Literature and Fiction · Hardback

Ulysses II

Kristian Klausen

The Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani was killed in a bomb attack in Beirut in 1972. Israeli intelligence claimed responsibility; they had placed an explosive device under his car, which detonated when Kanafani turned the key in the ignition.

This novel imagines a universe in which Kanafani escapes, flees to Norway and rents a dormitory with the Alsaker couple in Drammen. Living with them, and wandering around the small town, he gets the idea for an epic novel about his Palestinian people.

Ulysses II is an ambitious literary experiment, which examines what would happen if the Jewish protagonist in James Joyce's Ulysses were rewritten as a Palestinian.