Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire (review)
we've done to our women. All our revolutions and utopias have been carried on their backs. And they were the only ones who paid the full price." It is also striking that this novel, set against the backdrop of the 1967 war, should have been published against that of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (1982), and that the discussion of a massacre of Palestinians should have appeared in a novel published in the same year as Sabra and Shatila. These obvious and presumably vital contemporary resonances do not emerge in Cleary's treatment. Though this is a book that might have covered much more ground in terms of the texts examined, which probably ought to have moved beyond the single genre of fiction (despite the one film— it would have been marvelous to see a reading of the connections between, say, poets Mahmud Darwish and John Montague), and which could have more fully integrated the readings it does offer, it is a groundbreaking study. Comparative literary and cultural criticism, which crosses regional, linguistic, and national barriers, is by far the most difficult kind to pull off.