Alia Yunis’ debut novel “The Night Counter is a multi-plotted story chronicling the life of 85-year-old Fatima Abdullah, a Lebanese who immigrated to Detroit, the United States when she was a teen, as she strives to reconcile with her dysfunctional family during the last nine days of her life.
In “The Counter, Yunis recreates the immortal, mesmeric Scheherazade, the Persian storyteller who whiled the nights away despite being married to a vengeful king determined to behead her. Once again, Scheherazade brings hope to humanity’s most daunting fate: death. This time though, she is the listener not the storyteller.
By tapping into stories from across four Abdullah generations, Fatima rediscovers reservoirs of emotions she’s rarely ever admitted to. For 1001 nights, Scheherazade appears at the windowsill of the home of her grandson Amir in LA, where she had just moved, pleading for a good story.
As Fatima tells the stories of her 10 children, she gradually ceases to obsess over which daughter is worthy of her wedding dress and their home in Lebanon – a house she has not lived in for the past 70 years.
Her stories, and ultimately Yunis’ novel, shed light on matters of love, family, life’s disappointments, the status of immigrants in the US and Arabs in a post 9/11 America, all wrapped in a package of light comedy.
Fatima is your typical 85-year-old; stubborn, almost blind and relies on a hearing aid. Her purple hair and the frequency with which she switches to Arabic in daily conversation are what add flavor to the sorrowful incidents she recalls.
When Fatima is not telling a story, Scheherazade takes jaunts on her magic carpet to check on the estranged Abdullahs. Between Minneapolis, Pennsylvania, Huston and Beirut, the reader is introduced to each of Fatima’s children, their children and sometimes their children’s children.
We meet Laila, Fatima’s eldest daughter who is still living in Detroit, battling cancer and her husband’s new favorite spot: the mosque; Soraya, a psychic reunited with her ex-husband by giving birth to Amir through a sperm donation; Nadia, a strong advocate of Arab unity whose son runs a successful matchmaking business in Washington, DC; Randa, whose greatest fear is for her neighbors in Huston to know she is of Arab descent; Meriam, who spent her entire life cherishing the memory of her martyr husband, whom, we discover later, she never actually loved; and Hala, a doctor married to a Chinese and is soon to become a grandmother.
Although drastically different, Fatima’s kids seem to share two things: a black and white picture of Fatima in her wedding gown and an obsession with weather updates.
At times, the witty dialogue will leave you laughing out loud, at others; you will be gripped by the hardships immigrants face in a land that is in all ways foreign to their home.
At Diwan Bookstore in Zamalek, the Chicago-born author gathered among friends, journalists and avid readers as part of her Middle East tour to market her debut novel.
In person, Yunis is as natural and cheerful as her heroine, Fatima. That said, it’s no surprise her decision to write “The Counter came to her off-the-cuff.
Sitting in a final interview before being awarded a minority fellowship, Yunis had to tell the selection committee what she would do if indeed she received the money.
“The husband in the story had been a short story originally, and I just thought of him at that moment, it just came to me at that moment. And when they said yeah you have the scholarship, I had to write it, she laughed.
Although names, characters, places and events are all a product of Yunis’ imagination, to her, the idea of grandmothers telling stories hits close to home. “Somewhere in my head a grandmother is a natural narrator for me. Both my mom and grandma are great storytellers, she said.
Yunis herself grew up between the Midwest and the Middle East, but she stressed that this is not a novel about her family.
“I tried to use names that could be read in English, she explained, after her cousin, Bassam, had asked why she had called the drunk, one of Fatima’s sons, after him.
She admits, however, that the book was initially targeting the Arab-American Community. “This was the intention, but when you start writing, you’re just writing about the characters. You make a new agenda, she said.
“The Counter is currently being translated to Norwegian, French and German, with no prospects of it being translated to Arabic.
“Translation into Arabic is unfortunately not profitable for most publishers because the market is not big enough, she explained.
Answering a question by Daily News Egypt on the success of the novel, Yunis said, “When you write you write what’s in your heart, but you try the best you can in the marketing stage because that’s the hard part.
In the US, her tour took her from San Francisco and Santa Barbara to Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Her Middle East tour included stops in the UAE, Bahrain, Cairo, Amman and Beirut.
“I’d write another book before I ever market another book, she said.
