An Old Carriage with Curtains

Ghassan Zaqtan, Samuel Wilder

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781803092348
• eBook ISBN: 9781803092379
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The concluding novel in a trilogy that has become a landmark of Palestinian fiction.

An Old Carriage with Curtains is the third and final book in a masterful trilogy of novels encompassing the history of the people of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya. The novels trace the wandering trajectories and inner lives of characters connected to this village across decades, as well as the vicissitudes of historical change and displacement in the land. Through the return of a middle-aged man to the site of an ancient monastery in the hills near Jericho that he once visited as a boy, the incredibly vivid and surprising stories of Hind, a stage actress and brilliant storyteller, the stories of tortuous routes of checkpoints and bureaucratic blockages, and decades of Occupation, Zaqtan creates a narrative of personal reckoning and reflection.

The vectors of memory and historical reflection interweave in this dreamlike narrative, which delivers a singularly powerful depiction of subjective and collective experience in the face of devastating and sweeping historical change.

Table of contents

• Zaqtan’s copyright page
• No Visitors Today
• The Bridge and the Fat Man Who Cut in Line
• The Way to Zakariyya
• First Appearance of the ‘Railway Station’in Mother’s Story
• A Simple Need to Speak
• You Don’t Look Like Your Mother and You Don’t Seem Angry Enough
• Beings of the System
• Saeed Asks Fatima about the Process
• Failure of the Old Man’s Second Attempt
• Blind Body Beyond the Window
• First Appearance of Rivka, the Train and the Station Guard in Mother’s Story
• Will You Be Gone Long This Time?
• Kattan, Habibi, Kertész, al-Qisi
• Dialects
• And Roads
• Her Laugh That He Found Obscene
• We Did Not Find the Railway Station
• Failure of the Old Man’s Fourth Attempt
• As for Me, I Cannot Do That
• The Moroccan Woman’s Coffee Shop