Eden at Dawn Karim Kattan Review

September 19, 2026 Guest Contributor Adult Fiction 0

Eden at Dawn, Karim Kattan’s latest novel, published in English by Foundry Editions this month, begins like a fable as a terrible sandstorm engulfs Jerusalem, sending it ‘into the stone age’ for one relentless summer. The narrator of our tale is an all-knowing sky, ever watching ‘through a variety of windows, dormers, oriels, portholes’. Out of the storm rises two heroes, its ‘babies’, Isaac and Gabriel.

We meet Isaac like so: ‘Here he is: the first man. Deep asleep. Hush . . .’ He is restless, ‘always looking elsewhere’, which at times gives him a ‘demonic appearance’.

And then to Gabriel: a ‘handsome sleeper’ who’s got ‘an intergalactic handsomeness’, which makes the sky’s heart ‘swell . . . with utter, moral joy’.

The sky recounts the boys’ nearly intersecting lives through their upbringing in Palestine. Their childhoods are not chronologically ordered but arranged along rolling emotional highs and lows. Isaac’s first kiss is followed by Gabriel’s dog getting run over by a military Jeep.

Isaac and Gabriel finally meet through a shared connection, sit on opposite sides of the same couch, and play a few rounds of cards. Both are infatuated, but they leave without exchanging information. They stumble into each other after weeks of yearning and hoping, this time unwilling to part. Isaac and Gabriel fall for each other, and their blossoming romance is both intriguing and emotionally compelling, making you curious about where their relationship will lead.

Formality, Intrusions

There is wonderful play between Eden at Dawn’s timeless, Biblical orality and hilarious line-by-line spontaneity. Jerusalem, for example, is described as an ‘idiotic, labyrinthine spider’s twat’, and at the boys’ first meeting, Isaac feels ‘romantic fury’ towards Gabriel and describes (to himself) Gabriel’s hands as ‘slutty’. Daytime contains ‘rinky-dink hours’ compared to the lushness of night-time. Isaac describes a friend’s slow, daily-type of love as ‘awfully vegetable . . . as in a fairy tale’. The narrator’s old-fashioned, almost formal storytelling style is kept from becoming stiff with these bursts of madcap wordplay.

Similarly, the contrasts between supportive friendships, beautiful landscapes, sands sweeping skyward, and the intensity of love shared consistently brushes up against oppression. The occupying Israeli government creates daily humiliations and ‘micro-management’, pseudo-helpful but opportunistic bureaucrats, ‘a whole grammar of ordinary dangerousness’, pleasure cut short, ‘life at minimum viability’. Israel’s modernity is a constant, forceful interjection: ‘the prowess of metal’, the skyscrapers, high tech sand-sucking machines, phones and their death tolls, highways built over obliterated villages. There is an understanding in Isaac that ‘modernity would only come about through his own personal destruction.’

The sky asserts that this story will not end well: ‘Love does not conquer all, and certainly not this administration.’ We’re told the characters are ‘doomed’, and that ‘they knew this, but also didn’t know this.’

This mirrors my own feelings and fears while reading. I know that the lovers’ lives will inevitably be crushed by the constant, increasingly violent intrusions. There is no escaping the narrator’s eye or the ‘omnipotence’ of occupation.

Writing the Inevitable

There’s something both hopeful yet grievous about reading Isaac and Gabriel’s love story. Inevitably, the reader becomes a passive witness, waiting for the force that will drive the two men apart, powerless to influence the ending.

Karim Kattan’s choice of a timeless narrator lends itself to optimism, even in tragedy. There is the ‘victory of all that is immobile . . . the revenge of silence and slowness’. Without giving too much away, I was left feeling amazed at the fortitude that comes through loving another person. Being loved, yes, but particularly the glory of devoting one’s life to another and how it shields the characters from suffering. Even in endings, there remains the prospect of ‘whirlwinds, angel and soul’.

Eden at Dawn contains stunning writing on desire as something more than just being a simple appetite, especially when it is enmeshed with loss, aspiration and the extreme cost of modernity. Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman from the French, Eden at Dawn was shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Renaudot. Karim Kattan’s publisher, Richard Village, discussed Kattan’s debut novel, The Palace on the Higher Hill, winner of the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie at the BookBlast Book Club last year.