Review

New Hanan Al-Shaykh Book, The Locust and the Bird Reviewed at Barnes and Noble

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Hanan Al-Shaykh finally has a new work available. It has been sometime since Only in London came out and I was quite excited to hear about the new book. The Barnes and Noble review is mixed, but I will be reading it none the less. The book is part biography and part novel and does sound interesting, especially in view of her complete works in English. As with many foreign language writers she isn’t mentioned too often, but with 6 or 7 books in English now she is one of the best translated Arabic writers.a

The novel’s only significant weakness is its sluggish pace. Inevitably, the poetry-filled yearning characterizing Kamila and Muhammad’s years apart begins to grate after a while. And al-Shaykh’s decision to chronicle Kamila’s countless attacks of jealousy and insecurity proves exasperating, repeatedly miring the story in protracted nothingness. Equally unoriginal is Kamila’s realization that married life with Muhammad is not all bliss, what with children and domestic chores multiplying almost unabated.

Of course, there are exceptions. Occasionally, al-Shaykh will inject a surprisingly powerful element into descriptions of her mother’s long days and quotidian duties, as when she depicts Kamila’s disturbing (and successful) attempts to miscarry, a ghastly homegrown solution to unwanted pregnancy. And after Kamila is widowed, al-Shaykh poignantly has her express her newfound anxiety: “During our marriage, my endless pregnancies and exhaustion had left me isolated from friends and relatives. I’d seen the world through his eyes. After his death, it was as if I started out all over again.”

What really matters, however, is al-Shaykh’s major twofold achievement with The Locust and the Bird. To begin with, she has written a stirring but never hagiographic account of a woman — her mother — who defies almost every major societal and religious stricture governing women’s behavior in her time. Yet al-Shaykh also manages the remarkable feat of unpretentiously capturing a character’s philosophical relationship with art. A close reading of The Locust and the Bird reveals that — perhaps counterintuitively — young Kamila does not in fact live vicariously through film; she pointedly refrains from transmuting her hunger for the real yet elusive man she loves into a complacent satisfaction with the honeyed images of romance flitting before her eyes. Indeed, far from allowing films to become her life, Kamila emerges from the theater spiritually refreshed but further impelled to achieve her dream. And that, aside from being a profound notion al-Shaykh deftly encapsulates in literary form, is probably both the wisest and healthiest approach to art.

Horacio Castellanos Moya and the Political Novel at the Quarterly Conversation

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Tirana MemoriaScott at the Quarterly Conversation has written an excellent article about Horacio Castellanos Moya and the new political novel. It is a good introduction to his work and is worth a read in part because it charts not only an interesting history of the development of the political novel, but of Latin American political novels. The nexus of his argument is here

As with Senselessness, the shape of She-Devil’s political conspiracy never becomes very distinct. Trapped within the narrator’s paranoid consciousness we can only guess at its actual dimensions, and any objective reality of an actual conspiracy is never confirmed. Part of this is simply the fragmented distribution of political power in a modern society—the fact that even a president can’t have full information on everything being done by a government. This fragmentation of power is something that Moya elegantly fuses with the development of his plot and his character as he marches his protagonists down each alley one at a time, closing certain threads of investigation even as new ones are introduced.

Yet the more significant part of this is due to the protagonist’s mind, which changes subtly but powerfully throughout both of these novels. What Senselessness and The She-Devil in the Mirror are doing is bringing the unreliable first-person novel to a modern Latin American context. What for Ford Madox Ford was primarily a story of infidelity in inter-war England, and for Kobo Abe was about existentialist malaise in mid-century Japan, and for Walker Percy was about the alienation of the individual in a radically mediated society, and for Kazuo Ishiguro was a story of classism in contemporary England, becomes for Moya a story of the great political subconsciousness that seethes through life in 21st-century Latin America. Each of these writers shares an interest in portraying the space between objective reality and human subjectivity. Fundamentally, they are interested in what happens as the human mind attempts to piece together a reality, though it lacks the necessary information to do so. As the diversity of these writers’ output shows, the dramatization of this gap is a very malleable tool: an individual’s quest for objective truth can interrogate realities about the cultures that range from a bottom-rung operative in a Latin American state on the verge of failure to a wealthy, privileged gentleman in a European nation at the height of empire. What is most characteristic about these novels is that vital facts about the culture each is set in are bound up at the deepest levels with the narrators’ own gradual realization that there is no such a thing as an objective reality. The process of self-discovery is contingent on comprehending one’s cultural context.

I would also add that having read Tirana Memoria I know that he doesn’t always approach reality in such dark terms, even when he is writing about a coup. He is also willing to inject humor and play games with the perception of reality only in the most oblique terms. Tirana Memoria uses one of the most straightforward sounding narrators, who scarcely hints at the deep rejections of a verifiable truth. If the book is ever translated into English, perhaps we will have a more complete picture of his work.

Among Thieves – A Review

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Mez Packer’s Among Thieves is British ska noir, a combination of the 2 Tone seen in early 80’s England and drug dealers and low grade criminals. What gives the book promise is the setting with the music and rebelliousness and an energy set against a dreary England rife with unemployment and disappointment. The characters would be tough and use enough slang you’d feel you were in Coventry. And the novel begins that way when Jez, a Jamaican, begins to narrate the book. The book quickly switches, though, to other narrators and the energy Jez gives the novel is lost and it becomes a just a novel of petty friendships and animosities.

Briefly, the plot follows four characters. Pad and Andy are friends and drug dealers. They make good money but they soon fall out and would not have much to do with each other, but Andy owes the IRA 25,000 pounds and needs Pads help. They try different schemes: passing counterfeit money in Spain; smuggling drugs into England. Nothing works correctly because Pads hates Andy too much. Jez is in the middle of every plan, always getting the raw end, but adding some edge to the story. Finally, Ahmett narrates the story of his flight from Albania, which seems unconnected, but at the very end of the novel connects all the points of the story.

What makes Among Thieves a weak novel is the unfocused plot. While a crime novel could be less plot driven, Among Thieves seeks complexity in the plot, but what occurs is not complexity but lethargy as Pads complains about Andy getting his girl or telling us how jealous he is that Andy might sleep with one of his drug couriers. Instead of tension, you have the sense of listening in on high schoolers gossiping. No, not all drug dealers have to be hardboiled toughs, but winers are tedious.

A second problem is Ahmett. Most of his narration is about his escape from Albania and has nothing to do with the central plot. While the twist at the end of the book links him to the story, the long sections of his life only serve to slow down the intrigues between Pads and Andy. In a novel of intrigues, each part must heighten the intrigue otherwise the book ceases to be intriguing .

The one bright spot in the novel is Jez who brings an energy to the narration that is often lacking when Pads narrates. It is obvious the Packer can create interesting characters and knows how to give them life. Perhaps in her next work the characters will be more consistently interesting.

While reminiscent of Train Spotting and Snatch, Among Thieves has neither the dark introspection of the former nor the well plotted story of latter; however, it does fit squarely amongst the British crime genre of the last 20 years.

Rupert: A Confession – A Review

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Rupert: A Confession belongs to that genre of writing called the compulsive explainer, which features a narrator who is unable to control his need to explain the world, often in intricate detail, as he sees it even if it is in his best interest not to explain so much. It can be a difficult way of writing because the obsessions of the narrator can overwhelm a reader with the obscure or the tangential. To that compulsion Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer adds an unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator adds a different complication: how does one tell the reader the narrator is lying without the narrator having to explain the lie? Weaker writers will just have the narrator say two different things at two different times. Yet unless the narrator has gone through some shift the statements are forced or awkward. Why did the narrator sudden decide to say this? Is it because the writer needs to tell me the narrator is unreliable? Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares is an example of this. On the other hand, the narrator who does not know they are unreliable is the truly difficult and interesting approach because not only does it keep the character in character, it gives more work to the reader forcing her to puzzle out the unreliability from the clues within the story. Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy is a excellent example of this precision in characterization.

Pfeijffer successfully combines the two elements the obsessive and the unreliable to create Rupert. Rupert is on trial for something what it is isn’t clear, but what ever it is Rupert feels the need to explain his innocence in great detail. The detail, though, is not a counter argument of the facts, but a brief history of his affair with Mira and the days after. Rupert, though, is a pervert and he’d gets more pleasure in going to a peep show than actually having sex wit his girl friend. He is also quite graphic when he describes his encounter in the peep show and his dreams, and it is an obvious tip off that Rupert, despite his claims to the contrary, is not completely aware of what a courtroom nor society in general thinks is proper behavior. Telling a court that you are stalking an old girlfriend and still love her only suggests madness and violence. As the novel progresses Rupert becomes more obsessive, yet each time he makes the claim it is obvious he is only becoming more unhinged, losing grasp of the boundaries between desire and stalking.

The trial is the perfect contrasting device for the unreliability because Pfeijffer can let Rupert’s story, his obsession, flow naturally in Rupert’s voice. At first Rupert seems a little strange, but not manically obssesed, just a lonely man in a permissive country. As he goes farther into his story, though, it becomes obvious that what he is narrating is probably not true. The distance between how he has behaved in earlier scenes contrasts too heavily with the behavior he claims at the end.

Rupert: A Confession is a tense novel. The coming expectation of some great misdeed flows throughout the novel and over the last 30 pages the question is, is this what landed him in jail? To say what happened would ruin the novel, but the sense of coming disaster animates the book and keeps his obsessions from the tangential. Another source of the tension is the constant fixation of sex. Titillating, as Publishers Weekly said, is the wrong word for the seedy depths that Rupert visits as he seeks to fulfill his fantasies. Had his fantasies with Mira been reality and the reality non existent, the book would be titillating. Instead, coupling the violence and sense of foreboding confront the reader with questions: what happens when eroticism you are enjoying as a spectator (the reader) turns dark? Does it turn the former experience into a mistake, something shameful, or are they two different things? Ultimately, does using the surrogate, Rupert, for some distant enjoyment place one in the same dark peep show where Rupert first shows his obsessive side?

Rupert is also an architectural novel. Pfeijffer uses the city and the spaces within it as a way to distance Rupert from greater human contact. Rupert sees more in the city, its squares, its buildings, and can understand them better than the people in them. He knows how to analyze, not how to connect:

Fredo square is not like that, but it does its best. When it’s on form and happy because it’s being kissed by a sultry summer evening, it can mirror the perfection of the Palio. Then it can stop looking and smile like a brushing bride who embraces you and is grateful and all is well. She stretches herself out comfortably on the soft bed of the humming city, blissfully certain that she is loved.

Towards the end of the novel as Rupert is trying to find Mira in the winding streets of the old part of town, he blends the language of the erotic with the architectural, removing any humanity from Mira and turning her into an object. At the same time, though, the complex eroticism previously mentioned returns, because the city as Rupert sees it is truly erotic. The architecture becomes the reflection and the shape of the inhabitants, and as such is both beautiful and ugly, and in Rupert: A Confession, also a place for shame and titillation.

Rupert: A Confession is a brief novel, but in its 130 pages Pfeijffer is able to master one of the more difficult things in fiction, the unreliable narrator, and that makes it well worth the read.

Ten Days In A Madhouse by Nellie Bly – A Review

~ bythefirelight

What shocks one generation can seem so tame  to another, or in those shifting ironies of time what seemed natural is now the shocker. Over the last 100 years in the United States that shifting shock has most often come with the changes in race  and gender relations. But the shifts have also come in the way mental health is approached and some 120 years since its publication Ten Days in a Madhouse is a reflection of those changes and while some part of the writing may seem dated or at best a piece of history much like Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, Ten Days is not that distant from our time and its subject and the manner of its writing are worth a look.

Briefly, Ten Days in a Madhouse is Nellie Bly’s (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman) account of her ten days in a madhouse in New York in 1887. Bly, in an act of stunt journalism that wold make her famous, pretended to be mildly insane so she would be sent to an asylum to see first hand what one was like. To begin the process she goes to a rooming house and one night she stays up all night staring at the wall. The stare fest alerts her roommate and scares the homeowner and the next day she fixates on her lost trunk and insists on finding it. At the same time she continually talks about too many foreigners and never having worked, which both seem strange to the working class people she is rooming with. These three things are sufficient for her to land before a judge and eventually in the madhouse where she endures the arbitrary and vindictive rule of the nurses who are little better than street toughs. At the end of ten days a lawyer from her paper the World secures her release.

What strikes a modern reader are two things. The first is the obvious arbitrariness of the commitment and cruelty of the nurses. For the women who are trapped in the asylum there seems to be no way to escape. They have no way to demonstrate their sanity and some are quite sane, only having suffered what might now be diagnosed as a bout of depression after a traumatic experience or a nervous breakdown. To say one was sane was to say one was insane. Many of the women Bly encounters should not be in the asylum by modern standards and it easy to see the asylum as yet another version of Kafka’s Trial or Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But one should not let the smugness of a century’s worth of experience suggest that what she was writing about is no longer a problem. Instead, the arbitrariness and, more importantly, what constitutes madness is at the same time silly yet as strange as what could be called mad now. Saying one would not work or that there are many foreigners are quite observational, yet said amongst the working class of New York it seemed a form of obstinance. And in the obstinance you really see the shifting notions of what is strange.

The second area of discord is what Bly takes as normal. She continually winks at the reader, which is mostly stylistic, but then throws in comments that say she is worried about her hair. In a piece of serious journalism it seems a little strange. Yet her preoccupations tell as much about what is normal as is strange. And the reversal comes in how she characterizes women. In the world these events take place women are delicate and there is a continual paternalism.

Given these discords the book can seem at once a Guild Age curiosity and an annoying reflection of time thankfully past. What makes the book valuable is not so much what Bly was reporting, but what she thought of it. There is an earnestness that is not jaded, even though she is doing a stunt, and her solutions for fixing the asylums are hopeful if vague. In her conclusions you sense a belief that these problems are easily fixable if they are just addressed. Though her language is a bit more cluttered, she writes clearly and it serves well to show those shifts in attitude of the last 120 years. In those shifts, too, you can see how arbitrary the care of the mentally ill can be. In reading the book, one should not come away smug, but reminded.

Death in Spring – A Review

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—Men who are eager to kill are already dead. (pg. 99)

To distill Mercé Rodoreda’s Death in Spring into an essay is not so much difficult, but it quickly takes the magic from this brief yet symbolically complex novel. Set in a mythical village where the laws of nature mostly work as expected and the inhabitants live in a partly Christian, partly fascistic world, Death in Spring is part allegory, part fantasy, a novel whose preoccupations (as the title suggest) are death, but which take place amongst the rich imagery of the living world. It is as if she trying to create an escape from what is to come in the village, with the inhabitants. This is not a novel that sees “Nature, Bloody in Tooth and Claw,” but a flight to its refuge, because the alternative is so disturbing.

Composed of a series of short, enigmatic chapters narrated by a villager, the novel follows the course of the narrator’s life in the village from youth to death. The events he narrates are not singular, but repetitive, ritualistic, and without beginning and end. This is not a novel of they did, the singular, but they would do, the repetitive. The sense of the repetitive is what makes the novel haunting, because there is no leaving the village. And the narrator wants to leave, not because of one threat in particular but the constant sense of threat.

To understand what makes the village different, all one has to know is how they bury the dead. Instead of burial or cremation, a tree is cut open in the shape of a cross and the bark is pulled away. The dead (or nearly dead) person is placed in the tree and is covered over with the bark again. Later, when the person has spent some time there they put cement down the mouth to keep the soul in. The burials are not necessarily by choice, either. Instead, the function as one of many violent rituals that keeps the village eating itself with violence.

In the village, too, is a prisoner. Why there is a prisoner isn’t explained, but he is an object of ridicule and curiosity and when finally released he is unwilling to move from where his cage once was. Its as if the cycle of violence and control becomes so natural that even a prisoner who might want to be free, is uninterested in freedom.

Amongst the culture of communal control, Rodoreda creates a mythology from the natural world: bees that are at once free, yet are scavengers too; a river that runs under the village, not only giving life to the village but also giving it another means to violence. All of these images create a sense of an Eden that is not quite Eden. It is that sense of beauty just out of reach that makes the novel so arresting. One particularly gruesome practice will illustrate how the book mixes all these elements together.

I wanted to see the Festa, so I went. The villagers had gathered near the river, on the esplanade by the canes that whistled because it was windy. Tables and benches had been built from tree trunks. The horse hoof soup was already boiling in large cauldrons, and standing beside each pot was a woman who was removing scum with a ladle and throwing fat and lumps of cooled blood on the ground. For a funeral Festa, they killed horses and pregnant mares. First, they ate the soup, then the horse or mare, and then a morsel-but only a small piece because there wasn’t much to go around-of the little ones the mares were carrying inside them. They made a paste with the brains; it helped digestion. They peeled them, boiled them in a pot used only for brains, cleaned them, and then chopped them to bits.

The novel could easily seen as an allegory of post civil war Spain. Between the mix of conformity and quasi-religious practices that celebrate violence all marks of Franco’s Spain. The novel, too, can be a more generalized allegory of violence and conformity. With either read, the novel with its clear images, sparse narration, and fantastical landscapes is clearly a brilliant novel of a great story teller.

Clarice Lispector Review in New York Review of Books

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The New York Review of Books has a long review essay by Lorrie Moore that also draws on some of her other works.

This Side Of Paradise – A Review

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The problem with coming of age stories is that once you have come of age and look back at what may have been a small fraction of a life, it may seem just a pacing moment in the larger picture of a life. Moreover, it is such a specific event that others have no way to relate to those brief experiences. And explaining those moments to someone younger who has no idea of the little preoccupations that obsess one is at best a tepid history lesson. There are exceptions, of course, but the average coming of age novel will always seem so powerful to those who lived it and years latter just be a puzzle: did someone actually care about this?

This Side of Paradise as a coming of age story suffers from the specificity a lost moment. In reading it, one gets the feeling that the book meant something once, something earnest, but now, 80 years latter, it is a strange melange of Nietzschian philosophy and a writer longing to be a writer. It is almost a manifesto of what writing should be. Several times Fitzgerald lists authors that he thinks are worthy or are pointless. Most are unknown now and few stand up to scrutiny, although his attacks on some of them might have been brave at the time. It is the longing to be a novel of ideas that weighs down the novel. Every chance he gets, Fitzgerald works in some bit of philosophy amongst the goings on of the boys at Princeton or Harvard so that you end up with an elitist Nietzsche, or in American parlance, an anti-business philosophy lover.

Besides the tiresome speculations on philosophy and psychology the book never really says anything. Sure it is a rejection of the previous generation and part of it seems to fit within the Lost Generation literature, but nothing really happens. The protagonist leaves the university and goes on to life having one final showdown with a rich man in his limo. What is actually bothering the protagonist is lost in vague generalities. While the book does have a few Dreiserian moments of  seediness, it never gets beyond the specifics of a boy in 1918.

Perhaps Fitzgerald was a writer who needed to experience what he was writing about. The themes of the era are only briefly mentioned at the expense of frat boy pranks and so he had to retreat to the philosophical, the only thing he may have known. Unfortunately, pop psychology or philosophy, even if it comes from Nietzsche reflects more about the fleeting preoccupations of youth than philosophy. Occasionally, his descriptions are worth the slog: when describing an overweight character he says he was ” a trifle too stout for symmetry;” when describing a friend he says he was “an occasion rather than a friend.”

Had Fitzgerald not written The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise would be just another of the forgotten books he listed in his own book.

New Quarterly Conversation with News from the Empire Review

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The Quarterly Conversation just published issue 17. It includes my review of Fernando Del Paso’s News from the Empire. There are some other interesting articles, too. Definitely worth the look.

To Live or Perish Forever – Stunt Journalism and Reporting – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The term stunt journalism first came into usage after 1887 when Nellie Bly wrote Ten Days in a Madhouse where she had impersonated a mad woman to get a patient’s view of a madhouse. The stunt made her famous and did bring the story to a public that didn’t know how bad the madhouses were. Since then journalists have occasionally used stunt journalism as a means to get at a story they might not otherwise get. However, the stunts have also become a end in themselves, as in the work of Hunter S. Thompson who reveled in becoming the story. The stunt journalist, though, always has something over the journalist who just sends in the 500 to 1500 word story. They have the adventure of the story and it is that adventure, whether real or manufactured by inserting one’s self into the story, that can make a stunt journalist’s work exciting and often compelling.

The risks to this kind of journalism range from distorting the story to weak prose and they are something that Nicholas Schmidle in his new book To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan manages to avoid. Yet as I read the book I couldn’t help but think I’m not reading about the ethnic tensions in Pakistan, but the adventure of placing one’s self with in those tensions. The adventure is never so clear as when he returns from southwestern Pakistan, Balochistan, and he us traveling along a dirt road at night worried about bandits and realizing the police escort he had started with has dwindled to one truck with police officers armed with sticks. Schmidle is in great danger, a danger that highlights the problems of Pakistan and yet what is the story? Is it Pakistan or is it him? Is it the thrill of the car through the Pakistani night or is it the depressing ethnic strife that is always threatening to destroy Pakistan?

If you answer both then you have the book, because it is both and that is its strength. Part history, part journalism, part danger tourism To Live will depress with its endless problems, some known, others seldom reported. Of particular note is the ethnic tensions between the Punjabis, Pushtus, Balochis, and Sinds. Lost in the reports of the Taliban in the Swatt Valley are the constant tensions that have racked the country and which the government seems to have little interest in stopping when riots flare up. From what Schmidle says it is a wonder that Pakistan still exists. Add in the Taliban and the ever present state security services who seem obsessed with looking good and thwarting India, and you have the most dysfunctional state. What you hear in the news is even worse on the ground.

Schmidle offers some interesting reporting on the Taliban and the collapse of the traditional power structures in the tribal areas, noting that the Taliban are not a new form of the old tribal system, but a replacement that exterminates any opposition, including the tribal leaders. Yet despite the danger and the brutality, Schmidle meets with fundamentalist leaders and brings a humanizing face to them. He doesn’t do it because he believes in them nor trusts them, but to show how they could gain so many followers despite their positions that are so inimical in the west.

The friendships, too, are part of the adventure. He is honest in describing his feelings and in this sense the book is very good. But the question about what is a stunt and what is reporting still remains. Any act of reporting puts oneself if the story, even if peripherally, but does the story behind the story over take the story? In To Live occasionally it does, but in the I centric world of media it certainly is a light touch and no where near as purple as Dexter Firkins Forever War. Schmidle has managed to write a solid account of his time in Pakistan and if the story is subsumed in his story it is only because those are the demands of the solitary journalist.

‘The Informers’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez reviewed at the Los Angles Times

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The Los Angles Times has a good review of The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I’ve seen other reviews of the book (if I was a better blogger I would actually link to it) and they were all good. The book is an interesting mix of history and story telling that ranges over the last 60 years of Columbian and European history:

“The Informers” is narrated by Gabriel Santoro, a Bogotá reporter and author of a book that recounts the life story of a Jewish German immigrant named Sara Guterman whose family was one of many to escape to Colombia during the early years of Nazism. The primary distinction of “A Life in Exile,” this book within a book, is the review it receives from Santoro’s identically named father. The elder Santoro, a professor with a reputation as the moral conscience of the embattled nation, inexplicably savages the book in a prominent newspaper.

When his son confronts him, the scholar elaborates on his dismissal: “Memory isn’t public. . . . [T]hose who through prayer or pretense had arrived at a certain conciliation, are now back to square one. . . . you come along, white knight of history, to display your courage by awakening things . . . you and your parasitical book, your exploitative book, your intrusive book.”

The plot gets more complicated as it goes on and you’ll have to read the review to see more, but Adam Mansbach’s conclusion should make that an easy decision.

Vásquez is a hugely skilled writer, his prose weighted with authority and carefully observed detail, and he is a dexterous weaver of voices and time periods. “The Informers” fares best when he allows his protagonist to stay in the moment, to build scenes instead of imagining wide swaths of the past. The journalist’s visit to Enrique Deresser is gripping: revelatory and elusive, understated and devastating. Sara Guterman’s recollection of an explosive 1943 dinner the Deressers held for a Nazi named Bethke is deeply dramatic, rife with tension and complexity. The emotional impact of such scenes — in which a nation’s unresolved pain is distilled, writ small, in the actions of a single man or the volleys exchanged over a dinner table — hints at the power of which Vásquez is capable.

Julie and Julia – Hagiography Sauteed in Butter – A Review

~ bythefirelight

I love to eat and to cook. I’ve got chef skills with the knife, can cut a mound of paper thin onion slices quickly, and think it is fun to spend a half hour sieving a sauce so that it is ever so smooth. So Julie and Julia was fun, if for no other reason than it was about food. To watch a Julia Child bio-pic was a delight: who knew that to learn to cut onions like a chef she stood in her Paris kitchen practicing until no one could enter the kitchen; or a sexual being and not just a strange older woman on TV. Meryl Streep’s performance is certainly what makes the film fun, bringing to the film a liveliness and exploratory a joy as Julia first finds French food and then strives to master it. And the food looks good…if only one could eat like that more often.

The film is more than a joyous ode to the joys of French cooking, though. There is still Julie. If Julia makes one want to eat French food or at least watch a rerun of her cooking show, Julie drags the film down with pedantic problems and frustrations that grow tiresome quickly. When she cooks things are going just fine. I want to see how she fails or succeeds (at least during the film, after I could careless). It is when she leaves the kitchen and the fights with the husband and the souless work and 9-11 intrude that the film is just banal. What is worse Julia is always there: “Julia wouldn’t have done this. How would Julia have done it? Julia was perfect.” Anyone watching it will understand she is overdoing her love of Julia, but it still isn’t that interesting to watch.

Unfortunately, Julie’s hagiography taints the Julia story. Although I know they are from different sources, the Julia story now seems too perfect and despite the fun it feels uncomfortable as if one is being feed something artificial, something other than the pure butter Julia and Julie both fetish over. As a light move, Julie and Julia succeeds, and even Julie can be funny, but Julie feels as passing as the millions of blog posts that are generated daily. I’m not sure if there is a digital equivalent of 5 seconds on the lips, 5 years on the hips, but Julie is certainly not worth the indulgence that Julia is.

$9.99 – A Review of Animated Etgar Keret

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At first it would seem difficult to make a film from the stories of Etgar Keret or at least difficult to make a film with a narrative thread that spanned the film and was not a series of little vignettes. Keret is known for ultra short stories, most under 3000 words, and they are usually not linked together in any discernible way. Instead, they form a chaotic reflection of the sometimes unexplainable in our lives, not a what could happen, but how you react if something similar were to occur. These reactions to things that most likely couldn’t occur—a man with wings, for instance—but illuminate emotions that are otherwise buried by the often tired social realism.

In $9.99 the film makers have continued with Keret’s focus on the unexpected, but have joined many of the stories to create several narrative threads that run throughout the film and smooth what otherwise might have been a choppy film. Even though the stories have been reworked they still contain the element of the unexpected that most manifests itself in this film as a counterweight to the dull, the weight of loneliness in modern life. One thread follows an old man who has lost his wife and is lonely, trying to talk with who ever passes by. One day he meets a man with wings who he takes for an angel. This angel is not angelic, though, but a bum who scrounges money off the old man. While it might seem like a story of a helpless old man, when the old man pushes the angel off the roof to see if he flies the story moves from the melancholy to a rejection of the simple salve the angel represents and at the same time a freedom for the old man.

The stories are always funny, if touched with melancholy and despite the dark ending of the old man and the angel the story is much lighter than it seems. It is the interplay between melancholy and humor, loneliness and hope, that makes the film good. When the unemployed son of a business man buys a book that explains the meaning of life for $9.99, the disappointment isn’t expressed in shouting, but a sadness that expresses affection and as the story of the father and son continues it isn’t the strangeness of the events but how they find release from all their disappointments that makes the film interesting. $9.99 is a great introduction to the world of Etgar Keret and the movie will surprise anyone who has not read his works with its inventiveness.

Season of Migration to the North and Tayeb Salih Reviewed in Harpers

~ bythefirelight

There is an excellent review of Season of Migration to the North by Robyn Creswell in Harpers (via Powell’s). The review goes beyond the typical East-West polemic that usually comes out in reviews (something I noted in my own review).

Many critics have noted that Season of Migration to the North is in some sense a rewrite of Conrad’s novella, whose symbolic pilgrimage it cleverly reverses. Rather than following a white man traveling upriver into the heart of Africa, where he indulges in a fantasy of primitivism, Salih sends Mustafa Sa’eed down the Nile and into the heart of Europe. There he masters the ways of the natives — Fabian economics, but also race-think — the better to subjugate them. These mirror images are ingenious, but it is possible to make too much of them. Postcolonial critics, who have set the terms for the reception of Salih’s novel in the English-speaking world, read it as a classic example of “the empire writing back.” Salih’s inversion of Conrad’s compass is taken to be an act of resistance, a critique of the imperialist perspective that Heart of Darkness is assumed to represent. But this reading slights the complexity of both works, as well as the relation between them. It makes Conrad’s racism, which is obvious and conventional, the keynote of his fiction. And it imputes a narrowly political agenda to Salih, whose primary concerns lie elsewhere. The central drama of Salih’s novella is not Mustafa Sa’eed’s journey to the heart of Europe but the confrontation between Sa’eed and the narrator, who, like Marlow, feels himself “captured by the incredible,” faced with a character too big for the otherwise realistic fiction he inhabits. It is Salih’s understanding of this dilemma, which is ethical and literary rather than straightforwardly political, that makes his reading of Conrad distinctive.

What makes the article worth the read, too, is the additional context  Creswell gives to Salih’s works. Since little of Salih’s works are in English the quotes from interviews and his journalism. What is particularlly interesting, is his take on fundamentalists, which Season would surely fall afoul of.

Salih once spoke in an interview of his sense that the past and future are in “a continual conspiracy against the now.” In his fiction, Salih often associates the agents of this conspiracy with orthodox Islam. A scene in The Wedding of Zein. To be published in a new edition by New York Review Books in February 2010. Salih’s first novel, makes this point. The tale is set in the same Nile-side community as Season of Migration to the North. The titular hero is a kind of village fool, and the story of his marriage to the village belle is, for the most part, a sunny fable. But in describing the feelings of the villagers toward their imam, Salih lets a pall drop over the landscape. It is the shadow of the future:

Each would leave the mosque after Friday prayers boggle-eyed, feeling all of a sudden that the flow of life had come to a stop. Each, looking at his field with his date palms, its trees and crops, would experience no feeling of joy within himself. Everything, he would feel, was incidental, transitory, the life he was leading, with its joys and sorrows, merely a bridge to another world, and he would stop for a while to ask himself what preparations he had made.

La Semana De Colores, by Elena Garro – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Elena Garro is not well known in the English speaking world, or if known, she is unfortunately known as the wife of Octavio Paz. She has been called the most important Mexican woman writer after Sor Juana, but for the most part her importance has dimmed over time so that only two books are in print in English.  La semana de colores is not one of those books, although the story Es la culpa de las tlaxcaltecas (It Is the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecas)is quite famous.

The stories in La semana range in style from magical realism to stories of criminal twist. Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas is the best story in the book and shows a mastery of the magical and historical in a story that blends 500 hundred years of history. Garro tells the story of a woman who meets an Indian on the side of the road. He is dressed for battle and keeps mentioning battles of in the distance. Margarita, a woman domineered by her husband, talks with him, but doesn’t understand what he is doing on the side of the road. Latter she sees him in Mexico City and around her home. The Indian, though, is just more than an aparation of the past, he is her cousin and husband, and Margarita continually says she has betrayed him. Yet she has to wait for him in the home of her husband in Mexico City and even tells him about the Indian, which makes him think she is crazy. Throughout the story Margarita shifts between these two realities: the modern Mexican life, and the Indian who is running from a defeat in battle; a loveless and violent marriage, and the true husband. Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas plays with the idea of a golden past, the past before the Spaniards came, to create a work that criticizes the macho world Margarita lives in. In the house she is a prisoner; outside she is free. The link is made all the more clear by the repeated references to the Tlazcaltecas who were the tribe who helped Cortés defeat the Aztecs. And when she says she was a traitor she plays on the story of La Malinche who helped Cortés and became his mistress. Garro uses these elements to create an opposing world where she would be free from the machismo of her house in Mexico City. There is also a longing to correct the mistake La Malinche made in becoming Cortés mistress. For Margarita to free herself of her husband, to do what she wants to do, is the way to break with the last 500 years of history and return at once to the past and the future.

If Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas masterfully blends the magical and the historical, some of the other stories are not quite as well rounded and tend towards a mix of peasants and ghosts or peasants and crime that is tiring. More than a few times I thought I was reading a mix of Juan Rulfo and Edgar Allen Poe. An example of the latter is Perfecto Luna where a man who was so overcome with guilt about killing a friend and disposing of the body parts in the adobe of his home he begins to hear him everywhere. Finally, he has to flee his home and town. As he is fleeing he finds a man on the side of the road and tells him everything. The next morning they find the killer dead. Perfecto Luna like other stories has several elements that run through many of the stories and grow a little tedious: peasants who believe in spirits and which manifests itself as a simple mindedness. While these stories were written in 1964 before Magical Realism became the dominant style, at this point to read stories about ghosts or devils or superstitious people who believe in them seems to insult the characters.

The other story that had some real merit was El arból. El arból while using a twist device at the end shows class tensions between an upper class woman and an illiterate woman from the country. The story, of course, shows the classest and racist attitudes of the rich woman, but it dwells more on how those fears become self fulfilling. However, there is, as always in these stories, a question of whether the attitudes bring on the rich woman’s violent end or was it something super natural. Where as some of the stories rely on the simplicity only of the characters, El arból allows for a broader range of thoughts and emotions between the two characters which makes it a richer story. Unfortunately, the ending is a little bit of a one liner that seems a little easy.

While the stories seem uneven, except for the Es la culpa de las tlazcaltecas, there are sufficiently well written to warrant reading one of her few works that are translated into English.

War’s End – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Joe Sacco is a writer whose work has always seemed to show the great power of the Graphic Novel. His comic journalism (not a disparaging description) is some of the best work I’ve seen in the field (and thankfully avoids the self obsessed woe is me story of other graphic novels). His artistry is in the comic genre, tending towards the caricature with people, but his drawings are realistic and detailed in a way that strives to document and highlight the story at hand. The stories in War’s End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-1996are those of Bosnia at the end of the war. This is the third of his books in Bosnia, obviously not as strong as his master work Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, but still showing his deft ability to write about war and yet never forget that for good or bad, he as a journalist is part of the story.

Soba, the first story, is not so much a story of war, but aftermath, an exploration of PTSD and rootlessness that comes after war. Yet it is more than just the soldiers coming back from the front, but a whole generation, a whole society that thought it was civilized and modern. What Sacco finds is the self destruction and disappointment that often comes with at the end of such wars. It is a solid, if brief, examination of the all to common and I think not repeated enough result of intense combat.

The second story, Christmas with Karadzic, isn’t as strong, but it does show that Sacco is aware of himself as participant and doesn’t try to deceive himself that he is an impartial professional. During the Christmas of 1995 he with several other journalists goes to interview Karadzic. It is not a particularly perilous journey, but it has its adventure and adrenaline. They get the scoop in the Republica Serbska and return to Sarajevo. Joe finds that he loves it; it was exciting and the other journalists, who live on cigarettes and tips, give him a rush. It is a two edged sword, because the idea is they are sending facts back to the papers, but it is as much an adventure as anything else. The willingness to show the reporters as part of the story is what makes Sacco interesting.

It is too bad that he has said that he probably can’t keep writing books like this because he can’t keep doing the journalism. Hopefully, the next one will be as interesting.

Captain Abu Raed – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Abu Raed is a janitor at the Aman airport who lives a quiet life of a widower but is a respected man in his neighborhood. Behind his humble job and quiet life is a man whose life has not gone as he wanted, beyond the death of his wife and son, it is not clear what other tragedies have brought him to work as a janitor. What is clear is he doesn’t belong as a janitor, he is a highly educated man who spends his spare time reading such works as A Season of Migration to the North. One day he brings home a captain’s hat he finds in the garbage at the airport. One of the neighborhood children sees him and insists he is a captain and despite his reservations he begins to play the role, telling the children stories he has picked up in his readings.

The relationship with the children is what animates the movie. At first it seems he is just a kindly old man who entertains the children, but when one boy, whose father beats him, seeks to unmask him as a fraud, Abu Raed begins to draw closer to their lives. He finds, much to his disappointment, that the children are succumbing to hardships of poverty. One child is beaten by his father, another who is very smart cannot go to school because his dad makes him him sell candy on the street. Abu Raed wants to help, but he is powerless. What can a janitor do? He has been freed by what he reads, but is trapped by circumstance. He knows the two boys have no future if they continue on the way they are. He tries to help one by buying all his candy, but that just makes his father want him to sell more. His best intentions go astray.

Contrasting with the boys is Nour, a woman of thirty and a pilot for Royal Jordanian airlines. She is everything the Abu Raed is not: wealthy, young, free to travel, and very westernized. Yet she finds in him an understanding and refuge from her family whose sole goal is to marry her off. In her he sees the life he couldn’t have and through her travels, he travels.

Nour, too, becomes the means for Abu Raed to finally do something to save one of the boys and finally make up for his son who he lost at the age of four. He gets Nour to take the boy’s family in as they make a midnight escape from their home and abusive father. Abu Raed, though, does not flee with them. Instead, he meets with the father, a drunk who likes to use his fists, and tries to talk to him, help him. It is a useless gesture, more a sacrifice, but Abu Raed is a man who believes in peace and the family. It would be impossible for him to send the family into hiding if he did not try and help.

Captain Abu Raed is a movie that at its core is about family and the search for meaning without one. Both Nour and Abu Raed really don’t have one, at least one they want. For them to take in the boy and his family is a way of saving what they don’t have, but value most. While these elements make for a good film, I can’t help but wonder what happens now, after the family flees and the father is on trial for murder? Will this nicely tied up ending really hold in the end? Perhaps not, but at least while the family is safe the idea that one can save a life even when you are an old janitor is still possible.

Departures – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Departures is a movie for crying if the tears streaming down the faces of several women in the audience is any indication. While the movie is about undertakers, it is really about family and the search for the healing when a family falls apart. The film follows Daigo a cellist who is laid off from his job and takes a new job in his village of birth as an undertaker. For western audiences undertaker here means someone who washes, dresses, and makes up the body as the family watches. It is very ritualized and as they do the washing the film suggests there is not so much a closure but a briefest healing for the families. At first Daigo is the reluctant novice, but he soon learns he has a talent for the job and begins to like the ritual of it. As he begins to understand the job more and how important it is for the families to see him clean the body, his family and friends distance themselves from him. Yet he perseveres and when those same families and friends see him wash the bodies of their loved ones they understand how important he is to the process of taking care of the dead. In addition to the families who watch him work, Daigo is also trying to come to terms with his father who abandoned him when he was just a boy. It was so long ago he can not even remember him.

The power in the film is located in continual sense of healing, of the families who have been arguing about the death, suddenly seeing the loved one as they were or as the family wants to remember the loved one. The grief is naturally hard on the families but the under takers, but the ritual is calming not only in the sense that the family sees a new the loved one, but the grief becomes part of the ritual which in turn becomes part of the ritual of life. From the sense of healing Daigo and the other undertakers become part of life cycle of the town they live in and as much as the film is about the dead it is about the rituals about the every day. It is not by chance that Diago has to leave Tokyo to find the calmer rhythms of a Japan from the past. Ultimately, when Diago resolves the issues with his father not only is there the same healing for him that he has seen with the families, but the course of life has made its natural progression. To compare Departures to a Japanese tea ceromony or the care taken in flower arangements might be over stating it, but the movie leaves one with that sense of tranquility and suggest while that ritural and tranquilty may not end grief it helps.

Emilio, los chistes y la muerte, By Fabio Morábito in Letras Libres

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Letras Libres reviewed Emilio, los chistes y la muerte, By Fabio Morábito recently and for those who like to read fiction as much for the style as the story it looks like an interesting book. If you read Spanish the review is worth a look.

The style of this novel is that of his stories and that is a good thing: we are before one of the stellar writers of our literature. Before anything, it is his self control. It is known that Morábito did not learn Spanish until he was 15, and it is noticeable: his relation with Spanish is adult-like, lacking the natural childishness fascination, marked with a distrust that obliges him to ponder every word. There is not, nor does it seem like there is, artificial nor capricious lyrics. If there is poetry, it is the poetry of Mondays: “Mondays/ they take apart the platforms/ and the bandstands, / they remove the nails / and the promises,/ reality returns / to its brutish state, / to poetry.” (from From Monday All the Year) There is a simplicity but not it is not simplistic, an economy but not a coldness. The sentences-he doesn’t stop to hide their elegance-are the remains of a fight we don’t see. Because there is a struggle:  Morábit’s struggle to purge the language.

El estilo de esta novela es el de sus cuentos, y eso es buena cosa: estamos ante uno de los prosistas estelares de nuestra literatura. Ante todo, su contención. Se sabe que Morábito no aprendió el idioma hasta los quince años, y se nota: su relación con el español es adulta, como desprovista de la natural fascinación infantil, como teñida de una desconfianza que lo obliga a ponderar cada palabra. No hay, no parece haber, artificio ni caprichos líricos. Si hay poesía, es la poesía de los lunes: “Los lunes/ se desmontan las tarimas/ y los estrados,/ se desclavan lo clavado/ y las promesas,/ la realidad vuelve/ a su estado bruto,/ a la poesía” (“De lunes todo el año”). Hay sencillez pero no simpleza, economía de me-
dios pero no frialdad. Las frases –no termina de ocultarlo su elegancia– son restos de una lucha que no observamos. Porque hay una lucha: la de Morábito purgando el idioma.

Emilio, los chistes y la muerte, By Fabio Morábito in Letras Libres

Season of Migration to the North – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

Season of Migration to the North is a difficult book to forget, one that posses difficult questions in the relations between the developed world and those from outside of it. A brief book, the economy and mystery create a view of the developed world that is troubling at best and hopeless at worst.

Season follows is the story of two men who have gone to study England from Sudan and have returned to after extended stays. The narrator is a young bureaucrat in Khartoum who spends part of his time in his native village where his parents and wife lived. One day he meets Mustafa Sa’eed who had been a professor of economics in England and has retired to the same village where he has married, had children, and become a respected member of the community. Mustafa Sa’eed, though, is a man with a dark and mysterious past and he slowly tells the narrator about his life in England where he would spend his free time sleeping with English women. He turns himself into the idolized African with incense and African artifacts in his apartment, and tells stories of lions and elephants so he can find English women to take back to his apartment. His interest is purely predatory. He doesn’t care about them. Instead, he uses them, turning their projections of what Africa is into a means to take what he wants. Ultimately, he comes to grief when he murders his lover, a woman who hates him yet wants to be around him. He is put on trial where it comes out that he not only has murdered his lover but two other women have committed suicide because of him.

Sa’eed doesn’t tell the narrator all of this at once. Instead, the narrator hears part of the story and he is curious but ambivalent and doesn’t purse his history. When Sa’eed dies in a flood of the Nile he leaves the narrator the care of his house and family. In the home that the narrator has inherited is a room that Sa’eed let no one enter and suggests that it holds his secrets. The narrator, though, doesn’t examine it and the mystery of Sa’eed permeates the novel.

Once Sa’eed has died the novel begins to play with the traditional and the western influence. In one particularly funny scene the elders of the village, including one woman, talk about the joys of sex. The conversation revolves around all the various wives and husbands the elders have had and how they have divorced just to sleep with someone new. One elder talks about the dozens of wives he has had and how he slept with them. At the same time the only woman of the group reminisces about her husbands in a sexual manner.  The group is at once free of English and western notions that marriage is supposed to be permanent, and yet at the same time the conversation is rooted in Sudanese notion that gives relatively little freedom to women, although the elder woman does suggest these roles aren’t quite so fixed.

For the narrator everything is proceeding as usual until the man who has bragged about all the wives he had decides he must marry Sa’eed’s widow. The narrator, who is responsible for Sa’eed’s family, won’t give his consent unless she wants to marry him. She doesn’t. The man insists she marry him, because it is not right for her to live alone. The narrator’s father suggests to the narrator that he should marry her so the man can’t, but he won’t do that either. In the end he returns to Khartoum to return to work. The man goes to the woman’s family, gets permission to marry and before he can sleep with her she commits suicide. It is a devastating event and the village is destroyed by it. Thus, if Sa’eed took his revenge in England, then England has its revenge in Sudan.

Throughout the novel there is a back and forth between the west and the traditional in Sudan. On the one hand Salih creates two characters who are alienated by their experience in the west. They have left Sudan and become something different, which not only sets them apart in the village, but sets them apart in the west. Each has taken on a role in the west, but the role doesn’t integrate them, it leaves them empty. Yet they are still attached to the west. Sa’eed constructs a private room in his house that is the perfect replica of an English study. Sa’eed, especially, is shaped by the duality of his lives and that duality, the feeling of emptiness in the west leads him to the cunningly profligate life in London. He uses women out of a vindictiveness as if to prove sarcastically that if this is what you think I am, then here you have it.

Neither the narrator nor Sa’eed can let go of what they learned, though. The narrator imports a western sensibility into the decision about Sa’eed’s wife. It seems clear that by tradition she would have been married off much earlier, yet he hesitates. However, Season is not a novel that wants to say the west is better, and the narrator is not interested in fighting for Sa’eed’s wife, he just thinks if she is not interested then she should be free not to marry. This conflict between the way of life in the village and that in England manifests itself as rage in England and scandal in Sudan. In each case the narrator and Sa’eed marked by their experiences abroad.

Season is a complicated novel and the issues are more than just sexual. Focusing on the relationships between Sa’eed and the women, though, creates scenes, those of the bedroom, that are easily transported between cultures. Moreover, the taboos Salih addresses create fundamental conflicts between all the characters that profoundly show the issues between the different cultures. Yet the use of the women in England seems slightly off. The women are not full characters, which makes sense since Sa’eed is only using them, but to have two kill themselves over him and the third use him as a means of suicide, Salih seems to using shallow caricatures at best. The silly notion that they are going to kill themselves over him seems to use some of the simpler cliches about women. While the women are not central characters, their suicides are the weakest part of the book.

Season is an impressive book despite its few weaknesses. It was for good reason that Arabic critics selected it as one of the best books of the 20th century in Arabic.

Season of Migration to the North is a difficult book to forget, one that posses difficult questions in the relations between the developed world and those from outside of it. A brief book, the economy and mystery create a view of the developed world that is troubling at best and hopeless at worst.

Season follows is the story of two men who have gone to study England from Sudan and have returned to after extended stays. The narrator is a young bureaucrat in Khartoum who spends part of his time in his native village where his parents and wife lived. One day he meets Mustafa Sa’eed who had been a professor of economics in England and has retired to the same village where he has married, had children, and become a respected member of the community. Mustafa Sa’eed, though, is a man with a dark and mysterious past and he slowly tells the narrator about his life in England where he would spend his free time sleeping with English women. He turns himself into the idolized African with incense and African artifacts in his apartment, and tells stories of lions and elephants all so he can find English women to take back to his apartment. His interest is purely predatory. He doesn’t care about them. Instead, he uses them, turning their projections of what Africa is into a means to take what he wants. Ultimately, he comes to grief when he murders his lover a woman who hates him yet wants to be around him. He is put on trial where it comes out that he not only has murdered his lover but two other women have committed suicide because of him.

Sa’eed doesn’t tell the narrator all of this at once. Instead, the narrator hears part of the story but he is curious but ambivalent and doesn’t purse his history. When Sa’eed dies in a flood of the Nile he leaves the narrator the care of his house and family. In the home that the narrator has inherited is a room that Sa’eed let no one enter and suggests that it holds his secrets. The narrator, though, doesn’t examine it and the mystery of Sa’eed permeates the novel.

Once Sa’eed has died the novel begins to play with the traditional and the western influence. In one particularly funny scene the elders of the village, including one woman, talk about the joys of sex. The conversation revolves around all the various wives and husbands the elders have had and how they have divorced just to sleep with someone new. One elder talks about the dozens of wives he has had and how he slept with them. At the same time the only woman of the group reminisces about her husbands in a sexual manner.  The group is at once free of English and western notions that marriage is supposed to be permanent, and yet at the same time the conversation is rooted in Sudanese notion that gives relatively little freedom to women, although the elder woman does suggest these roles aren’t quite so fixed.

For the narrator everything is proceeding as usual until the man who has bragged about all the wives he had decides he must marry Sa’eed’s widow. The narrator, who is responsible for Sa’eed’s family, won’t give his consent unless she wants to marry him. She doesn’t. The man insists she marry him, because it is not right for her to live alone. The narrator’s father suggests to the narrator that he should marry her so the man can’t, but he won’t do that either. In the end he returns to Khartoum to return to work. The man goes to the woman’s family, gets permission to marry and before he can sleep with her she commits suicide. It is a devastating event and the village is destroyed by it.

Throughout the novel there is a back and forth between the west and the traditional in Sudan. On the one hand Salih creates two characters who