In “Except the Border,” Elisa Shua Dusapin Redraws a Territory Scarred by Violence

Elisa Shua Dusapin, a novelist known for intimate and award-winning fiction, has left the territory of fiction to write a literary report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The result, “Except the Border,” is a first-person account that the review calls impressively precise.

The project initially inspired both curiosity and concern. How could a writer who was neither a specialist in the conflict nor a reporter find the right position from which to approach one of the world’s longest wars? The question became even more difficult as the atrocities surrounding Oct. 7 reached a bloody peak and the bombardments that followed struck Gaza.

The book’s answer lies partly in Dusapin’s openness about her lack of experience. Rather than conceal that vulnerability, she turns it into a means of approaching people who live with violence, or with its echoes, every day.

The review presents the book as an attempt to confront the region’s extreme violence without claiming a conventional reporter’s authority. Its central reminder is that violence is everyone’s concern. Dusapin is appearing at the Livre sur les quais literary festival in Morges through Sept. 6.