Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.

Not since Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut has a female movie star offered such an awkward portrayal of sex as Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. The movie is meant to be daring, a Last Tango in Paris for our time, but its essential premise would work in a Douglas Sirk production: A sexually frustrated, long-married woman accepts her fate until a stranger comes to town and puts everything at risk.

What Kidman—as Romy, the CEO of a soulless corporation—dreams of and seeks out in online pornography is the experience of being sexually dominated. Not the most obscure of sexual fantasies, but for the movie to work we must understand this kind of sex as so shocking, so unnatural, that we are being given a privileged glimpse at something few decent people have seen before. What follows is a yoga class’s worth of heavy breathing (Romy’s) and a salute to the kind of soft-core porn that we haven’t seen much of in the past quarter century.

Romy’s life and world are sketched out in the first act in a way that makes her seem like an alien, but we are apparently meant to see her as an ideal. She’s married to the wonderful Jacob, a theater director who really respects her but who, for the 19 years of their solid, loving marriage, has never once brought her to sexual ecstasy. This might be believable except that, in the greatest bit of stunt casting of the past decade, he’s played by Antonio Banderas, who has been fulfilling sexual fantasies for more than 30 years. He manfully takes on the material and is good as the kind of sensitive and enlightened man who could never debase his wife in any way—this is Romy’s cross to bear. All of this—and her creepy home life, in which she makes a hot breakfast on weekdays and then puts “Mommy loves you” notes in her daughters’ backpacks before school, although one of the girls is a smoker who looks to be about 17—might as well have been presented as a series of storyboards, because no care has been taken to make any of these characters or their emotional and material circumstances remotely compelling.

Just when you think you might die of boredom, the oxygen masks drop and Harris Dickinson arrives in the role of Samuel, a member of the new class of interns at the company. He is the knight errant of the film, there to relieve both the audience’s tedium and Romy’s dry spell. His performance is so layered and interesting that you realize a great actor can rescue almost any script. Samuel is a chancer and a charmer, transparently uninterested in the intern life, his eye out for ways to subvert its structures. He quickly locates Romy as a means to a bit of fun. He stands too close to her, asks her personal questions, never acknowledges her as the most powerful person in the company, and soon figures out what she wants.

He manages to have a private meeting with her, and listens to her tell a story of entering corporate life. It was a “gruesome” process that involved solving “math formulas,” she says: “One of the questions was how many ping-pong balls would fit in that specific room.”

Girl bosses are going to girlboss, but math is always going to be hard. Samuel quickly calculates how many ping-pong balls would fit in the room they’re in, and she looks at him with new regard. Stay in school, girls!

Samuel’s boldness and command of Algebra I soon lead to their kissing, a passion born partly of his assertion that “I think you like to be told what to do,” and the affair begins. Don’t expect a frank accounting of what sexual domination and submission look like, because one of the more outrageous demands he makes of Romy is telling her to get on her hands and knees (apparently for some kind of … sex thing). After a considered pause, she assents, as though she’s Edmund Hillary boldly deciding to climb Mount Everest.

The movie turns on the idea that Sam has ultimate power over Romy because he could report what they’ve been doing to HR. “They could fire me,” she says, frightened. But his true power does not involve work politics. It lies in the fact that she’s become sexually dependent on him because he’s the first person to give her sexual pleasure in almost 20 years. There’s also a chance that his boldness and unpredictability might be signs not simply of his unsuitability for corporate life, but of something more sinister, even dangerous. He spends his free time skulking on the office’s balcony, wearing a giant jacket and smoking, a serpent among the ambitious interns. There’s a very good moment when we—and Romy—learn that he’s not just involved with her, but also with her assistant, which makes her wild with anger. Romy’s the CEO, but Samuel’s the boss.

Will this affair ever end? Or more to the point, will the movie? Yes and yes, for though its clear intention is to reveal that women in their 50s are full of sexual desires as various and urgent as those of the young, the film comes up with a 1950s-style answer to why Romy wants what she wants: a hinted-at childhood sexual trauma, the implication that her desires are problematic, and can be corrected if the trauma is healed.

The affair ends with the sensitive, cuckolded husband once again taking it in the shorts. Jacob confronts Samuel and they fight in front of Romy, but soon enough they’re sitting in the living room nursing their bruises with bags of frozen peas, which Mom has given them. Jacob is trying to explain that “female masochism is a male fantasy” to Samuel, but just as the gender theory heats up, he experiences a panic attack (never have we known him to be a victim of panic attacks but—to stand outside the moviegoing experience and inside the movie-writing experience—it must have worked in the room). The attack is resolved only when Samuel comes over, gently rubs his back, and talks him down while Romy sits on the couch near him. You think: threesome?

But it’s blessedly Act III, and things are starting to roll up. The panic attack prevents anyone from kicking off some age-gap discourse, and Romy quickly sorts out her problems, getting rid of Samuel by finding him a job at Kawasaki in Japan. (The rest of the interns have to stay in the claustrophobic office; Sam wins again.) If only she could dispatch her sexual impulses to Japan, too. What is to be done with her desires?

Early in the film, Romy tells her assistant that she was “named by a guru” and raised in many cults—“cults and communes”—and we see her undergo EMDR therapy in which meaningful images flash past her eyes. While tearfully confessing all to Jacob, she explains that she has tried therapy to kill the kink; nothing has worked. Successful girlbosses don’t want sexual domination! They want nice, normal sex, and through cleansing talks with a loving and patient husband, they can find it. What Romy has isn’t a kink; it’s a pathology, a pretty reactionary stance for the film to take, given its intention to shock us with the unthinkable.

By far the worst part of this terrible movie is the decision to give Romy a special sound to make when she’s having a real—instead of a fake—orgasm. This sound is a loud, growling grunt meant to suggest ecstasy but sounding more like the noises a character makes when he’s about to be transformed into a werewolf. In the final scene, Romy and Jacob are in bed together in a dreamy light, engaging in a healthy act of marital sexual congress. How can this ever be fulfilling to Romy, now that she’s discovered doggy style? Because a small accommodation has been made: As things heat up, Jacob very gently—as though he is shielding her from strong sunlight—places his hand over her closed eyes. Can this mild gesture toward her dangerous fantasies ever bring her the kind of pleasure she experienced with Sam? Apparently so: We are grunted out of the theater.    

My local independent bookstore has a corner devoted to what it calls “Palestinian Stories.” The small display of books, which went up in October 2023, is a grim collection of mostly nonfiction titles, such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 and Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. The smattering of novels are largely by Palestinian American writers, among them Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses, both bleak multigenerational epics of exile and grief.

You can feel the weight that these books have to carry, each bearing the “pressure” to tell “the human story that will educate and enlighten others,” as the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad recently wrote in her book Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Because Palestinians are a people frequently reduced to a problem, the impulse to testify on their behalf is natural. But art that begins with such a mission is not art that is likely to surprise or entertain. Didacticism often results in fiction mostly inhabited by heroes and beautifully tragic figures: the Palestinian grandmother who tightly grips the key to the ancestral home that she lost; the young Palestinian American woman who returns to the occupied lands and feels, for the first time, her people’s struggle; the deracinated doctor in Beirut or Kuwait or Paris, unmoored and overwhelmed by longing.

Especially in this past year of mass death in Gaza, writers want to humanize Palestinians. They need to humanize Palestinians. And maybe hoping, as a reader, to also encounter occasions to laugh is obscene. But a new debut novel by a celebrated Palestinian American playwright responds in a startling way to the burden that Hammad described—by shrugging it off. In Too Soon, Betty Shamieh isn’t trying to educate or enlighten. I was taken aback when, as we talked, she described herself as essentially writing “fan fiction.”

What Shamieh meant is that she creates stories to entertain herself, as a kind of wish fulfillment. Her plays—she has written 16—have something of this quality too. In Malvolio, produced by the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2023, she took the tragic fool of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night—who is tricked into thinking that the noble lady he serves, Olivia, is in love with him—and gave him a sequel that ends in marriage and triumph over his tormentors. Shamieh has rejiggered Palestinian characters in a similar spirit in other plays, making them irreverent and flawed instead of avatars of victimhood, carnal where they tend to be portrayed as saintly. In fan-fiction mode, she plays with genre, which gives her a structure to complicate. With Too Soon, she told me, “More than anything, I wanted to create a Palestinian American Sex and the City.”

[Read: Everyone should be reading Palestinian poetry]

The novel, which opens in 2012, has all the beats (and some of the cliché and cringe) of a romantic comedy—one that unfolds partly in the West Bank. In Shamieh’s classic marriage plot, an indecisive woman is approaching her 40s and trying to pick between two men, each of whom represents a distinct path for her. Yet the protagonist, a theater director named Arabella who shares much of her biography with Shamieh, is an antihero. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants to America, Arabella is both confused and demanding. She wants to pursue Aziz, a man descended from her clan who is volunteering as a medic in Gaza and who offers her the prospect of being the good Palestinian, making babies for her people—a life decision that would also be politically sound. But she discovers that she has feelings for Yoav, an Israeli American theater friend she has known for nearly 20 years, who represents the independent life she has made for herself in New York City; he doesn’t want kids at all. Arabella is not an emblem of anything—she can be self-righteous, self-deprecating, petty, lustful. And she’s funny. I’m not sure how she would feel about being tucked among the other “Palestinian Stories.”

“Don’t we all know that we’re kind of terrible?” Shamieh asked me, as a Palestinian American Carrie Bradshaw might. “I’m just in touch with the fact that I’m that way.” But she wondered aloud whether other people know this about themselves too. “Sometimes I feel like I’m playing truth or dare, and nobody’s really actually telling the truth.”

I met Shamieh one day in early November at a French brasserie called Marseille in New York’s theater district, a favorite spot of hers where she had many post-performance glasses of wine during the two decades she spent working Off and Off-Off-Broadway after graduating from the Yale School of Drama in 2000. I expected her to be as brash in person as Arabella is on the page. “If you were thinking about hating me already, don’t worry. You’re in great company,” Arabella assures the reader in the very first paragraph. “Also, try as you might, you can’t hate me as much as I hate myself.” But Shamieh, a curtain of long black hair sweeping down one side of her face, conveyed calm and even a little shyness, explaining, “I’m older, and I’m a mother.” In her 40s, she has a 10-year-old son and now lives in San Francisco.

From the novel’s start, Arabella resists her Palestinian identity. She’s not one to sign petitions. She’d rather be recognized for her unique productions of Shakespeare: “I staged comedies as if they were tragedies and vice versa” (a good summary of Shamieh’s work as a playwright as well). When she is featured on the cover of American Theatre magazine and later learns that this was purely because the editor was looking for a way to honor Edward Said, the Palestinian American intellectual, Arabella is furious: “I was chosen not for the art I made but for the art I made while being Palestinian. I had done everything in my life to never feel I got a leg up because magnanimous liberal white people felt sorry for me.”

Asked to direct a production of Hamlet in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Arabella hesitates at first. “I have zero desire to return to Palestine,” she tells Aziz the first time they speak, after their grandmothers have set them up. She finally takes the job because she hopes to impress the British theater company sponsoring the project. And because she wants to test the chemistry with Aziz.

Arabella’s identity crisis is one that Shamieh understands. She was the first Palestinian American playwright to have a production premiere Off Broadway, and the responsibility of representing the Palestinian or Arab perspective on the New York stage felt daunting, she told me, especially as she worked throughout the War on Terror years. She certainly was not interested in producing “agitprop,” she said; instead she studied Neil Simon’s comedies so she could emulate them. Just before she started writing Too Soon, she had made a decision to try writing for television, like many of her playwright friends. She was ready to go for the money—until, that is, she found herself caught up in the story of Arabella, a single woman in her mid-30s who wants to settle down but can’t figure out who she is.

“The only way I could deal with my fear of being pigeonholed and limited and diminished by my ethnicity was to write about my fear of it,” Shamieh told me. “That’s the only way I can process it and laugh at it.”

[Read: I am building an archive to prove that Palestine exists]

The ribald humor, the over-the-top-ness that she brings to describing this struggle, reminded me—surprisingly—of mid-century Jewish American writers, especially Philip Roth, navigating between the poles of Jewishness and Americanness with a lecherous grin. I thought back to a hotel-room encounter at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint. Alexander Portnoy is in Israel, wrestling on the floor with a hearty young woman from a kibbutz. He is attracted to her strength and repelled by it, wanting to conquer her but also to be her—and, to make things even more Freudian, he realizes with a jolt that she reminds him of his mother. The scene, in all its violence and absurdity, reveals the subterranean tensions between Diaspora Jews and Israelis. In Too Soon, Arabella spends days in hotel rooms in Jerusalem and Ramallah with Aziz, having sex and eating takeout hummus and skewers of shrimp. At one point, mid-fellatio, she discovers scars from bullet wounds on both of his legs—the work, it turns out, of Israeli snipers. She wants to talk about what happened; he doesn’t want her to stop.

The novel is full of such moments, when Arabella’s own urges collide with a sense of obligation to something greater. She is drawn to the idea of Aziz, as he is to the idea of her—propagating and making their grandmothers happy. Shamieh told me how familiar this aspect of tribalism felt. Her family is descended from Christian Palestinian clans that lived for centuries in a village that eventually became Ramallah. During the decade leading up to the Six-Day War, in 1967, most of the members of her family scattered to a few different cities in the United States, including San Francisco, where Shamieh was born and grew up. But the descendants remained in a kind of “time warp,” Shamieh said, gathering annually at an enormous convention, in part for the purposes of pairing up young descendants. “I would say maybe 95 percent of my cousins married people who cannot speak Arabic and have names like Betty and are completely American, but are from our clans,” Shamieh said. She went too because “it seemed easier than dating.”

But she felt an inner conflict, which makes its way into the novel. “I lived in the space—that stasis—between being pushed and being pulled,” Arabella explains. It leaves an opening for self-aware scrutiny of the narratives that prop up a person’s sense of identity and community. One Manhattan scene, in which Arabella secretly seeks out the mother of Yoav, her Israeli American love interest, lands in an unexpected place. The mother, Indji, is an Egyptian Jew who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and found refuge in Israel before coming to the United States. To gain her confidence, Arabella pretends to be Jewish (a hokey contrivance that Shakespeare would have approved of), and Indji shares the story of her banishment. The tale tilts Arabella’s perspective. “I fretted over the plight of Palestinians only because I was one,” she reflects. “Had I been born Jewish, I would have been a Zionist, perhaps a militant one. I would have insisted we had a homeland. I would have wanted it secure. By any means necessary.”

It’s a vertiginous moment for Arabella—and for the reader, too, in a post–October 7 world in which both Palestinians and Israelis have rewound the tape on their own stories all the way back to their most elemental and least accommodating versions: the Nakba versus the Holocaust. “Inviting a competing history into your worldview is disorienting,” Arabella says. “It flips a switch in your brain and your vision suddenly becomes kaleidoscopic. The shards of your people’s history are true and clear, but they don’t coalesce into a neat picture of saints and sinners.”

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said famously revealed the ways that Western literature had depicted Arabs as exotic, backward, irrational, and in need of guidance—portrayals that served, consciously or not, to justify a colonial mindset toward them. But Said’s analysis also posed an implicit question that it didn’t answer: If these writers robbed Arabs of their full humanity, how can literature restore it—without, that is, simply creating characters who are the noble inverse of the ones Western writers invented?

Shamieh’s novel would be comfortable on romance-fiction shelves, but the longer trajectory of her dramatic work points to her deep concern with this question. She came of age in the 1990s, during the optimistic period of the Oslo Accords—a time, she told me, when Said and the conductor Daniel Barenboim could create an Israeli-Arab youth orchestra, for example. In 2003, Shamieh herself helped found a Jewish and Arab American theater collective called the Semitic Root. The defeatism that has come to define the way that many young people today perceive the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is not really part of her vocabulary. And as we sat and talked, I sensed an unwillingness to delve too deeply into the mess that is the region’s politics; that’s not what has motivated her.

[Read: Stop doomscrolling about Israel and Palestine—read these books instead]

What propels her instead is the idea of creating characters and stories that confound expectations—including, occasionally, her own. Early in her work on Too Soon, Shamieh realized that her marriage plot needed to be multigenerational, pulling her back toward what she had resisted as a fusty Palestinian genre. Interspersed between Arabella’s sections are the first-person narratives of her lively grandmother Zoya (who on the boat to America manages to steal a moment of transgression with a man named Aziz, actually the grandfather of the Aziz whom Arabella will meet—again, Shakespeare would approve) and then of her mother, Naya (who bridles at an arranged marriage, immerses herself in African American culture, and grows an afro). “I thought I was writing Sex and the City,” Shamieh told me, and then “it was as if Carrie Bradshaw’s grandmother shows up, and she’s like, ‘I survived the potato famine and I didn’t have a great time on the boat to Ellis Island being a single woman, and that’s why you like shoes and are obsessed with men.’ ”

These women are all antiheroes of a sort, especially when set against figures in other Palestinian works. Shamieh mentioned one largely overlooked 1974 novel by the Palestinian Israeli writer Emile Habiby, which she looked to as a rare precedent for its profanity and satire. The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist is a picaresque story of a Palestinian man stumbling through the wreckage of the 1948 war out of which Israel emerged. He finds himself in surreal situations (including an encounter with an alien from outer space), always trying to make the best of them—and somehow always falling deeper into a hole. “He’s trying so hard and doing everything and still failing,” Shamieh said.

This uphill-battle swashbuckling is what animates Shamieh in her dramatic work too, which pretty consistently features norm-breaking women who cause havoc. One of her most successful plays, Roar, appeared Off Broadway in 2004, starring Annabella Sciorra as a Palestinian woman named Hala. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, she incites quarrels and betrayals among family members who are driven, and often defeated, by unabashed sexual desire and a hunger to assimilate in bold ways (the teenage protagonist of the play, Hala’s niece, is a blues singer). “Roar has these women who are in your face,” Samer Al-Saber, a theater professor at Williams College who is compiling a selection of Shamieh’s plays into a book set to be published next year, told me. “They are funny. They are constantly discussing what potentially could be considered dirty laundry. They are fighting with each other, against each other, and for each other. And in that way, it is not the typical minority story.” By bucking conventions, Al‑Saber added, Shamieh is also resisting the demands of the market.

Shamieh told me that in writing such characters—her “crazy women,” as she put it—she also managed to avoid the traps set for her by the wider culture’s perception of Arab Americans. She could have done the expected, she said, and written plays about, for example, honor killings, a persistent problem in certain Arab communities. But she worried that she would be reinforcing stereotypes; by not creating submissive and oppressed women, she could upend them. At the same time, she was writing characters whom she not only knew—women like those in her own family—but was more comfortable sharing with a non-Arab audience.

Arabella also chooses a third way at the end of Too Soon, and (spoiler alert) her rejection of Aziz was particularly striking to read, because her rationale sounded like something Shamieh herself would say. “Unlike Aziz, I wasn’t searching for a point to life,” Arabella says. “I was looking to feel enthralled by it.” Shamieh actually did say something like this to me, though it was more grounded in the challenge and opportunity of being Palestinian. “I feel like my bent as a human being is towards joy, towards connection, towards optimism,” she told me. “But I happen to have been born to people who don’t have much at this point to be optimistic about.”

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “A Palestinian American Sex and the City.”

A century after your death, what traces of your life will remain? Perhaps someone might find discarded clothing or a few boxes’ worth of cherished effects: china, jewelry, a watch, a toy. Your signature on official forms may linger, along with plenty of photos, likely in an outdated file format. What will these scattered items say about you? Even if everything from your time on Earth—every letter, text, tax filing, piece of furniture, and knickknack—were to be preserved, would you be confident that a researcher drawing on your personal archive could accurately describe the kind of person you were, or understand the life you led? Would you want them to speak for you?

Now consider how little of consequence actually survives the churn of human affairs. Mold eats away at diaries and letters. Technological failures and fires swallow family photos. Natural disasters displace neighbors. War annihilates the keepers of memories. The constellation of small things that make up a life is blown apart so easily that historians, biographers, and archivists make accounting for these commonplace losses part of their process.

But there are other ways to reconstitute a person’s life. Fiction, which thrives on the tiny, telling details most easily lost to time, finds opportunity in these open spaces. Whatever can’t be found can be imagined. Here, many writers have flourished, creating works of historical recovery that seek to excavate the dead and the lost. Novels such as Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail and Patrick Modiano’s pair of Dora Bruder books home in on individual lives and intimate experiences effaced by barbarities or tragedies. But the endeavor to resurrect the forgotten can be fraught—especially when the person being brought back was the victim of a shattering atrocity.

In her new novel, The Rest Is Memory, Lily Tuck tries out this mode. About a decade ago, the writer came across three photos in The New York Times of a 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl named Czesława Kwoka. In the pictures, taken during her imprisonment at Auschwitz, Czesława appears starved and bruised, with a shaved head and frightened stare. The images grabbed Tuck, who cut them out of the paper and kept them. She could find only the most basic information about the girl with the glare: Czesława came from a small village in southeastern Poland; arrived at Auschwitz on December 13, 1942, with her mother; was tattooed with an ID number, 26947; and was executed on March 12, 1943. Everything else was lost.

So Tuck aimed to fill in the blanks. In an afterword, she describes Memory as “an attempt to bring to life a young life tragically lost.” She imagines Czesława’s life as a Polish Catholic peasant through a collection of broad attributes easily extrapolated from what’s known about her class, her time, and her home. Tuck writes that Czesława has a father, Pawel, who poaches game animals and yells; a mother who once fell in love with a pilot; a guard dog who makes her anxious; a favorite orange hen named Kinga; and a youthful crush on a boy with a motorcycle. Tuck presents these characteristics in a series of fragmented present-tense passages, some declarative—“Her mother’s name is Katarzyna”—and some descriptive, such as a passage about her favorite food, the creamy karpatka cake.

But Tuck also attempts to illuminate the particular life of the girl and her family with textural, novelistic details. We learn, for instance, that her father’s laugh “makes shivers run up and down her back,” and that he is missing the middle finger of his left hand from “an accident skinning the wild boar,” which left a stump that still bleeds. Czesława likes to taste the snow on her tongue, loves to play jacks, and reads to her grandmother from her favorite book: Kaytek the Wizard, by Janusz Korczak.

Tuck embeds her fictionalized passages within a panoply of explicitly nonfictional paragraphs, full of footnoted information on Nazi agrarian policy, the 1940 Katyń massacre, and the operations of the Auschwitz camps, as well as excerpts from a book about the prisoner and photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took the pictures that so grabbed Tuck. She quotes from perverse evidence, such as ID numbers, camp records, and estimates of the market value of shaved human hair, and she uses these pieces of corroboration to expand outward. Eventually, the novel grows to encompass a network of victims and perpetrators: Polish aristocrats, other prisoners in the women’s barracks, the famed writer Tadeusz Borowski, and the camp commandant Rudolf Höss, along with his wife, Hedwig.

In these factual sections, Tuck’s voice is sober and unadorned, befitting the overwhelming horror of the subject matter. Set beside the naturalistic fictions, they shock, particularly when Tuck leaps associatively between the two modes. A short description of how the ashes and excrement of the Auschwitz prisoners were dumped into the Vistula and Sola Rivers is immediately followed by a discussion between two girls about swimming—a disturbing evocation of the domestic in the demonic. Tuck denies us the comforts of the novel, refusing to quarantine the real at a safe distance from the fictional. She demands that we consider them side by side, two expressions of the same material.

This approach firmly establishes the context for Czesława’s suffering and death. But per Tuck, Memory is meant to bring her back to life, and here the author stumbles. The details she dreams up for Czesława recur throughout the novel, first as descriptions and then as conversation in the camp, twisted brutally by the circumstances: Her youthful love of karpatka curdles into a reflection on starvation. Yet when juxtaposed against the litany of facts and figures, these inventions are exposed as flimsy, easily dwarfed by the documentation. The more solidly Tuck draws the world around her protagonist, the more uncertain the writer’s picture of her becomes. Surely there was much more to her life than her chicken, her mother, her cakes, and her death. Surely she had bugbears, irritations, and emotional leaps both characteristic of and distinct from those of her parents, her neighbors, and her annihilated countrypeople. But, unable or perhaps unwilling to sufficiently imagine these things, Tuck reduces Czesława to an amalgam of facts, details, and anecdotes—a person viewed from the outside in. The author becomes less novelist than prosecutor, establishing the facts of the case but losing the texture of experience, which is to say: what distinguishes life from evidence.

Bringing the dead to life is no easy task, of course. To take up their voice is to run the risk of effacing it altogether—and when other writers make the attempt, it is typically with an acknowledgment of their limitations. In Minor Detail, released in English in 2020, Adania Shibli tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. She, like Tuck, fractures her narrative, depicting it first from the perspective of the child’s killers and then from the point of view of a fictional modern-day Palestinian woman, whose investigation of the buried incident results in her own death. This recurrence of atrocity is made inevitable, the novel shows, by the laws and restrictions created by those who had committed the crime in the first place.

Shibli’s narrator feels drawn to her subject by a coincidence: The murder occurred on her birthday, 25 years before she was born. Patrick Modiano feels a similar kinship to the subject of his two books about a young Jewish girl who disappeared in a part of Paris with which he was deeply familiar. At first, the Nobel winner had little more information on Dora Bruder than a missing-person’s report, published on New Year’s Eve 1941: a description of a “young girl … age 15, height 1 m 55,” with a round face, a sports jacket, and “brown gym shoes.” Dora had defied the curfew and run away from her parents, who were asking the public for help. The description grabbed him, and in his 1990 novel, Honeymoon, he imagined a life for her as a fugitive who survives the Holocaust by meeting a man and fleeing to the south.

Yet this imagined survival was not enough for him. Over the next several years, Modiano continued to investigate Dora’s story, discovering her birth certificate, photos of her family, and, eventually, the record of her deportation to Auschwitz on September 18, 1942, six months before Czesława’s murder in the camp. For his follow-up about Dora, named Dora Bruder after her, Modiano has much more data at his disposal than Tuck, allowing him to include other forms of evidence, such as the letter from a deportee found at a bookstall along the Seine.

Still, Dora Bruder is also filled with many qualifications; perhaps might be the author’s favorite word. There is too much he doesn’t know and can’t ever find out—including where Dora went when she ran away. “I shall never know how she spent [those] days,” he concludes, “a poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her.” This gap, this absence, is Dora Bruder, and by refusing to fill it, Modiano allows the absence to testify on her behalf: She hid, she lived, and for a time she was a human being who transcended the incomplete image of her conjured by all this evidence. Her escape from the author stands in for a greater spiritual liberation; wisely, he lets her get away.

In Memory, Tuck too seeks knowledge she cannot gain. But rather than acknowledging this unfixable emptiness, she attempts to patch it over with her ultimately insufficient inventions, creating a fiction that, when surrounded by so much indisputable fact, can only collapse inward. Some holes can’t be filled, and no writer, no matter how skilled, can return their subject to anything truly resembling life.