There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
A book review
Elif Shafak’s novel There Are Rivers in the Sky opens with the idea that a single drop of rain could maintain its identity throughout time as it morphs from raindrop to part of a body of water to vapor in the atmosphere to cloud and back again to raindrop. Perhaps it even remembers. This idea is the starting point that ties together King Ashurbanipal, who ruled Assyria from its capital of Nineveh in the seventh century B.C.E., and the novel’s three main characters.
Arthur, a boy from an impoverished nineteenth-century London family, is sent to work in a printer’s shop at a young age, where he encounters a book about Nineveh and becomes obsessed with its artifacts, especially the clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing dating from Ashurbanipal’s time.
Narin, a nine-year-old Yazidi girl is descended from a seer who lived near Nineveh in the nineteenth century. In 1914, she is gradually going deaf while her grandmother shares ancient wisdom from the Yazidi culture, and she looks forward to being baptized in water from the Tigris River.
Zaleekhah, a London woman of Turkish descent who was raised by her aunt and uncle after the death of her parents, is a hydrologist who studied under a professor who believed water had memory. In 2018, she and her husband decide to divorce, and she moves into a houseboat on the Thames.
Each story is steeped in tragedy, but also in the characters’ determination to overcome hardship and pursue goals that are important to them. This goal-oriented focus keeps their stories moving forward as the links between the characters gradually become clear. Along the way, readers learn about Assyrian culture, the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Yazidis, the Iraqi marsh people reviled through the centuries as “devil-worshippers” because of their pantheistic beliefs. Readers may recall that they were persecuted under Saddam Hussain and, later, the ISIS terrorist organization.
If there is another novel that revolves around Yazidi culture, I’m not aware of it. There Are Rivers in the Sky is worth reading for this alone. It will especially please readers who enjoy time-sweep novels portraying particular places and the significance of their people from ancient times into the present.