Book overview
Told through contradicting, unreliable narrators and almost entirely in dialogue, Seyed Qader Hedayati's GABOR fuses the experimentation of George Saunders with the absurdist satire of Joseph Heller to deliver a seldom explored portrait of Kurdish boyhood and friendship under the anarchy of occupation.
In a Kurdish village under military occupation, a group of boys scrape together their savings and buy a hand-stitched football to prove they aren't losers to the other kids. When it lands inside the opposing military base, Karim sneaks in and takes it back-only for the soldiers to burn the neighborhood to the ground looking for it. Streets are bombed, homes are raided, snipers take aim at pedestrians, residents are dragged off and imprisoned. As the casualty rate skyrockets, Karim and his friends retaliate by firing junkyard scraps from their slingshots while raging bulls escape slaughterhouses to stampede into warfare.
"Each chapter unfolds like a surreal hero's quest as we follow the children's unstoppable yearnings for things as mundane as a soccer ball and a comic book. I found myself laughing, wincing, and cheering these boys on as they take ever greater risks for the most basic of human needs: dignity." - Aisha Abdel Gawad, author of Between Two Moons, finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
"With its youthful, sympathetic anti-heroes, and their bizarre war over a soccer ball with a hostile army, GABOR, is a strangely compelling account of the absurdity of war and the difficulty of Kurdish identity under occupation"- Alan A. Saeed
Seyed Qader Hedayati is one of the leading experimental novelists in contemporary Kurdish literature. His novels include The Echo of a Full Stop, The Yoke of Azazel, GABOR, The Grave City, and Bardinah. His critical writings include the essay collections Kurdish Prose and the Change of Form and Stone on Stone, alongside his translation of Bahram Bayzaie's The Truth and The Wise Man.
Chiya Parvizpur is a Kurdish writer and translator working in both Kurdish and English. His debut novel, The Smell of Wet Bricks, was published in the UK, and his second novel, Twenty-Four Seconds of Shehin's Life, received the Kal Literary Prize in Kurdistan. His translations include Ata Nahai's Birds in a Gale and Dealing Helaleh's Destiny, Seyed Qader Hedayati's GABOR, and Jiyar Jahanfard's The Shadeless Border. He is working on his third novel.
Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo is a multilingual writer, translator, and researcher. Her work centers on identity and displacement, with a focus on translating contemporary Kurdish literature into English. Her published translations include Ata Nahai's Birds in a Gale and Seyed Qader Hedayati's GABOR. She holds a Master's in English and Literacy Studies from the University of Stavanger.
