A volume of stories ends up being a more or less homogeneous composition around ideas, sensations, settings or plots. Lisa Halliday has played to write a book of stories that finally composes a novel in its last unit, in its spiritual coexistence of characters, in a chronology straddling two worlds lived from two different prisms that finally belong to the same asymmetry of the world.
Between 2003 and 2011 we lived through that distant war in Iraq. Far away for western consciences, but very real once entered into circumstances, interests and consequences. And around that war, or with the excuse of the warlike conflict, this novel is built that is a literary dialectic with its thesis, its asymmetric antithesis and the brilliant final synthesis. In other words, two capitulated narratives like "Insentatez" and "Locura" that end up connecting in an ending where the frenetic narration takes on a special meaning.
Perhaps the ultimate intention of the author in this section of the novel is to address so many notions about our current lifestyle. In the characters from here and there, on both sides of the asymmetric mirror, we enjoy ideas about love and passion embodied in Alice and the writer Ezra Blazer, with the drifts of a society that engulfs wills and redirects everything to obsessive ideas around success as the only way to recognize talent.
In the second part we meet Amar, an Iraqi, who lives an odyssey and a final arrest in a London airport. The Iraq war is proceeding through strange and confusing states in which the liberating forces seem to be seen as occupying forces. Of course, a guy like Amar, a citizen of the United States but originally from the country in conflict, will be one of those collateral victims.
Two very different scenarios that, thanks to the delicious narrative capacity, agile and at the same time suggestive in its philosophical and political depth, captures and invites us to discover those points of union that end up presenting a synthesis that ends up presenting a harmonious amalgam of ideas about power, justice, ambition and the perception of what humanity today can mean.
You can now buy the novel Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday's surprising debut feature, here: