Imam Salim adopted three boys about the same age with different parents and ethnicities: Dayo of Nigerian origin, Iseul of Korean origin, and Youssef from the Middle East. The first section of the novel follows the boys as young adults in their home on Staten Island. For years Youssef has seen an hallucination he calls Brother, shape-shifting entity that takes the form of different animals. Almost an imaginary friend of sorts, Brother is a constant companion in Youssef’s life and a secret. It took the harder sciences a while to come to such a destabilized point, but Kurt Gödel carried them there only a few years after Haldane’s lecture to the Cambridge Heretics. The classic explanation of his incompleteness theorems begins, in the spirit of Kant’s first Critique, with an unanswerable but necessary question: “If the Barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself, who shaves the Barber?” If he shaves himself, he doesn’t; if he doesn’t, then he must. And so any logical system in which this question can be answered is inconsistent. Where it can’t be asked, the system is incomplete. (A simplification, of course, of Gödel’s legendary method, which involved the “Gödelization” of propositions into prime numbers—a method around which I, regrettably, have not wrapped my head and which I cannot explain.) This categorizing impulse, tending toward the creation of smaller and smaller divisions of objects and concepts, created a situation in which what is could not be defined with enough certainty to decide what ought to be done about it, and the once-so-obvious division between description and ethics crumbled. Friedrich Nietzsche, a devoted reader of Kant, felt the dissolution of this boundary more acutely than any philosopher before, and in response, he collapsed description and ethics into one huge object. And so he wrote that everyone must love their fate, that the only “good” things are those which affirm life rather than deny it, and that his prophesied Übermensch would reach death and yell, “Again!”, because, in Nietzsche’s view, Kant had removed any possibility of an ethics that did not say, “If it exists, then it’s good, without exception.”

MBIt also felt like your editor reciprocated that trust. For instance, the novel’s four parts work within different genres. It’s unusual but it works. Was that your intent? Harris, Elizabeth A.; Williams, John; Khatib, Joumana (2022-05-21). "Writers to Watch This Summer". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-11-03.If we adopt Haldane’s frame of mind, then this is what writers in the 21st Century have to wrestle with, if they are to “understand [their] subject matter.” Immanuel Kant’s philosophy has blown a swath of self-deconstructing rubble into the future of critical philosophy, and science and math after Einstein and Gödel have followed suit.

Khalid’s writing is lyrical, with the precise vocabulary of a poetry and a surveyor’s eye for details, yet Brother Alive never gets lost in its erudition—the prose is delightful and clear ... Ultimately a work of profound sadness as much as political savvy, Brother Alive is a stunning debut.”— Rain Taxi Review of Books ZKRight, and the brothers spend much of the novel trying to figure out how to build anew, how to live. One of the brothers raises himself through survivalist rationality. Another through religion and family, and the narrator studies art and literature to find meaning. They are all trying to locate themselves amid modernity, but in some ways, they are losing themselves to the search, which is how they end up in the city. They want out of their adopted cultures, or rather they reject culture and identity by virtue.

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In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are an inseparable if conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother. Brother Alive is a rigorously intelligent, wholly sensitive, and quietly rebellious work of art, with prose as profound as it is beautiful. What an inspiring examination of the waywardness of life and the grounding of love this story is. What a wise, thoughtful writer Zain Khalid is. What a gift to humanity this book is.’ – Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times -bestselling author of The Prophets MB This makes me think of your fictionalized linear city HADITH where progression at all costs seems to be the MO.