A young soldier lays, dying from his wounds, stirring in a haze of delirium after a bomb has killed all his comrades. Known only as Ali, the young soldier drifts in and out of consciousness, next to a tree, bleeding out, not yet twenty years old—his short life playing like hallucinatory movie, fractured and gauzy, coloring and clouding his mind, rewinding his past, revealing how he came to the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War. 

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, transports us into Ali’s final hours, producing a lyrical fever dream of death—prompting inevitable questions about the morality of war, of life, of violence. Rather than a heavy diatribe about brutality, however, the novel uses its narrator’s hallucinatory state to wend around the realities of life during war, outlining in haunting clarity the way violence affects both bodies and minds. This fragmentary effect of Yazbek is hypnotically poetic, and Leri Price’s translation replicates its mesmerizing, melodious cadence: 

So. He was alone. And this tree, which he knew by heart, just as he had memorized the topography of the trees in his village, seemed like the twin of his tree next to the maqam. Light broke in his heart—he considered the resemblance to be a good omen! The tree would protect him, he knew—just as they had protected the maqams and everyone who sought refuge there.

Anchored in spirit by this tree, as Ali lays dying, he fixates on the natural world around him, not only grounding himself as his memories surreally soar around his consciousness, but also grounding readers, inviting them into the scene through rich microscopic detail, holding them tightly through each surge of existential and abstract thought. 

He glimpsed the delicate roots of the grass branching out through the layers of soil, their roots, white, fine, and dense, destroyed by shovels. And he smelled dawn coming off the root tips, and he saw some pink worms tumbling over the edges of the coffin, and he recalled how yielding they were when he used to toy with them between his fingers. Where did that happen? When was it he collected some worms, lined them upon a large rock, and set them off on a race? He couldn’t remember. But seeing the dancing worms accompany him as he fell, he was comforted—and then his vision dissolved. This was the burial ground next to the maqam and its giant tree. Was he still here? Where? What was “here”?

Unfolding over fifteen dense yet quick chapters, Where the Wind Calls Home paints the nuance of pain as it coexists with beauty. “The novel demands perseverance from the reader as the poetry of Ali’s story requires cherishing, reflection, and praise,” Noshin Bokth writes in The New Arab. “Although the carnage of war is precisely felt, the beauty of nature and life also erupt despite it.” 

Chosen as a 2024 Asymptote Book Club selection and a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, Asymptote editor Alex Tan reflects on the novel’s ability to probe and traverse, with great astuteness, the underlying causes of nation’s a civil war. “[Ali’s] disfigurement, with each twist of pain, narrates the plight of a country being killed ‘from within,’” Tan writes. “Though war operates as the novel’s inevitable fulcrum, Where the Wind Calls Home carefully evokes the density of an interior life that exists prior to, and beyond, the machinations of sectarian violence.”

In translation, inevitability is duly heightened—in this case, Price brings through linguistic art a piece of abstraction into book form, bound pages relating the dreams and sorrows of a person (a history, a community) across the globe.