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In a world scarred by indiscriminate bombing, forced starvation, and mass displacement, a nameless survivor lies crushed beneath the rubble of a bombing—alive, but barely.
Entombed in darkness with no hope of rescue, he must navigate the thin edge between life and death using only his hearing, sense of smell, and the volatile power of his imagination. Above him a genocide unfolds. Below, in his fragile pocket of air, he begins to witness it in ways no unburied survivor ever could.
As hours blur into days, hallucination and reality weave together. Memories seep through the cracks. Fantastical visions rise from the dust. In this liminal state, he gains a strange, heightened clarity, an almost supernatural insight known only to those suspended between worlds, the mortally wounded who hover in the space where time fractures and the mind sharpens to a blade.
What begins as desperate escapism becomes a haunting chronicle of a people forced underground by violence, a nation living beneath the weight of another’s cruelty. In the darkness, he discovers a grim sanctuary: the rubble is a tomb but also a refuge from the firestorm above.
A wartime tale of resilience amid annihilation, this novel plunges readers into the intimate terror of one man’s confinement and the collective suffering of his shattered homeland. As he reflects, “Being under the rubble is a strange thing. . . . You’re clinging to life not to live, but to defy death. Just because you’re breathing doesn’t mean you’re alive. You’re a ghost, and your homeland is but a ghostland.”
This is the story of a people driven underground not by myth or choice, but by force: “We are subterranean only because others refuse to allow us our place under the sun.”
“Brilliant and harrowing.
Assi’s second novel begins as a silent song of survival and soon
becomes a glorious symphony of the radical imagination.
Rubble is timeless, essential reading.”
—Cara Hoffman, author of RUIN and
The Last Coward on Earth
“Poe’s ‘Premature
Burial.’ Jack London’s Star Rover.
Dostoevsky’s ‘Underground Man.’ Antecedents,
perhaps, to this deeply moving tale of an individual’s hope and
despair after being trapped underground by an endless war. Using an easily
grasped metaphor for the hopelessness of being caught up in the conflict, Assi
buries his narrator alive, then lets him ramble beneath the rubble, meditating
and hallucinating over the world that made him suffer and then brought him down
below, in the rubble. Through all the musings, the memories, and the pain,
Assi’s everyman struggles for dignity. The dignity of a peaceful
day-to-day existence. The dignity of just once having what everyone else takes
for granted. The dignity of not living in constant fear. And finally, if it
comes to that, the dignity of an honorable death. His story defines his
humanity while restoring ours.”
—Allan
Kausch, author of Warehouse Afternoons
“A witness to the hollowing of Palestine,
Assi paints vividly on the inside of its carapace. Art is our final defiance of
horror and death, and there is no better example than this.”
—Meg Elison, author of Big Girl
“Vivid, lyrical, and compelling. Should
be compulsory reading for those who are silent or inactive in the face of
Gaza's huge tragedy.”
—Ghada Karmi,
author of In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story
“The name of the narrator is not
important, because the world in which he lives has been torn apart by the
forces of genocide. Life among the rubble isn't one, and survival is a matter
of making it to the end of the day, and for the voice a matter of making it to
the end of the next sentence. This novella is relentless.”
—Nick Mamatas, author Kalivas! Or, Another
Tempest
“Rubble is a tour de
force, a remarkable journey of the besieged and restless mind. Trapped under
the ruins of a bombarded cityscape, the narrator, like Samuel
Beckett’s locked-in antiheroic heroes, exists on memories and
absurdist flights of fantasy. In the narrator’s own words, ‘The
secret to surviving under rubble is to set your imagination free.’”
—JJ Amaworo Wilson, author of Damnificados
and Nazaré
“How does one wile away one’s
time when lying buried under tons of debris from a bombed apartment building?
That would seem to be an inappropriately facetious question except that it
matches the tone of Seraj Assi’s forceful new novel Rubble,
in which the entombed hero often relies on wit to alleviate his misery. Rubble
gives us a searing description of ethnic cleansing from the viewpoint of a
victim who in his last moments is someone whose free roaming thought is both
nearing annihilation and verging on everything. ”
—Jim
Feast, author of Karl Marx Private Eye