Brother Alive

Product Information

ZK That’s how it functions. It’s based on the Saudi prince MBS’s NEOM, a real-life economic and politically progressive city that he conceived. Not that NEOM is post-identity or race, it’s not that it isn’t inherently discriminatory, it’s that if you can afford to buy in, then you will be forgiven for your identity, your supposed flaws. Welcomed. Their investor presentations use quotes by James Baldwin alongside ones from the prophet Muhammad, which is part of why I called my city HADITH. No ideology should get in the way of capital, in fact, any ideology can be co-opted, because for him capital is simply the only way of ensuring progress. This wildly ambitious novel seeks to break new ground in big-issue territory like provenance, race, class, birth and rebirth . . . Take note of Zain Khalid’s name.”— Jane Graham, Big Issue (UK)

Often, in those who follow his directives—consciously or not—this division between understanding and rendering beautiful takes the shape of a division between content and expression: Imagine Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s gorgeous descriptions of absolutely bleak countryside Armageddons, Chris Abani’s masterful poetics of torture and war. The description of the book and the write-up introducing this book here on Goodreads does a fairly good job of summarizing it. We have a man, Iman Salim, who is raising three young boys, Dayo (of Yemen extraction) Iseul (Korean), and Youssef (undetermined but Middle Eastern) in his apartment which also doubles as a mosque. He is a radical Iman with ties to Saudi Arabia where the boys were all born. Oh, and let's not forget that one of the boys has an imaginary (??) friend that follows him to adulthood and beyond. Brother is like another character.ZK Point in case. My editor felt the book would flow better without that character and their storyline. He was right.

Takes the reader from Staten Island to Saudi Arabia on a journey into a unique madness . . . Khalid’s writing is lyrical, with the precise vocabulary of a poetry and a surveyor’s eye for details, yet Brother Alive never gets lost in its erudition—the prose is delightful and clear . . . Ultimately a work of profound sadness as much as political savvy, Brother Alive is a stunning debut.”— Brian Watson, Rain Taxi Brother Alive is a stunning achievement—conceptually daring, endlessly surprising, and rich with moral and intellectual questions that match the beauty of Zain Khalid’s prose and the fullness of his imagination."— NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award judge Jessamine Chan In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are an inseparable if conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother. Brother Alive feels like the first work of fiction since the beginning of the pandemic that reflects the mood of the city . . . This book, so focused on the past, sometimes seems to have little optimism for the future. But some of Khalid’s best writing comes when he has Youssef wax eloquent about whatever’s on the horizon. Even though Brother Alive is far from hopeful, wrestling with intellectual and political energies that seem to have no appropriate outlet, Youssef, and his author, maintain a sense of delirious wonder throughout. It’s a very New York quality: Every so often, the cynicism falls away and the sentiment—the affection that keeps us in this worn-out city—shines through.”— Jonah Bromwich, Atlantic That is, each image represents, for Haldane, a piece of “the case against science.” But he is less interested in this type of ethical judgement than in the more immediate question of how to react to the changing nature of scientific practice. Regardless of what he expects from scientists themselves, though, he demands with blunt precision that artists understand the world in which they live and, whether what they see fills them with pessimism or optimism, to render that world beautiful to those with whom they share it.Gorham, Luke (2022-07-01). "Brother Alive". Library Journal. Archived from the original on 2022-11-27 . Retrieved 2023-11-01. This impression is made full-bodied by the characters' constant questioning of the validity of their sentiments, their fury and indignation, as well as their convictions. Naturally, this leads to a further splintering of reality, demanding deeper meditation on the placement of the self in a capitalist world, which is known to operate in stark contrasts. Breaching the gap requires the invention of grey space, facilitated by a sedated morality.

This wildly ambitious novel seeks to break new ground in big-issue territory like provenance, race, class, birth and rebirth … Take note of Zain Khalid’s name.”— Big Issue (UK) Brother Alive by". Publishers Weekly. 2022-05-13. Archived from the original on 2023-06-23 . Retrieved 2023-11-01. This categorizing impulse, tending toward the creation of smaller and smaller divisions of objects and concepts, created a situation in which what is could not be defined with enough certainty to decide what ought to be done about it, and the once-so-obvious division between description and ethics crumbled. Friedrich Nietzsche, a devoted reader of Kant, felt the dissolution of this boundary more acutely than any philosopher before, and in response, he collapsed description and ethics into one huge object. And so he wrote that everyone must love their fate, that the only “good” things are those which affirm life rather than deny it, and that his prophesied Übermensch would reach death and yell, “Again!”, because, in Nietzsche’s view, Kant had removed any possibility of an ethics that did not say, “If it exists, then it’s good, without exception.” But there is something rotten under the surface and has been ever since the boys were born, even before, this plan. At least one of the three boys along with the Iman has a disease. It is at this point that the novel shows its genre-bridging features. I would suggest that it qualifies as science fiction, although the book is not labeled as science fiction. ZK Actually, I’m kind of done with many of these themes. I’m no longer interested in telling a story that in any way mirrors my own journey. Rather, I am writing almost archetypal stories that are less rooted in place, and perhaps more rooted in the surreal. There are a couple of stories I’m working on now that are entirely surreal—I have a short story coming out about a constipated despot, who thinks that her constipation is evidence of her looming death. I’m interested in realism too, but an entropic reality, beauty in the recognition that anything can happen—and a lot does.

About the Author

Howell, Jonah (2022-07-08). "Haldane's Demand: On Zain Khalid's "Brother Alive" ". Cleveland Review of Books. Archived from the original on 2023-09-26 . Retrieved 2023-11-01. These themes—political cynicism and forgetfulness—define New York right now. Where Whitehead’s 2001 New York was a city that came together, determined to hold on to its past, New York is now a place where turnout for the last mayoral election hit a record low and the words Never forget have been traded in for a shared sense of amnesia that clouds the loss of the more than 40,000 New Yorkers (and counting) killed by COVID. They’ve received no museum, no sacred memorial. To an extent, that’s because the pandemic doesn’t come with an end date. It’s also because this time, instead of going to war with some external foe, the war we’ve waged and continue to fight—over masks, vaccine mandates, and nearly every other aspect of the past two and a half years—is with ourselves. It took the harder sciences a while to come to such a destabilized point, but Kurt Gödel carried them there only a few years after Haldane’s lecture to the Cambridge Heretics. The classic explanation of his incompleteness theorems begins, in the spirit of Kant’s first Critique, with an unanswerable but necessary question: “If the Barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself, who shaves the Barber?” If he shaves himself, he doesn’t; if he doesn’t, then he must. And so any logical system in which this question can be answered is inconsistent. Where it can’t be asked, the system is incomplete. (A simplification, of course, of Gödel’s legendary method, which involved the “Gödelization” of propositions into prime numbers—a method around which I, regrettably, have not wrapped my head and which I cannot explain.) Youssef’s dilemma as a character mirrors this New Yorker identity crisis—though he’s deeply engaged with the world, with politics and literature, he cannot find a system or an institution to believe in, or to belong to. So instead, he accepts and even loves Brother—who strips him of the pain of unbelonging by robbing him of his memories. As the book progresses, Brother becomes more powerful, taking more and more from Youssef, leaving him a passive participant in his own life, in thrall to a force he cannot control. ZKI find it tough to separate myself from a book I’m reading or visual work I’m viewing. There's a heightened sense of awareness that I feel, sometimes it is hard for me to cohere what I consume and be able to talk about it in an intelligent way. Brother allowed me to voice that heightened awareness.