of ambitious debut that might inspire other writers in turn.” — The New York Times , Writers to Watch This Summer That’s not to say that Brother Alive earns its appeal only for its reflections concerning humanity, corporeality and love. The novel’s sentiment, gliding through the narrative as a wholly separate entity, is undeniably helmed by meaty intrigue. The deeper we reach into the plot, the more clarity we find. In the end, it's the midsection of the feral tale that contorts and mangles its own face, redefining the past as only the present can. Thus Khalid has charted a novelist’s route out of the central problem of Kant’s critical philosophy, the mind’s irresistible need to question things it can’t possibly know. By accepting, with Gödel, that none of his characters, in the literary logic that constructs them, can be consistent and complete, and that they must oscillate between overlapping, at times conflicting states of singularity and plurality, Khalid has responded to Kant by reversing his central impulse. Where Kant systematically divides conceptual categories in search of precision in thought, Khalid declares the porousness and constant mutability of those divisions, allowing him to write psychological and physical relationships with dynamics little-explored outside the more adventurous segments of contemporary neuroscience and philosophy.

Brother Alive is an intellectual feast, an existential wail, the anguished contraction of feeling, a pyretic dream. Simply put, it's a work like no other. Stitched from three unique parts, the novel tells the story of three brothers connected not by blood or race, but by the protective gaze of their adoptive father, Imam Salim. Beguiling . . . A nervy, episodic read . . . Khalid is such a gifted commentator that his methods bear close examination . . . [His] sentences abound with florid, poetic metaphors while maintaining the clipped, declarative tempo of Scripture . . . Brother Alive is Rushdie with none of the ceremony, a searing collage of the profound and the mundane.”— Pete Tosiello, New York Times Book ReviewOne the most exciting debuts in recent years . . . Khalid’s vision can be bleak, even cynical, but it’s also remarkably cogent and underscored with a profound tenderness. It’s a love story—many times over, actually—wrapped inside a searing indictment, a rage against the many machines that would sacrifice people at the altar of capital. That Khalid executes a novel this intricate, elegant, and compassionate with such masterly prose all but guarantees that this will be one of the finest works of literature this year. Blisteringly intelligent, bursting with profound feeling, and host to some of the most complex, necessary characters in recent memory.”— Luke Gorham, Library Journal (starred review)

An artist must understand his subject matter.” This seemingly banal demand, from speculatively inclined biochemist J.B.S. Haldane in his 1923 lecture to the Cambridge Heretics, modestly titled “Daedalus of Science and the Future.” After an aside on ferroconcrete architecture, Haldane clarifies: “we must see that possible poets are instructed, as their masters [Milton and Shelley] were, in science and economics.” Haldane, master of the loaded phrase—at the tip of his pen, a recommendation that writers receive education in the sciences does not simply mean that they should take science courses. ZKWell, project housing is always named after some titan of industry, or a scion of some sort, or lousy presidents. And Coolidge was one of the worst. I was talking about this with a friend recently. It’s like people from Staten Island turn into conflagrations because you hate everything about the place because even though Manhattan feels within arm’s reach, you are removed from it. You see the city progressing, you see it advancing, you see all of this capital and culture pouring into it, whereas Staten Island didn’t have that. When I was coming up, our only cultural export was the Wu-Tang Clan. Gorham, Luke (2022-07-01). "Brother Alive". Library Journal. Archived from the original on 2022-11-27 . Retrieved 2023-11-01. Often, in those who follow his directives—consciously or not—this division between understanding and rendering beautiful takes the shape of a division between content and expression: Imagine Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s gorgeous descriptions of absolutely bleak countryside Armageddons, Chris Abani’s masterful poetics of torture and war.ZKRight, and the brothers spend much of the novel trying to figure out how to build anew, how to live. One of the brothers raises himself through survivalist rationality. Another through religion and family, and the narrator studies art and literature to find meaning. They are all trying to locate themselves amid modernity, but in some ways, they are losing themselves to the search, which is how they end up in the city. They want out of their adopted cultures, or rather they reject culture and identity by virtue. MB This makes me think of your fictionalized linear city HADITH where progression at all costs seems to be the MO. Khalid, though, does not halt his exploration of the pluralizing effects of intimacy at this speculative medical point: Later, Youssef remarks that his brother Iseul’s girlfriend seems to have become somehow plural. As his sibling-disease has somehow pluralized Youssef, so that he shares a mind with Brother, love in whatever form pluralizes its erstwhile singular participants, so that physiological illness may be spread, not simply “from a simple touch,” but by “giving of yourself, being understood.” And Khalid goes still further: The air near a cold character is “ten degrees colder than the surrounding air.” A man with a dark past seems to darken the sun when present. When a character with a shadowed past walks into a room, it seems that all history’s mysteries swirl in the gases around him.

As the nights warmed and the air became the same temperature as our skin and the sun resisted setting until the moon was in the middle of its shift, Coolidge’s streets thrummed with activity,” he writes. “Rebounds of Wu-Tang, Dipset, and early Drill caromed off parked cars and the deep concrete.” The boys learn that “all parts of a pig are delicious, including the feet,” and enjoy watermelon, curries, flan, and generic-brand cola. Their neighborhood bustles with food and music and people, strangers who can become family. I make this suggestion because Zain Khalid's Brother Alive has a lot going on. A. LOT. What I propose to do here is to discuss the three sections into which the novel is divided with some reflection on prose and plotting, but I won't be providing a summary. The publisher has done a much better job of that than I could. ZK Point in case. My editor felt the book would flow better without that character and their storyline. He was right. An astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father It also features a certain tolerance for things that Islam does not, in fact, usually approve of...even a range of sexual conduct.This is an H-bomb of a proposition; Kant’s friends didn’t call him “the All-Destroyer” [ der Allzermalmende] for nothing. And Kant recognized what he’d done from the very beginning of his critical project: In the first sentence of the preface of the 1787 first edition of his first Critique, he bluntly states that his philosophy is a response to humans’ irresistible lust to investigate questions they can’t hope to answer—although, by careful reason, we can find the right divisions of concepts to allow us, at least, to ask those unanswerable questions. Tosiello, Pete (2022-07-12). "A Debut Novel Explores Power in Many Forms, From Capital to Dogma". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2023-03-19 . Retrieved 2023-11-01. Stylistically brilliant and intellectually acute, Brother Alive is a remarkable novel of family, capitalism, power, sexuality, and the possibility of reunion for those who are broken. Colson Whitehead once wrote that all it took to belong in New York City was an act of remembrance—the summoning of a piece of the city that no longer existed. “You are a New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge,’” he wrote. “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” Whitehead wrote this essay in 2001 and it’s easy to understand why he was reflecting on what was missing: Two towers had left the skyline, and 2,977 people were gone with them. The action shifts from lower-class Staten Island in post-9/11 world to Salim's story of from whom and why he got these kids. This is interesting, but it's really lightly gone over, and is the set-up for the final section set in The Line, Saudi Arabia's astounding city of the future that they're building with the oceans of money petrochemical exploitation has given them permission to create using slave labor from around the developing world. (This isn't foregrounded, but there's a strong streak of anti-capitalism in Zain Khalid's anti-colonialism. These are very agreeable qualities to me, but note their presence before deciding to make a run at this long, magisterially paced book.) It is in this last section that I lost my sense of the author being in full control of his narrative. A disease process, the shift of Brother from a child's fantasy key to a very different one as Youssef, now a gay young adult, resumes the narrative's reins.



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