Paradiso 17

An extraordinary, sweeping novel following one man's itinerant search for home across the globe, after his childhood exile from Palestine.

Gabi's Review

In Hannah Lillith Assadi’s novel Paradiso 17, the map of a life is traced through the patient, tensile prose of displacement. Drawing from her father’s history, Assadi follows a Palestinian man across seven decades, moving through the geographies of Syria, Kuwait, and Italy before settling in the American landscapes of New York and Arizona. It is a work that captures the commencement of dispossession and the subtle, persistent erosion of the "undermining evil" that dogs a life.

The main character Sufien is a magnetic creation: spiritually restless, charming, and empathetic to his detriment. He is defined by a constitutional inability to remain in one place, perhaps a symptom of exile and homelessness itself. The title refers to the Canto in which Dante is foretold of his own exile, and the novel uses this framework to insist that being cast out is not merely an event, but a permanent state of being.

Assadi’s vision is remarkably generous, at times comic or upbeat and she wraps her characters in a protective warmth. Sufien is so universally adored by those he encounters that the narrative occasionally blunts the edges of a character who might otherwise reach a more jagged, genuine complexity. Some secondary characters, most notably Sufien’s wife, Sarah, are rather impressionistically drawn. But these are minor reservations about a novel that successfully bypasses the two most common traps of the genre: "misery tourism" and "triumphalist resilience." Assadi opts for something far more honest: an exploration of ordinary life lived sideways to catastrophe, and a self quietly reshaped by forces it cannot fully name.

Paradiso 17 is a necessary read for its luminous sentences and for the profound dignity it imparts to a story which the world has struggled for seventy years to convincingly express.

Publisher blurb

An extraordinary, sweeping novel following one man's itinerant search for home across the globe, after his childhood exile from Palestine.

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.

Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. In this moment time stops making sense.

He spends the rest of his life propelled forward – although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the forgetful assurance of wine. When life carries him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls in love with a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Until finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of a desert much like his first home.

Paradiso 17 is haunted with grief and yet it is also struck through with the dazzling light of a life truly lived and a love that connects us, no matter our distance.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.