There Are Rivers in the Sky
Ratings10
Average rating4.8
In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.
In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.
In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
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Whenever I think about this book, I find myself having trouble articulating what this book is about. It's about people, about history in Mesopotamia, about relationships, about the Yazidi people, about the visible and invisible connections between people, about love in its many forms -even ones that harm-, about surviving despite your circumstances and the deep scars that they cause, about prejudices and brutality, about the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's about a single drop of water.
Elif Shafak is great at teaching me bits of Turkish history I hadn't heard much about. The more brutal and ugly parts of it. But she does so beautifully. My heart broke again and again reading this book, for the characters, for the story, for the people in history who actually lived it. It's also sadly a very apt time for a book involving a genocide, one that is not widely known.
If you're not familiar with Elif Shafak's writing, you're truly missing out. Her writing is always so beautiful and somehow very educational, it borders magical realism at times. She writes about strong characters and weaves a story like a tapestry, once finished, forcing you to take a step back to take in the full picture.
This is no different, a story spanning centuries, cultures and countries. There are three main characters across time. Only by reading will you see if and how they're connected.
This is not a book you will read in one sitting. You'll take your time with it, and it'll steep within you, until you're ready to dive back in.
I read this as a mixture of audiobook and ebook, and really enjoyed the narration as well.
Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the ARC!
Rivers are fluid bridges – channels of communication between separate worlds. They link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible, and ultimately, the living to the dead.
Water, and rivers in particular, dictate more of our lives than most people realize. Cities, especially those founded before the proliferation of the railroad, need water and are very often situated along rivers. Our highways and railways often parallel rivers, taking advantage of prehistoric pathways the water has carved over millennia. I've spent much of my life in and around rivers – in them, I find orientation in a disorienting world. I'm a river person, and as such, I'm aware that many of our rivers are under various threats. Pollution, impoundment (damming), and rising water temperatures threaten both the quantity and the usability of our planet's freshwater, as well as every organism that relies on that water for survival. Like us.
I don't particularly like thinking about these things.
There Are Rivers in the Sky gave me no choice. Elif Shafak's novel is so finely crafted that we are confronted with these unpleasant truths, but she makes us want to sit with them. Both elegant and compelling, There Are Rivers combines multiple storylines told over a couple thousand years, the common thread between them being a single drop of water. Maybe this sounds a bit twee (it did to me, at first) but Shafak masterfully weaves the stories with a sleight of hand. Plot developments feel organic, natural, never forced by the author's storyboarding. Much of the story also revolves around the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian epic poem whose origins around 2100 BC likely date it as the oldest written poem in the world. This has the effect of somehow grounding the novel, like giving it an ancient air of authority.
I found There Are Rivers in the Sky to be a nearly perfect novel. The prose is artistic but not overly florid. The plot moves but doesn't lean on cliffhangers or other devices to artificially hook the reader. The sentences, the story, and the characters do the work, and do it well.
A poem is a swallow in flight. You watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage. Poems belong to no one.
Like poems, rivers may be experienced, they may be temporarily impounded, they may be fought over, but we can never catch them, and they belong to no one. Elif Shafak reminds us we'd do well to remember this.
4.5/5 stars
After the first few chapters I got disappointed. Too many themes and overly constructed. Flat characters. We learn little about the Gilgamesh epos and also little about the Jezidis. The water droplet theme is a trick to connect it all.
