Salt Houses by Hala Alyan: book review

Salt Houses (2017) is the generational story of Alia Yacoub and her children as they are forced from their home and country due to war, conflict, marriage, and the hope of a better life. It spans the years from 1963 to 2014.

Commencing in 1963 in Nablus in West Bank, 50 kilometres north of Jerusalem, Salma is reading her daughter’s coffee dregs to predict Alia’s future. Alia is about to marry Atef. Salma sees ‘an unsettled life’ but does not tell her daughter that.

Salma’s younger children, daughter Widad, and son Mustafa, are still single. Mustafa loves Aya, but she would not be accepted by his family. The 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israel War splits the family as they leave Nablus: Salma moves to Amman in Jordan, while Widad, Alia and Atef move to Kuwait. Mustafa is lured into a group of political activists.

In 1990 Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and the family must move again. And as Alia and Atef’s three children grow, they find love and leave for distant lands. When they move to locations such as Beirut, Paris, and Boston, the family heritage and identity becomes fragmented and dissipated. Do they have Eastern or Western values, traditional or modern values, the urge to roam or the need to settle?

For Souad, Alia’s youngest daughter, ‘Beirut called to her. She wanted somewhere new.’ After marrying Elie, and moving to Paris, Souad ‘caught herself daydreaming about Kuwait. For a summer, Paris seemed infinite, vast, with its shops and museums and cafes. But as her new home, the city chafed, the cobblestone streets always crowded, the sky pocked with clouds.’ Her husband had work, but she had ‘nothing.’

Atef reflects on the fifty years since leaving Nablus – the changes in his wife Alia, his children, and now his teenage grandchildren: half of one nationality, half of another, everyone was now a mixture of bodies and minds. The grandchildren had heard stories of Nablus, but what was the city like in reality?

Alia is rash, impulsive, restless, absent-minded, and pouty. There are family arguments. The latter chapters are best, as individuals must come to terms with loss, leaving, migration, and assimilation into their new foreign environments. Each of them must form their own definition of homeland - home and hearth – and what new cities add or take away from their identities and souls.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).