| The extras are Ezra Brenner and Maryam"Halim, childhood friends whose paths cross again on the set of a movie filming in the Israeli desert. Soon they are falling in love--and everything is falling apart, for he is a Jew and she is"a contradiction in terms; an Isracli Arab. It is 1976. Since they last met, as hopeful, awkward teenagers, Ezra has been blood-icd by two wars and has lost sight of hisvocation, architecture. Maryam has seen herbrother killed and hcr family has movedto the West Bank in a strained attempt mrcassimilate. The,love story of thcsc twocannot hclp but be as dramatic as the land-scape, as complex as the politics, that sur-rounds them. But the already considerable obstacles arecompoundcd by two more--by two forcesdirecting their actions from behind thescencs: Ezra s uncle, who has made him anambivalcnt informer on the nascent pcaccmovemeut; and Riad, a PLO operative whois pressuring Maryam to commit herself tothe cause. In the beaufful, schizophrenic, madden-ing country that is Israd--a fihn that runsbackward and forward and seems to have no end--Maryam and Ezra struggle to find their roles. A novel of people awakened by love, buffeted by family, wounded by tfistory, The Extras is rich, haunting, and heartrending. Wayne Karlin spent four years in the marines and fought in Viemam. After the war hc received his bachelor s and master s degrees and became a reporter for the Gan- nett newspapers, living in Israel for several years. He currently teaches college in Charles County, Maryland, where he lives with his wife and son. He is the author of two previous novels, Crossover ("Graceful, almost poetic" San Diego Union) and Lost Armies ("Where others overdcscribe and label, Karlin uses words to cvoke people and places. Where others use mundane lan- guage, Karlin peppers his narrative with poetic word portraits. Where others present cardboard, one-dimensional characters, Karlin draws complex, hard-to-classify ones" Washington Post). |
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