"This crisis too, like all others, finally subsided and the alley returned to its usual state of indifference and forgetfullness."

". . . It continued, as was its custom, to weep in the morning when there was material for tears and resound with laughter in the evening. And in the time between, doors and windows would creak as they were opened and then creak again as they were closed." (284-285)




Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988. He is best known for his novels about the evolution of modern Egyptian society. Mahfouz's early exposure to Western literature influenced his innovative development of both the Arabic novel and colloquial Arabic prose. Another inspiration was his lifelong interest in democratic politics and social justice.

Zuqāq al-Midaq (Midaq Alley, translated by Trevor Le Gassick) was published in 1966. It follows the lives of various characters who live and work in the eponymous Cairo alley. Kirsha the café owner is a gay drug addict. Husniya the bakeress routinely beats her husband Jaada with her slipper. Uncle Kamil the good-natured sweets seller is fat and sleepy. Salim Alwan is a wealthy businessman embittered by a heart attack. Zaita is a sadistic cripple-maker held in fear and esteem by professional beggars. Sheikh Darwish is a half-mad former English teacher who left his job after a demotion to roam the streets. Saniya Afify is a middle-aged landlady looking to remarry after years of independence. Dr. Booshy is a self-proclaimed dentist with a shady background. Hamida is a beautiful but selfish (and not to mention sociopathic) young woman obsessed with riches and Abbas the barber is the poor sap in love with her. And so forth. With World War II raging in Europe, Abbas and his friend Hussain Kirsha have left Midaq Alley to work for the British.

That's basically the whole plot right there: the interactions of various over-the-top personalities in a timeless locale only now starting to show the tremors of the twentieth century. The denizens of Midaq Alley are generally apathetic towards politics, viewing the whole matter as little more than a spectacle, and therefore lack any recognition of the social forces at play in their lives. Everything is up to fate and the will of God. Midaq Alley is very much a surface novel where things are as they are, arranged in place by a higher being (whether that's God or Mahfouz himself in the metafictional sense). Unfortunately, this also means that the story is bogged down by the same issues that plagued the Cairo Trilogy. It's exposition overkill and the inability to follow the "show, don't tell" rule which should be engraved on a plaque above every writer's desk.

Now I'm told that Mahfouz's original Arabic is renowned for its eloquence and how it captures everyday speech. Alas, this rarely seems to come through in translation. (And Midaq Alley and the Cairo Trilogy both had different translators.) "Arabic is, of course, a language far different in syntax and sounds from English and gives expression to highly distinctive people and a complex culture," Le Gassick says in his introduction, going on to explain how this leaves the translator with almost too much flexibility with regards to vocabulary and arrangement. "The present translation offers an approximation of how Mahfouz might have expressed himself had English been his native tongue" (xi). The situation is not entirely hopeless, however. I still do recommend the scenic, sporty Miramar, which either had a superior translator or was the product of a good day for Mahfouz. Oh, the travails of the monolingual bibliophile.

"the world's hidden symmetry"

Many years before, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.




Orhan Pamuk (1952-) is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2010 Norman Mailer Lifetime Achievement Award in the United States. With over seven million books sold in fifty languages, he is Turkey's bestselling writer. In 2005 Pamuk was jailed for taking publicly about Armenian Genocide and the mass killing of Kurds, prompting an international outcry and doubts about Turkey's future in the European Union. A statement supporting Pamuk was signed by José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, John Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Three years later the lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, who had brought the charges, was arrested along with several other ultra-nationalists for plotting a series of assassinations. It is believed that Pamuk was among their intended targets.

The tumultuous and fractured nature of Turkish society forms the basis of Pamuk's 2002 novel Kar, (translated by Maureen Freely), the Turkish word for "snow" that is played with throughout the story. We open with the poet Ka's return from exile in Germany to Kars, an impoverished city in eastern Anatolia. He has been assigned by a socialist paper called Republican to report on the recent rash of suicides of "born-again" Muslim girls forbidden to wear their headscarves in schools and other institutions. Though considered a backwater today, Kars is rich in Ottoman, Kurdish, Russian, Georgian, Armenian, and Greek history. In the deep winter snow it is a bleak, run-down place that still boasts magnificent buildings recalling its glory days as a trading hub and cultural nexus. Now masses of unemployed men congregate around television in dingy teahouses and tensions run high. Periodic outbursts of violence are not uncommon. Ka's arrival also coincides with a massive blizzard that cuts Kars off from the rest of the world and creates an environment akin to a pressure cooker. It is a Turkish microcosm, complete with its own mini-coup.

Ka's inquiry opens a veritable Pandora's Box involving not only political Islam, but also radical Islam, Kurdish rebellion, Marxism, secularism, and the clash between traditional and Western values. Despite his past as a leftist student, Ka has no current ideological attachments, which allows him to function as a mediator of sorts between the city's various factions. Meanwhile, he longs for the hand of fair İpek, an old friend who runs a hotel with her father, a retired leftist named Turgut Bey, and her sister, Kadife, the leader of the so-called "head-scarf girls" whose lover Blue is wanted by the state as an alleged terrorist leader. To top it off, a disgraced actor named Sunay has seized power in the name of secularism and nationalism and instituted a brutal crackdown on Islamic and Kurdish activity. He is the closest thing to a villain in this deeply complex tale, as the previously warring political groups temporarily unite in opposition to the military repression. The rich tapestry of beliefs, loyalties, friendships, and love affairs inspires a burst of creativity in Ka, who seems detached from the events surrounding him even as he is drawn further in. A poet longing above all for his own happiness, Ka embodies the difficult relationship between Western notions of art and individualism and his homeland's demand that he take a side. A revered sheik bluntly rejects his desire for a private relationship with a God best revealed in the beauty of falling snow.

We soon learn that the narrator is in fact Ka's novelist friend Orhan, who is himself acting as an investigative reporter some four years later following Ka's murder in Frankfort. Snow is Orhan's reconstruction based on his interviews with the various characters and the notes Ka left behind. This further reinforces Pamuk's exploration of the interaction between fiction and reality and the unfolding of a Creator's hidden pattern. (Note the character Orhan sharing a name with his author.) Sunay uses political theater both to jumpstart his coup (all too late did the audience realize the soldiers were real and the guns loaded) and, later on, as a propaganda tool starring Kadife, who has promised to bare her head onstage in exchange for Blue's release. One of Ka's notebooks reveals a diagram based on the six-sided snowflake - made up of the triple axes of Reason, Imagination, and Memory - the hidden symmetry of the world on which he has positioned all the poems written in Kars. In the center is "I, Ka." Each person is as unique as the snowflake, Ka believes, flourishing for a brief time before fading away.

The rich layers of Snow make for a vivid introduction to contemporary Turkish politics and pressing social issues. I am bothered, however, by what appears to be Orhan Pamuk's appropriation of women's experiences to make a point about Islam v. secularism. I could not find any information on the Web about Turkish Muslim women committing suicide over the headscarf controversy. What I found instead was that the suicide epidemic, which is occurring in Batman not Kars, is a new form of honor killing, often for reasons as trivial and innocent as light flirtation or wanting to see a movie. In anticipation of joining the European Union, Turkey has tightened the penalties for this egregious human rights abuse, which has prompted families to urge their "dishonored" daughters to kill themselves rather than risk losing two children. One method is to lock the girl in a room with rat poison, a gun, or a noose until the deed is done. So maybe there's something I'm missing here, which is entirely possible, but it looks like Pamuk took considerable poetic license, which is pretty disrespectful to the victims. If anyone out there knows more about this topic, please don't hesitate to enlighten me.

There are also problems with pacing. Snow is a character-driven story and as such runs the risk of getting bogged down with naval-gazing. Unfortunately, the trap is unavoided and, as I noted yesterday, the result is an overlong novel (426 pages) that seriously drags. Still, I am glad to have read it but can't say I plan on picking up more Pamuk in the future. To be fair, though, it was a New York Time Book Review Best Book of the Year and counts John Updike and Margaret Atwood among its admirers.

---

Orhan Pamuk's Snow was my reading selection for the month of July. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here. Other participants this month include:

Emily @ Evening All Afternoon
JoV @ Bibliojunkie
Richard @ Caravana de Recuerdos
Sara @ Wordy Evidence of the Fact

Snow Update

Well, as some of you have mentioned, this book goes veeerrrry slooooowly. I'm about thirty pages from the end so I should have my post out today. *drags feet*

"It was hot and humid, the darkness sultry."

. . . It was hard to keep my eyelids open. I wished I could sleep. I wasn't awake enough to fall asleep. And I wasn't really asleep enough to pull myself awake. Trapped in that space between drowsiness and sleep. Somebody once told me that in situations like this, the only option is to adapt. Otherwise, it becomes unbearable. The first step in adapting is to practice forgetfulness. Oblivion.

Rashid al-Daif was born in 1945 in Zhgarta, a region in northern Lebanon populated largely by Maronite Christians. Like many leftist, secular Christians, he spent the civil war in West Beirut, an area known as the "targeted zone" between political and religious loyalties. The experience left him disillusioned with Marxist analytical thought, which felt dry and hollow in the face of history's onslaught. I needed "confession, screaming, and holding pain up in the face of recklessness," he recalled, and subsequently "went back to literature." For only the language of literature, al-Daif found, is as volatile as reality itself. (From the introduction by translator Nirvana Tanoukhi.)

First published in 1986, the original Arabic title of Passage to Dusk is Fus'hah mustahdafah bayna al-nu'as walnawn, which transliterates into "a targeted, or intentional, zone or space, in between drowsiness and sleep." True to its al-Daif's creative philosophy, the story is unstable and constantly shifting. The narrator has returned home after a shell blew his arm off and landed him in the hospital. The building superintendent tells him that his cousin arrived several days ago with his pregnant, widowed sister-in-law and her young son, and that he has lodged them in the narrator's empty apartment. They're still there and he hopes he doesn't mind. But anything beyond that is a waking dream. The narrator spends most of the time in bed, where the feverish heat merges with his PTSD visions in a fugue of unending violence and sexual energy. His voice is muted but his words describe a world dominated by the forces of passion - for faith, party, people - that sweep everyone and everything along in all their tragic senselessness. Beirut is suspended, caught in a zone where the only thing that moves is the cycle of destruction.

At only 100 pages, Passage to Dusk is condensed to what feels like the dream of a single night. Bombs, bloodshed, falling buildings, and sectional warfare have been a universal story throughout the twentieth century, but al-Daif's surrealism is an unusual interpretation. Haunting and evocative, Passage to Dusk is best read in a single sitting to best drive home its visceral impact.

One generation passeth away. . .

"This bourgeois class is nothing but an array of complexes. It would take an expert psychoanalyst to cure all of its ills, an analyst as powerful as history itself."







The above quote would be more appropriate for Palace of Desire, the middle volume of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy which we've been reading since December. Talk about Drama! Final book Sugar Street, however, takes a different tone. Covering the al-Jawad family from late 1930s through 1944, the primary theme is age, its attending anxieties, and the passage of time.

Sugar Street's subdued mood contrasts sharply with the overwrought goings-on of Palace of Desire and the day-in-the-life narration of Palace Walk that was interrupted periodically by bursts of civil disorder as Egypt agitated for independence. Now there is a settled weariness in most of the grown children (Khadija, Yasin, Kamal), while Aisha has sunk into a permanent depression following the loss of her husband and two sons to cholera. Nearing the end of their lives, parents Al-Sayyid Ahmad and Amina are steadily falling into ill health, while World War II and Egypt's tumultuous politics are ever-present in conversation and falling bombs. Meanwhile, the new generation is on the rise, overshadowing even Kamal, who is only twenty-eight at the beginning and already suffering intellectual disillusionment.

Stylish Ridwan, son of Yasin the indiscriminate womanizer, is gay and suspiciously well-connected to various high-ranking members of the Wafd Party. Sixteen-year-old Nai'ma (daughter of Aisha) dies in childbirth early on, shortly after marrying double first cousin (!) Abd al-Muni'm (son of Khadija), the pious and idealistic Muslim Brethren member. His brother and political counterpart, Ahmad, becomes a leftist journalist who defies tradition with his working-class wife and comrade, Sawsan. Even more radical is his acceptance of her as an intellectual equal - exactly the opposite of how his older male relatives, including Kamal, have always viewed women. ("Our class is perverse," Ahmad thinks at one point. "We're unable to see women from more than one perspective.") Although Ahmad seems the most forward-thinking of the two, Abd al-Muni'm is hardly the proto-Taliban a modern reader would envision. Much to Ahmad's annoyance, the Muslim Brethren has appropriated socialism's rhetoric of earthly uplift and transcendental revolution. Needless to say, both movements make the Egyptian government very, very nervous.

There is also Yasin's daughter Karima, but she occupies a secondary role only, perhaps in keeping with the staunch (and hypocritical) conservatism of her older relatives.

At nearly two hundred pages shorter than the previous volumes, the darker storylines of Sugar Street have a tighter impact. Played out against a backdrop of international and domestic crises, the heady lives of the grandchildren and the passing of the older generations compose the most vivid portrait of a time and place Mahfouz has yet given us. All three books of The Cairo Trilogy end with catastrophes: Fahmy's death, the deaths of Aisha's husband and two sons, and the arrests of both Ahmad and Abd al-Muni'm. (And I've just received word that Joe has stolen Yasin's body!) But now there is no follow-up, in perfect keeping with the uncertainty of this later age. Despite an imperfect translation and an over-reliance on exposition, Naguib Mahfouz has given us a fascinating window into recent Egyptian history, as seen through the eyes of a single family. For an indirect sequel, I recommend Miramar, which takes place in the 1960s.

---

The Cairo Trilogy read-along was hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos. Our schedule was:

December 26-27, 2010: Palace Walk
January 30-31, 2011: Palace of Desire
February 27-28, 2011: Sugar Street

"Consider these wonders. . ."

"You're drinking with Yasin. Your father's a shameless old man. What's genuine and what's not? Is there any relationship between reality and what's in our heads? What value does history have? What connection is there between the beloved Aïda and the pregnant Aïda? Why did you suffer this savage pain from which you've yet to recover? Laugh till you're exhausted."


Such are the reflections of young Kamal, the emerging Modernist of Cairo's Abd al-Jawad family whose idealistic spirit differentiates him, for a time, from the rest of his drama-ridden family. Yes, EPIC DRAMZ and MOAR EPIC DRAMZ. These people have Issues.

Palace of Desire has the misfortune of being Book #2 in a trilogy, which is never an easy position. Neither beginning nor end, Book #2 is essentially a bridge between them, continuing with characters and situations from the previous volume but being unable to properly conclude anything, as that is the job of Book #3. In this case, we have already established that the al-Jawad family is dysfunctional in many ways. The only thing for Palace of Desire to do is chronicle how the DRAMZ evolves as the characters age and Egyptian society continues to change in the 1920s.

Perhaps "evolves" is the wrong word. Taking place after the cataclysmic events of Palace Walk, the present feels like a lull. A few conversations between Kamal and his friends is all we hear of Egypt's political situation. Instead, the entire focus of Palace of Desire is the petty goings-on and generally idiotic behavior of the adult family members. Father Al-Sayyid Ahmad takes a young lute player as his mistress, dumps her, and Yavin proceeds to marry her after having an affair with her mother. Khadija seems to do nothing but start pointless quarrels with her mother-in-law. Kamal, the smartest and most levelheaded of the bunch, spends entire chapters rhapsodizing about the neo-Platonic perfection of his beloved Aïda. Really, the book could have lost about 200 pages.

I'm not quite sure what the point of all this is. Unless Mahouz intends to go out with a bang, in which case this is like the eye of the storm or. . . Wait, we have some guests here.

Greetings and rise up my fellow workers! As you may recall, I am Karega and this is Joe.

Hi!

What is the meaning of this? You are interrupting a review of the book in which I, Al-Sayyid Ahmad, occupy the central role! And who's this?

I am Reb Smolinsky. The whole world would be in thick darkness if not for men like me who give their lives to spread the light of the Holy Torah. Respect me, impious goy!

WHAT?! Who are you people?! . . . Oh, by the light of heaven, what happened to you???

OY VEY!

Oh that. I had a date with a shell. But don't worry! The Necronomicon has given me some real nifty powers. You oughta see this trick Ephraim Waite taught me.

I would hesitate to anger him, if I were you. Unless you wish to learn for yourself the horrors of the living prison you see before you, a terrible tragedy loosed upon this innocent young man by the corrupt forces of this so-called "democracy." But I digress. Joe and I have been sent here to bestow upon two deserving men the opportunity of a lifetime. Such upstanding pillars of the community as yourselves have truly earned no less.

You honor and illumine me. May God be generous to you, my good man!

I seize good luck by the horns! See how God rewards such years of learning as mine!

I'll tell it to you straight: Karega and I know of an organization in need of a good religious scholar. One of their primary texts is in Arabic so you Al-Sayyid Ahmad can help Reb Smolinsky out. And trust me the pay's real good. We're talking solid gold here.

At last! The riches shine from me! I am a person among people! Oh, see how God is good to a poor man of the Torah!

I find myself intrigued. Do go on.

Few men will ever get this chance. Our clients are highly selective and insist on a few simple preliminary measures before we can proceed.

Nothing to it. Just a few oaths. Basically you just swear to be loyal and keep your mouth shut. In exchange you get some American beachfront property and all the damn gold you want.

Joyful am I! To God I sing my praises! Two simple oaths I take. Yes, I swear my secrecy and loyalty.

Well, now, this is simpler than bedding a singer in the entertainment district. You have my word on both oaths as well.

But there's more! I hear you fellows have been on the lookout for some female companionship.

I have been advised by my physician to embark upon a more sedate life. However, I find myself unable to comply with such demands, as I am a young man yet!

Yes, yes, a new wife I need! A poor widowed scholar I am! For my study I need a good cook and a keeper of the house who does not nag or curse me out to the streets. I need a servant to support my holy labors. You give me this too? Oh glory! I get a good job and gold and now I help a woman get into Heaven. As the good Torah says, women can get into Heaven only because they are the wives and daughters of men.

That makes perfect sense, now that I think of it. Don't forget the other . . . services they provide us as well. Yes, indeed, women truly exist to make men glad.

All it requires is another oath that you will marry one their women and sire her children. With all this gold, Al-Sayyid-Ahmad, you can more than afford to maintain a second wife. Amina won't like it, but who cares about her opinion, right?

She told me herself that she has no opinions of her own. A most excellent wife she is!

How I envy you! Perhaps I will have such a wife as well.

So we're all on board here? Third oaths all around?

Yes!

Yes!

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Wha. . .?

. . .

Congratulations Al-Sayyid Ahmad and Reb Smolinsky! The Esoteric Order of Dagon greatly appreciates the work you will be doing as scholar and translator of the Necronomicon. And you're sure to love Innsmouth. It's quite a charming little place with plenty of fixer-uppers and lovely ocean views. Good luck!

Iä, Iä Cthulhu! Iä, Iä Dagon!

HELP! HELP!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Yep. These women aren't going to put up with any of their shit that's for sure.

I have to say I rather do feel sorry for them . . . NOT.

---

The Cairo Trilogy read-along is being hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos. Our schedule is:

December 26-27, 2010: Palace Walk
January 30-31, 2011: Palace of Desire
February 27-28, 2011: Sugar Street

"He alone would set their course for them, not the revolution, the times, or the rest of humanity."

She did not understand how her heart could answer this appeal, how her eyes could look beyond the limits of what was allowed, or how she could consider the adventure possible and even tempting, no - irresistible. . . Deep inside her, imprisoned currents yearning for release responded to this call in the same way that eager, aggressive instincts answer the call for a war proclaimed to be in defense of freedom and peace.

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was an Egyptian writer and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. Published as بين القصرين or Bayn al-Qasrayn in 1956, Palace Walk (translated from Arabic by William M. Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny) is the first volume of his seminal Cairo Trilogy that follows the lives and fortunes of three generations of the al-Jawad family from 1919 to 1944. The trilogy is set among the streets of Mahfouz's childhood and, like many of his works, is deeply concerned with the political and social history of Egypt in the twentieth century.

Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, an affluent merchant, is known to his friends as a generous and jovial womanizer with a large capacity for alcohol. At home, however, he rules his family as a stern patriarch in the most conservative Muslim tradition. His wife, timid Amina, accepts his authority without question, despite her literal imprisonment in the home even as al-Sayyid Ahmad spends night after night carousing on the town. Yasin, age twenty-two, is his son by a previous marriage that ended in divorce after Yasin's mother refused to submit to him. His four children by Amina are Khadija (20), plain-faced but sharp-tongued; Fahmy (19), a bright and serious law student; Aisha (16), a blond beauty; and Kamal (10), who is playful and mischievous. Much of the story is concerned with the family's day-to-day domestic doings, from the marriages of the daughters to Al-Sayyid Ahmad's active social life and many lovers. But as Egypt begins to increasingly agitate for independence from Great Britain and English soldiers appear in the streets, events start precipitously downhill to a final, disastrous climax.

Richard's post made an observance so obvious I nearly headdesked. I was thinking and thinking of how to link the family's private lives to the tumult of the outside world. I instinctively grasped the connection but Palace Walk is such a large book with so much going on that I wasn't sure where to begin. It turns out that the extreme male privilege that characterizes the al-Jawad household could also mirror the oppression of Egypt as a whole under British imperialism. To that I would add the weight of tradition, which also grants Al-Sayyid Ahmad almost complete control over the lives of his adult sons, including whether or not they marry or divorce or participate in the independence movement. The personalities of Amina and Al-Sayyid Ahmad, meanwhile, are warped to a pathological extent. Amina is the very definition of a doormat, even assuring her husband at one point that, "My opinion is the same as yours, sir. I have no opinion of my own." And the two sides of Al-Sayyid Ahmad are so divergent it's a wonder they co-exist in the same individual.

Both the sons and daughters strain under their father's repressive rule, yet it's the women who stand out more because their situation is so over-the-top. When Fahmy asks his father about marrying a neighboring girl, and when a friend of his asks for Aisha, Al-Sayyid Ahmad's immediate reaction in both cases in OMG HAS HE ACTUALLY SEEN HER OMG OUR HONOR! It's Handmaid's Tale-level patriarchy, only not made up. Holy Taliban.


The general impression is that these women have never known anything different. But there is something subtle lurking, in contrast to an otherwise exposition-heavy book. There is a scene with Amina on her rooftop garden at the very beginning that stayed with me throughout the rest of the story.

The roof, with its inhabitants of chickens and pigeons and its arbor garden, was her beautiful, beloved world and her favorite place for relaxation out of the whole universe, about which she knew nothing. As usual at this hour, she set about caring for it. . . Then for a long time, with smiling lips and dreamy eyes, she enjoyed the scene surrounding her. She went to the end of the garden and stood behind the interwoven, coiling vines, to gaze out through the openings at the limitless space around her.

She was awed by the minarets which shot up, making a profound impression on her. Some were near enough for her to see their lamps and crescent distinctly, like those of Qala'un and Barquq. Others appeared to her as complete wholes, lacking details, like the minarets of the mosques of al-Husayn, al-Ghuri, and al-Azhar. Still other minarets were at the far horizon and seemed phantoms, like those of the Citadel and Rifa'i mosques. She turned her face toward them with devotion, fascination, thanksgiving, and hope. Her spirit soared over their tops, as close as possible to the heavens. Then her eyes would fix on the minaret of the mosque al-Husayn, the dearest one to her because of her love for its namesake. She looked at it affectionately, and her yearnings mingled with the sorrow that pervaded her every time she remembered she was not allowed to visit the son of the Prophet of God's daughter, even though she lived only minutes from his shrine.

She sighed audibly and broke the spell. She began to amuse herself by looking at the roofs and streets. The yearnings would not leave her. She turned her back to the wall. Looking at the unknown had overwhelmed her: both what is unknown to most people, the invisible spirit world, and the unknown with respect to her in particular, Cairo, even the adjacent neighborhood, from which voices reached her. What could this world of which she saw nothing but the roofs and minarets be like? A quarter of a century had passed while she was confined to this house, leaving it only on infrequent occasions to visit her mother in al-Khurunfush. Her husband escorted her on each visit in a carriage, because he could not bear for anyone to see his wife, either alone or accompanied by him.

Note that her moment of imaginative freedom begins in the context of her religion (a safe place) and moves gradually from spiritual to living transcendence (from safety to the outright forbidden). Nor is her name mentioned for the rest of the chapter, as though Amina now stands for a universal Egyptian "she" looking out through the screens and walls of suffocating custom and, just for a moment, stretching her mind (the only part of anyone that's ever truly free) to encompass something more. I was reminded very strongly of a similar, famous scene in Jane Eyre:

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself on the grounds, when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when . . . I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line: that I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit, which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold. . .

It is vain to say human beings out to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action: and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel: they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, sees this passage, with its sudden break to the crazed laugh of Grace Poole, as indicative of a defect in women writers of the time arising from society's refusal to allow them the full range of human experience. "[Charlotte Brontë] will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot." Amina's passage likewise cuts off abruptly with the reassurance that she is "neither resentful or discontented, quite the opposite." Much as I disagree with Woolf's characterization of Brontë's "deformed and twisted" writing (I think she was overreaching to prove her own point), you can also make an analogous observation of Amina's character, which seems increasingly Stepford Smiler-ish as Palace Walk progresses. Emily's post makes frequent comparisons to the domestic dynamics of Jane Austen (whom I've never read) and discusses how women contribute to their own oppression. Amina later becomes the harshest critic of Yasin's poor wife, Zaynab, who was only married to him after he was caught trying to rape Umm Hanafi the black maid and his father decided it was time he got some legitimate release.

(Umm Hanafi is basically, in American terms, a mammy: a middle-aged black woman with no family of her own who spends her entire life raising and caring for the light-skinned ruling class. When Yasin later tries to rape Nur, another black maid who waits on Zaynab, it's hard not to picture the white plantation son forcing himself on one of his African-American slaves. Now granted, Umm Hanafi is actually, you known, allowed to leave the house, but this also signifies that she is not afforded the "protection" given to wealthy Arab women. Author Kola Boof, who is of Egyptian Arab and black Sudanese descent, writes about race relations today in Africa and the Middle East here and here.)

I saw the women's situation as only one aspect of a society on the brink of some major upheaval. Even the male-dominated push for Egyptian independence involves head-on confrontation with traditional figures, right down to Fahmy's defiance of his father. There are some real undercurrents here and it will be interesting to see how they play out in Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. Al-Sayyid Ahmad is already conservative even by the standards of his day. The encroachment of modernity on his pious household should be interesting, to say the least.

In terms of its prose, Palace Walk differs quite a bit from 1967's Miramar in its more formal tone and emphasis on exposition. Mahfouz both shows and tells to an equal extent. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly - both narrative voice and dialogue have a sort of stiff, timeless quality to them that lacks any distinct voice or realist spontaneity. Almost awkward at times despite a few wonderful passages. Reading the first half would have been a chore if I wasn't fascinated (and repelled) by the portrayal of a foreign culture. The last part is carried entirely by the mounting intensity of the political climate but for 498 pages overall, I can definitely see some readers giving up or skipping ahead (there were some areas where I just skimmed). I have to admit that a thousand more pages of the al-Jawad family is pretty daunting, but I'm all for it.

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The Cairo Trilogy read-along is being hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos. Our schedule is:

December 26-27, 2010: Palace Walk
January 30-31, 2011: Palace of Desire
February 27-28, 2011: Sugar Street

". . . old recollections, dreams of bloodshed, of classes in conflict, books and pamphlets studied in secret meetings. . ."

"I won't believe a word of what you say. You're just mad because Mervat turned you down. And you don't believe any of this rubbish about socialism and equality. It's simply power. If you have power you have everything. And meanwhile there's no harm in preaching socialism and equality to others. Have you actually seen any of that gang walking around in poverty lately, like our lord Omar?"


I continue with my end-of-the-year Middle Eastern theme that began with Wolves of the Crescent Moon and will conclude with Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk next week for Richard's Cairo Trilogy read-along. 1967's Miramar, a short novel, is one of the Nobel Laureate's later works that deals with the social turmoil of post-Revolution Egypt. It was translated from Arabic in 1978 by Fatma Moussa Mahmoud.

Mariana is an aged society woman running a pension (boarding house) called Miramar in Alexandria. Still possessing an air of faded elegance, she often reminisces about the good life and her days as the queen of the salons. The first boarder, her old friend Amer Wagdi, is likewise preoccupied with his bygone time as a journalist in the heady final hours of Egypt's old order, when he mixed with powerful political figures and radical idealists. The third elderly boarder is Tolba Bey Marzuq, formerly a big landowner and prominent government official, now a bitter old man whose property was confiscated by the new regime. For all their past differences, Mariana, Amer, and Tolba are united by their advanced years and detachment from the uncertainty of the present.

Mariana's sole employee is a maid named Zora Salama, a headstrong young woman who fled her native village after her family tried to marry her off to a man decades her senior. She is the object of attention for the three young borders: Hosny Allam, a bored, self-indulgent country squire; Mansour Bahy, a melancholy radio announcer; and Sarhan al-Beheiry, a politically active accountant whose actions betray his true convictions. Despite Hosny's unwanted advances, Zora is having a secret affair with Sarhan, who one day turns up dead after being expelled from Miramar for fighting with a drunken Hosny. Meanwhile, Mansour is on a downward spiral due to a combination of love and politics.

Miramar is essentially a soap opera, as the publisher's copy promises. Yet I hate to describe it as such because it's really not trashy at all. Told from four separate perspectives (Hosny, Mansour, Sarhan, and Amer), it is instead a slice of life in a breezy city by the Mediterranean in the aftermath of great social upheaval. While the old folks seek company and security at the end of their lives, the young people (all under thirty) rush from here to there with seemingly no purpose. Amer can only recall the conviction of his youth while his successor, Mansour, falls just as hard and quickly as Sarhan the ostensible socialist. Hosny, alas, is the one left standing and he is by far the least sympathetic. A free-spending, speed-driving aristocrat with a penchant for prostitutes, Hosny is apparently the only one able to adapt to the new climate, thanks to his interest in purchasing a business from an owner nervous about the government's property seizures. The only characters with any real principles are Amer and Zora. Elderly Amer, however, is largely irrelevant, while Zora is strictly pragmatic (she wants to learn to read and find better work) and also powerless due to her gender, illiteracy, and lack of family ties.

All in all, Miramar is not optimistic when it comes to the success of Egypt's 1952 revolution. The same forces - class, money, male privilege - remain intact while the very people purported to benefit - namely, Zora - have seen little improvement. But given his careless lifestyle, it is doubtful if Hosny's success will last long or come to anything worthwhile. Perhaps Miramar is an expression of concern for a whole generation, despite Zora's hopeful ending.

Miramar is never gloomy, however. It is a fast, roundabout little book with a vivid sense of time and place and a believable cast. Frantic lives play out against a pleasant backdrop of white, beige, and sky blue with frequent visions of the sea and the tired grandeur of an old heiress's mansion. Founded in 331 BCE by Alexander the Great, Alexandria too is but a shade of its cosmopolitan past. Whatever happens, at least we'll always have Alexandria, the mute testament to history's ongoing march.

Click here for Richard's review.

"We are both lost in this strange and unfamiliar city."

In the desert you can see your enemy in front of you, he thought, and you can take him on in a fair contest. But the curse of the city, which is no different from Hell, is that you struggle against unknown enemies, enemies you can't see with your naked eye. Can we struggle against the firewood of Hell that devours us whether we are decent or wicked? I don't think so.


Yousef Al-Mohaimeed was born in Riyadh in 1964 and recognized in 2004 by the Egyptian Journalists Union and Diwan al Arab magazine for his contributions to Arabic literature. 2003's Fikhakh al-ra'iha (Wolves of the Crescent Moon), translated by Anthony Calderbank, is his first book to be published abroad.

Turad, a former Bedouin highwayman, is sitting in a bus terminal in an unnamed city, presumably Riyadh. Marred by a missing ear, he has spent the past several years drifting aimlessly from one menial job to another, often losing out to the cheaper labor of foreign migrants. Then another traveler hands him a file folder, believing it to be his. It contains documentation - investigative reports, diary entries, snapshots - pertaining to an orphaned boy, designated Nasir Abdulilah Hasan Abdullah, found as an infant two decades prior in a banana crate left near a mosque. His left eye was missing, likely torn out by a stray cat. Inspired, Turad will spend the next several hours reflecting on the intersecting lives of Nasir, a eunuch ex-slave named Tawfiq, and himself, as wandering outcasts caught up in the clash of tradition and modernity.

Al-Mohaimeed's sparse prose brings to mind the empty, harsh beauty of the desert recalled so fondly by Turad. Combined with the constant rotating motion of the narrative (from past to present, imagination to reality, first to third person) and the motif of mutilation, the result is an unsettling, dreamlike aura only accentuated by the book's short length (165 pages). But despite the tempting binary of romantic wilderness vs. soulless civilization, the single biggest driving force behind all their lives has been that of religion. Turad's invented story of Nasir's parents reveals a familiarity with the price of disobedience in their still-conservative society. Faith has also been used to justify (in many cultures) slavery and its accompanying abuses, and it was the retribution of a wealthy emir making the hajj that led to Turad's downfall. In fact, the title Wolves of the Crescent Moon refers to both the wolves that tore Turad's ear off and Islam itself (the crescent). At the very core of book, then, is that eternal, universal issue of people hiding behind God.

Although it seems simple enough on the surface, Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a complex, provocative look at how individuals navigate a culture in flux, where reality falls increasingly short of timeworn ideals (if they ever met in the first place). It is the common story of our time, as globalization and rapid change bring opportunities to some, tragedy to others, and disorientation to many.

Thirty-Nine Writers

Beirut39: New Writings from the Arab World
Various Authors
Various Translators
Edited by Samuel Shimon
320 pages
Bloomsbury USA
June 8, 2010



Beirut39 is an anthology of poetry, short stories, and novel excerpts put together by the Hay Festival, an annual literary convention described by Bill Clinton as "the Woodstock of the mind." Since its inception in 1988, the Hay Festival has expanded internationally and become particularly well-known in Latin America. On April 15, 2009, it brought together thirty-nine authors in Beirut, Lenanon. According to a panel of judges, these authors represent the most promising Arab writers under the age of forty. They hail not only from North Africa and the Middle East, but also from the Arab Diaspora in North America and Western Europe. Most write in Arabic, but others prefer French and even English.

As Abdo Wazen explains in the introduction, there is no longer simply "Syrian literature" or "Egyptian poetry." Arab literature is a global phenomenon that reflects the movement of Arab peoples all over the world and their embrace of the Internet and the information age. Many of the writers represented in the anthology are foreign-educated, have lived abroad, and are probably multilingual. Naturally, their work is influenced by myriad literary currents and has moved beyond the ideological molds that characterized their forebears in the '60s and '70s. Young Arab writers are united, says Abdo, by "their tone of protest, and their rebellion against traditional literary culture." They are individualists who "aim to express their personal concerns as they see fit, freely and spontaneously." Abdo also claims that they compose a collective "youthful realist novel, or neo-realist novel, or fantastic novel or post-modern novel," but I think that's a bit much. They're too diverse for that.

Although my knowledge of Arab literature is limited (I've only read The Story of Zahra and Season of Migration to the North), I feel that I just had an amazing introduction to its most current incarnation. Although I enjoyed all the pieces in Beirut39, I have decided to highlight my favorites below.

Abdelaziz Errachidi, from Bedouins on the Edge (translated by Alexa Firat)

An excerpt that initially comes across as a detective story: an elegant car crashes in the Moroccan desert but the occupants are missing. The townsfolk are entranced by the mystery, especially a local outcast known only as al-mahjub. As truth and fiction merge together, the story takes on the feeling of an hallucination, like a mirage shimmering on the sandy horizon.

Abdelkader Benali, from The Trip to the Slaughterhouse (translated by Susan Massotty)

A young, unnamed boy lives with his sister and Moroccan-born parents in the Netherlands. His father, an otherwise distant man, becomes strangely happy once a month when he gets to take a trip. No one will tell the boy where his father goes even though they're also careful to emphasize that it's really not a secret. The mood is characterized by tension: of things left unsaid, of culture clash and the rifts between tradition and modernity, of the disagreements between parents. Tension reinforces that trace of menace: why is his father always so eager to visit a slaughterhouse?

Abdellah Taia, "The Wounded Man" (translated from French by Frank Wynne)

A cross between "Death in Venice" and an essay on French film. Late at night, a young Moroccan professor surreptitiously watches a banned movie on a foreign channel as his mother sleeps on the couch next to him, oblivious. The professor, a closeted gay man, is caught up in the violent, forbidden desires enacted to a tragic end by the two male leads. Like Mann's Aschenbach, he perceives something transcendent arising from his awakened passion: the power of cinema to reach across cultures and transform a viewer worlds away.

Abderrahim Elkhassar, "Amazigh" (translated by Tristan Cranfield)

A poem about a disaffected Moroccan who links his introverted, non-conformist nature to a wildly romanticized (and possibly imaginary) ancestor, "the Amazigh king of old" who lived a life in tune with nature. Perhaps the speaker's internal dissonance arises from his living on another's land, away from the home of his forebears. ("Amazigh" is the Berbers' name for themselves.)

Ahmad Saadawi, from Frankenstein in Baghdad (translated by Anne Shaker)

An impoverished denizen of Baghdad collects scrap from the local dumps and sells it. Considered an odd one by his neighbors, he is obsessed with human waste, be it household trash or the body parts strewn about in the wake of suicide bombers. He is building a person on the roof of his building, a mad attempt at reassembly from the dehumanizing horrors of war. And then patchwork corpse up and disappears.

Bassim al Ansar, three poems (translated by Robin Moger)

"An Outing," "A Life Surrounded by Trees," and "A Panorama of Wonder" are difficult to explain yet I found their dreamlike imagery and unexpected juxtapositions enjoyable to read. The last one is rich in irony. The present war in Iraq is described in a nonchalant voice that jars with the eerie metaphors.

Dima Wannous, two stories (translated by Ghenwa Hayek)

The title characters of "Hanan" and "Jihad" are residents of Damascus, whose scenic beauty is brought to life through Wannous's sharp, clear prose. In the former, a beautiful, woman reclines on her balcony with a cup of coffee, enjoying the stillness of the early morning and reflecting on the vitality of her latest lover. In the latter, the son of a legendary government minister is sitting alone in his opulent mansion. He has been trying to find fulfillment by indulging in high culture and has sought, vainly, to become a creator in his own right. The confident attitude revealed through the litany of luxuries doesn't quite mask Jihad's hidden insecurity.

Faïza Guène, "Mimouna" (translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone)

Mimouna, our narrator, tells us the story of her life from before her birth in Algeria to the birth of her first granddaughter in France. Her tone is conversational, as though she is speaking directly to the reader, but gradually evolves from the exasperation of one forced into the world to the settled voice of an old woman. Are we where we are by mere chance, being born only to die, or is there a divine will at work? Allah knows what he is doing, Mimouna concludes, we're here for a reason.

Hyam Yared, "Layla's Belly" (translated from French by Frank Wynne)

Post-war Beirut tries to forget its pain in bars and clubs. Layla is disgusted but she joins them anyway, bringing home man after man and trying to convince herself she's having oodles of fun. Bitter and cynical, the prose reflects the true feelings she tries to deny. Until she meets Will, who woes her with talk of the soul. But he's no different.

Mansour El Souwaim, from The Threshold of Ashes (translated by Rowan al Faqih)

This one is confusing, which leads me to wonder if they began this excerpt in the wrong place and I'm missing context? But Souwaim's dark, feverish prose won me over, beginning in a nighttime haze and then recovering itself as the narrator emerges from his illness. A strange story of blackmail and debauchery begins. Very reminiscent of Season of Migration to the North, I thought, and then noted that Souwaim is also Sudanese and had, in fact, been awarded the Tayeb Salih Award for Creative Writing.

Mansoura Ez Eldin, "The Path to Madness" (translated by Haroon Shirwani)

A creepy Egyptian story summed up by its title. The primary narrator, a single woman living alone in an apartment complex, is intrigued and disturbed by her odd neighbor. On the one hand, she is completely straightforward. Yet her account is disorienting, seeming to circle and circle around itself before finally collapsing.

Mohammad Hassan Alwan, "Haneef from Glasgow" (translated by Anthony Calderbank)

A bittersweet tale about the hardships faced by international migrant workers employed as servants in Saudi Arabia. The narrator is not Haneef himself but the grown son of the wealthy family he spent twenty years chauffeuring. We hear very little of Haneef's voice, only the narrator's childhood memories of him, which speaks strongly about Haneef's subordinate position. He is a Pakistani with three daughters back home in war-torn Kashimir. Now in Glasgow, he is even further away from them. You miss your old driver??? The narrator's wife is disbelieving.

Najwa Binshatwan, "The Pools and the Piano" (translated by Ghenwa Hayek)

A story of life during a tumultuous period in Libya. Seen through the eyes of a child, the bonfire of foreign books and Western instruments loses much of its political immediacy, taking on instead the appearance of a fun and interesting event. Divisions between Libyans and other national/ethnic groups arise out of fairy tales. The touches of magic realism give the narrative an almost Latin American feel.

Rabee Jaber, from America (translated by Marilyn Booth)

A vivid, hellish description of an Egyptian-American doughboy's experiences on the battlefields of World War I.

Randa Jarrar, "The Story of My Building" (English)

A ten-year-old boy lives with his extended family in al-Zarqah, the poorest neighborhood in Gaza. He shares a room with his sister, is top in class at school, and enjoys playing with his neighbor's pigeons. His otherwise happy life is punctured all too often by violent death: of his immigrant uncle in Detroit, of his other uncle who hijacked a plane, of the intermittent battles outside. He returns one morning to find his building gone and his favorite pigeon dead. A story that is simple, sweet, and brutal all at once.

Samar Yezbek, from The Scent of Cinnamon (translated by Haroon Shirwani)

A beam of light cutting across the corridor awakens the mistress to a tryst between her husband and her maid. But all is not what it seems. The prose is charged and dramatic, reflecting the heightened emotions of the two women as the betrayal is revealed to be even greater than expected.

Zaki Baydoun, nine poems (translated by Tristan Cranfield)

A collection of nine mixed verse/prose poems. Casual in tone, cosmic in perspective.

The Guardian has a more general review that covers the trends and styles represented by this sampling of young Arab writers.

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LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program

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"only people of leisure can attain a way of thinking that is truly civilized"

A Splendid Conspiracy
By Albert Cossery
Translated by Alyson Waters
213 pages
New Directions Publishing
May 25, 2010





Teymour was waiting for Felfel in front of the statue of The Awakening of the Nation. In her stylized dress the woman was still raising her arm to encourage a heedless people to revive but, as if responding to her ludicrous call, against the metal railing that surrounded the monument, a vagrant was sleeping, snoring shamelessly and thus undermining the morale of his fellow citizens with his unfortunate conduct; whether by coincidence or design, serious damage was being done to the government's attempt - by means of this insomniac and imperious peasant woman - to rouse the crowds from their torpor.

Albert Cossery (1913-2008) was a French writer born in Cairo to a family of Greek Orthodox Syrian and Lebanese descent. Inspired by Honoré de Balzac, he moved to Paris at 17, ostensibly to study, which he never did. In his 60 years of writing he only produced eight novels, in keeping with his personal philosophy of laziness as a form of meditation and contemplation. Although he lived in Paris all his adult life, Cossery's ironic, irreverent books set in Arab countries established him as "the Voltaire of the Nile."

A Splendid Conspiracy, originally written in 1975 as Un Complot de Saltimbanques, opens with Teymour, a young man whose wealthy father has recently called him back from Europe to their small, unnamed Egyptian city. Although Teymour had been sent abroad to obtain a degree in chemical engineering, he never actually enrolled in any classes and spent the entire six years learning about the various forms of debauchery found in the great Western capitals. His "diploma" was purchased for a large sum of cash several days before his departure.

Luckily, Teymour's self-pitying funk doesn't last for long. His childhood buddy Medhat reminds him that every country has its share of "imbecils, bastards, and whores" ready to make life fun and amusing. Their mutual friend Imtaz, a disgraced actor, heartily agrees with this, and A Splendid Conspiracy is for the most part concerned with the trio's neverending drinking, dancing, and womanizing. Their crowd also includes Rezk the reluctant police informant; Chawki, a buffoon with too much money and a taste for schoolgirls; Salma, one of Chawki's former conquests who earns her revenge through his maintenance of her lavish lifestyle; and Samaraï, a lovestruck veterinary student whom the man-hating Salma enjoys tormenting. Just when things couldn't be more exciting, the town's prominent men have been disappearing and police chief Hillali thinks Teymour, Medhat, and Imtaz are the revolutionaries responsible.

It appears to be a simple enough story on the surface. Cossery's prose, though hardly minimalist, is straightforward and unadorned and rarely goes beyond candid narration. But, as Medhat explains, there are always "great gifts of madness and murderous rage" seething beneath every humdrum surface. A Splendid Conspiracy may seem like a carefree romp. But Cossery's irony is rich, beginning with the recurring image of a patriotic statue with her hand outstretched before the impassive city. It is a futile gesture. In a tale of idleness, "The Awakening of the Nation" is two-faced and ridiculous, the perfect symbol of what our trio perceives to be history's greatest con. According to Medhat (the most articulate of the bunch),

"From the beginning man's hardworking fate has made him unable to conceive of an ideal that is not material and does not correspond to his needs and his safety. All he thinks about is earning a living; this is what he is taught from childhood on. His only aim is to become cleverer and more of a bastard than everyone else. During his entire lifetime, he uses his ingenuity to provide food for himself and, once he has eaten his fill, to invent some sordid ambition for himself. When, then, does he have time to elevate his spirit and his mind? The tiniest thought along these lines is considered a criminal offense, immediately punishable by disapproval and starvation. Therefore, I venture to affirm that only people of leisure can attain a way of thinking that is truly civilized."

Such an attitude is profoundly selfish, of course, as Medhat & Co. make it clear that they care nothing for those lacking class privilege except to sleep with their women. Their "enlightened" position is made possible by a good dose of male privilege as well, and both advantages are innately bound to the oppression of others. Hence, the gang's laziness and debauchery is dependent on other people being denied the opportunity for laziness and debauchery. (As for Salma, the culture considers her a "dishonored woman." Although she enjoys playing this up for effect, she is still a social outcast dependent on the good graces of the man who ruined her.) Given the obvious similarities between author and characters, it is easy to dismiss A Splendid Conspiracy as a sexist, elitist ode to the libertine. A valid criticism - in some respects, it is: Salma is a shrill harpy and adolescent girls are naught but sex objects.

For all its blithe carousing, however, the "civilized life" is founded on a kind of nihilism that finds its starkest expression in the mystery of the missing men. Police chief Hillali's suspicion of violent, treacherous action comes from precisely our trio's seeming inaction. It is impossible to remain idle for this long, he argues, especially when you are educated, because with all that time to reflect you can't possibly have not noticed that "this world is abject and revolting." A sentiment Medhat, Imtaz, and Teymour actually agree with, but that doesn't mean they wish to change anything about such a world. They are apathetic in every sense of the word. If most actions that fall outside the realm of pleasure are stupid and ignoble, then it goes to follow that performing said actions only contributes to an overall slave mentality. Therefore, most such ambitious bastards are too stupid too live and our heroes will most certainly not lift a finger once they learn (accidentally) the true cause of the disappearances. Even if one of their friends becomes a victim. The more that go, the merrier.

I agree with another reviewer that all the characters are basically repulsive. But take comfort: Chawki, the bloated, vulgar doofus at the butt of the gang's jokes and despised by respectable society, is, in Albert Cossery's ultimate blast of irony, the very vision of Teymour, Medhat, and Imtaz's sordid future. They've already got all the ingredients. Joke's on them and their "enlightenment." Again, if someone were to condemn A Splendid Conspiracy as mere exploitation and misogyny, I would totally understand and actually agree to an extent. Still, I also found it surprisingly self-aware and self-critical and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Am very interested in hearing what other people think.

Click here for an excerpt.

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A special thanks to Alyson Waters for providing me this book and introducing me to a new author.

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Love in the Time of War

I hear, close by, scattered gunshots, yet feel as if they are at a great distance. This war has made beauty, money, terror and convention all equally irrelevant. It begins to occur to me that the war, with its miseries and destructiveness, has been necessary for me to start to return to being normal and human.



Hanan al-Shaykh was born in Beirut in 1945 to a strict Shi'a family, where her father and brother exerted great control over her. After the civil war broke out, Al-Shaykh left Lebanon and moved to Saudi Arabia in 1975, but now lives in London. Despite her conservative background, however, her novels, which focus on the lives of contemporary Muslim women in the Middle East, have been banned in several Gulf countries. The Story of Zahra, first published in 1980 as حكاية زهراء and translated to English in 1994, is considered a classic of women's Arabic literature, but its blunt depictions of drug use, abortion, mental illness, and frank sexuality certainly ruffled more than a few feathers.

Zahra is an outsider: a lonely young woman who just can't fit in. She accompanies her mother to secret meetings with an illicit lover and chafes at the preferential treatment given to her brother Ahmad. Her father is a stern disciplinarian who lashes out at her for picking the pimples on her face and savagely beats her mother when he learns of the affair. A fling with Malek, an older, married man, results in two abortions. Desperate for an escape, Zahra flees to an uncle exiled (for political reasons) to an anonymous African country distinguished only by its perpetually blazing heat and inscrutable natives. Unfortunately, her Uncle Hashem's attention take a sexual turn and she attempts escape yet again by marrying his friend Majed, whom she has only just met.

Through it all, Zahra also suffers from an unnamed psychiatric disorder, which at one point had landed her in a Lebanese mental hospital and subjected to electroshock therapy. Whether it is an organic mental illness (i.e. schizophrenia, clinical depression) or symptoms brought on by environmental influences is left to the reader to decide. Her relationship with Malek was semi-consensual at best, and likely another half-hearted effort to flee from her difficult home life. The two chapters from Hashem and Malek's perspectives make it clear that neither recognizes Zahra as a human being with her own needs and personality. Hashem sees her as a symbol, a blood linkage to his lost homeland. Malek, the son of a cleaning woman, merely wants a middle-class wife and a female body to own and fuck whenever he wants.

Not surprisingly then, one of Zahra's symptoms is her constant desire to claim a space for her own and be apart from everyone else. In Africa, this takes the form of locking herself in the bathroom for hours and even days. After the speedy and inevitable collapse of her marriage to Majed, she returns to Lebanon and sinks into a depression, overeating and wearing nothing but the same housecoat for days. But then the civil war happens, and her parents flee to a far-off village while her brother joins one of the warring factions. Once again, Zahra has a room of her own, which, combined with the social disruption of the war, seems to finally provide her with a liberation of sorts. Maybe she really is crazy: how else can her initiation of an affair with the neighborhood sniper be explained, even with her half-formed excuse that a naked woman will distract him from shooting everything that moves?

And thus, the central irony of The Story of Zahra becomes apparent: that it is the stable customs of peacetime that burden Zahra and the chaos of wartime that gives her freedom.

. . . Was I some vulture become human, or had the devil taken human form in me that hot afternoon when my Qarina [a kinship spirit] called my name? How did I manage to be so relaxed in this war? My days had beginning and end. I felt secure, even though the rockets still screamed and roared with unabating vigor. I was even able to sleep.

The war had become a perpetual, secure stockade, whose walls were, so to speak, decorated with hearts and arrows drawn in blood. Why had I felt no pleasure before, when I lay on everyday beds? Why had I never clawed at other men's backs as I did that of this sniper? I wore no makeup, while the war's eruptions seemed to have erased those on my face.

Zahra and normal Lebanese life were ill-matched. One factor leading to the quick collapse of her marriage to Majed, after all, were her bizarre attempts to fit herself into the mold of a conventional, happy woman; instead, her inappropriate outfits, wild dancing, and over-the-top gestures of friendship transformed her into a caricature and laughingstock. As such, The Story of Zahra raises some disturbing questions. Why is it that Zahra needed a war - the horrors of which she is fully cognizant - to find some measure of peace? What does this say about a tradition-bound society that tries control women's self-realization? And what does this say about the nature of war itself? Zahra isn't the only one suddenly casting off social constraints. Her brother Ahmad likewise falls into looting, mindless destruction, drug abuse, and a complete abandonment of sexual propriety, which, unlike Zahra's experiences (maybe), can hardly be regarded as any form of positive self-development.

The Story of Zahra has been celebrated as a feminist coming-of-age narrative that seeks to subvert traditional notions of female desire and autonomy. But it is also more complex than that. Al-Shaykh also asks us to consider society as a whole, as evidenced, for example, by Majed and Hashem's chapters, which humanize what could have simply been two predatory men. Even if we continue to disagree with their actions, Al-Shaykh wants us to why they, as men in a patriarchial society, behave and believe the way they do. And not only does the reader have to consider human behavior under cultural constraints, but also in situations in which said constraints have disintegrated. Tackling the complex topics of violence, politics, and multiple forms of social repression, The Story of Zahra is far from a black-and-white tale of female oppression and the heights of female liberation. It is a thought-provoking achievement, and one I'll be recommending.

Click here for Richard's review.

I finished this book on New Year's Eve, so I'm not sure if I should count it towards my New Year's resolution to read more female and non-European authors. What do you think? Does December 31, 2009 qualify as "kind of 2010"? This post was published in 2010. Darn, maybe I should've saved this one.

Laundry (A Review)

Laundry
By Suzane Adam
Translated by Becka Mara McKay
Autumn Hill Books
250 pages
November 1, 2008
Lost in Translation Challenge Book #6




I feel almost like an archaeologist, chipping away at a widening pit, descending into it, into another room, a maze. I don't understand anything. I didn't know any of it, violating the oath of years of silence. In my family we always screamed the truth in each other's faces. This did not make me any happier, though at least we knew each other's sore points; her family is partitioned, everyone nursing his own pain.

Suzane Adam's 2000 novel Laundry (translated from Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay) has been described as a "psychological thriller," but I'm not sure "thriller" is the right label for it. That word makes me think of a mass-market paperback you'd purchase at CVS along with the shampoo, makeup, and Tylenol. I could be wrong, but to me, Laundry was indeed intensely psychological, but also possessing the depth and lyricism of literary art that transcends mere genre. It is also a tale of the human mind - one that becomes even more disturbing when the reader considers the following:

• Superficial charm
• Criminal versatility
• Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others
• Impulse control problems
• Pathological lying
• Deceitfulness/manipulativeness
• Aggressive or violent tendencies, repeated physical fights or assaults on others
• Lack of empathy
• Lack of remorse, indifferent to or rationalizes having hurt or mistreated others
• A sense of extreme entitlement
• Promiscuous sexual behavior, sexually deviant lifestyle
• Lack of personal insight
• Failure to follow any life plan
• Inability to distinguish right from wrong

Adam definitely did her research: the clinical diagnostic criteria for psychopathy fits Yutzi with terrifying precision.

Laundry is told from the first-person POV of two narrators in Israel in the 1970s: Ephraim, the primary voice, and his wife Ildiko née Rott, who relates to him the story of her lonely, fearful childhood, including the mental and physical abuse she experienced at the hands of Yutzi. The book opens in an emotional whirlwind: Ephraim is confused, frightened, and deeply agitated by a recent, possibly violent, catastrophe involving Ildiko, who at first retreated into herself and is now finally ready to spill out the secrets of her past. Her family has no idea why what happened has happened. To them, twenty years ago in their native Transylvania, Yutzi had found five-year-old Ildiko wandering around after having been lost for three hours. Since then, Yutzi (whose troubled homelife included a morbidly obese, immobile mother and two violent, controlling brothers) has been an adopted daughter of sorts, with whom Ildiko's mother has maintained correspondence ever since the family's move to Israel when Ildiko was eight. Tiny, trusting Ildiko had idolized seventeen-year-old Yutzi as a beautiful older girl and followed her incessantly. In retaliation, Yutzi took her to the slaughterhouse where she worked. There, Ildiko witnesses the butchering of calves and the grotesque assembly of sausages, recalled in vividly surreal passages reminiscent of Mercè Rodoreda's haunting dystopic novella Death in Spring. Before taking her home, Yutzi threatens to "rip your guts out." Though sweet and gracious to Ildiko's parents and baby sister (even as she secretly steals from them), Yutzi continues to emotionally torment Ildiko behind their backs. Finally, one night shortly before the Rotts' move to Israel, Ildiko awakens to find Yutzi, who was supposed to be babysitting, having sex with Ildiko's best friend's father in the Rotts' living room. Yutzi attempts to smother her, but is stopped only by her alarmed lover.

Throughout her childhood, Ildiko's family will wonder at her withdrawn nature and frequent illnesses that only vanish when they leave Romania for good. Ephraim, a landscaper, will also tell the reader the story of how he met the quiet, introspective painter who lived at her mother's house where he tended the garden. He is fond of the Beatles and has had a pointless affair with a girl he met at a disco, all the while dreaming of a simple, loving wife who will enjoy nature as he does and want to sleep in Kinneret with him under the stairs. When telling Mrs. Rott what Ildiko had told him about darling Yutzi, his reward is yet another long-buried secret: Mr. and Mrs. Rott's own surival of the Holocaust. Laundry is ultimately a novel of silence buried in silence. In the Rott family, no one talks and the effect is similar to Freud's social theories on repression. Specifically: that the more of it you exercise, the greater the inevitable release of suppressed feelings, drives, and instincts. As in much Israeli literature, the Holocaust lurks as an omnipresent force that continues to shape the lives of the characters in the present. After all, Ildiko learned the principles of silence from somewhere.

Laundry is also a tale of female violence. When discussing this topic in another post from a pure fantasy standpoint, I referenced a brief essay by author Carrie Vaughn, who critiqued the tendency of speculative fiction writers to feel that they have to "explain" a woman's aggressiveness by giving her a victimized past. Of course, Vaughn was talking about the highly stylized and often supernaturally-enhanced combat found in urban fantasy. In Laundry, by contrast, Suzane Adam is realistic to an uncomfortable degree and sugar coats nothing. It can certainly be argued that Yutzi has also been victimized, but at the same time, Adam makes it quite clear that that is not the source of her twisted nature. Shirley Jackson once said that "some houses are born bad," and you can obviously say the same of humans.

But what made Laundry so different (to me, anyway) was its oddly feminine approach to violence and abuse. Ildiko had seen Yutzi as role model, a kind of like a real-life fairy princess. Despite her psychopathic personality, however, Yutzi, as a young woman, is also rendered powerless by society and is herself a casualty of male abuse. Although she is doubtlessly one of the most unsympathetic characters I have ever come across in fiction, I think Yutzi will force most readers to reconsider their notions of women as being the inherently "more moral" sex. I'm not trying to argue that "girls can be genocidal tyrants toooo," but I remember reading an article about Pfc. Lynndie England that mentioned how shocked people were that a woman could be responsible for such horrific behavior. But really, the article went on to say, when you deny that women can be brutal you also deny that they are fully human, with all of humanity's highs and lows. In Christian Jungersen's The Exception, the point is made repeatedly that "victimizing others is a part of human nature." (Incidentelly, The Exception also centered on female aggression, but in a stereotypically "hysterical female" manner.) Because Laundry is, above all, a powerfully human tale that explores the relationships between people and how they can be formed and deformed by trauma and pure evil. It certainly makes for uncomfortable reading, as its well-drawn, fully-realized characters beg for and demand empathy that will leave you almost shaking. In short: strongly recommended for anyone brave enough to take it.



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Challenge Update

I have now completed the Lost in Translation Challenge!

Suzane Adam, Laundry (Hebrew)
Christian Jungersen, The Exception (Danish)
Jakov Lind, Landscape in Concrete (German)
Ilja Pfeijffer, Rupert: A Confession (Dutch)
Mercè Rodoreda, Death in Spring (Catalan)
Jáchym Topol, City Sister Silver (Czech)