Egypt – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 THE CAIRO AFFAIR by Olen Steinhauer /2014/the-cairo-affair-by-olen-steinhauer/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 13:08:46 +0000 /?p=25806 Book Quote:

“When you live in a house of mirrors, the only way to stay alive is to believe that every reflection is real.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (MAR 18, 2014)

The Cairo Affair takes place in Egypt and Libya during 2011 with flashbacks to Serbia in 1991. It is set during the period when the regimes of dictators Hosni Mubarek, Egyptian President and military commander from 1981 to 2011, and Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan revolutionary and the de facto ruler of Libya for 42 years, came to a violent end. The revolutionary events of the “Arab Spring” brought to conclusion various repressive Arab governments. The “Arab Spring” is widely believed to have been instigated by dissatisfaction with the rule of local governments, though some have speculated that wide gaps in income levels may have had a hand as well. Numerous factors led to the protests, including issues such as dictatorship or absolute monarchy, human rights violations, political corruption, (demonstrated by Wikileaks’ diplomatic cables), extreme poverty, and a large percentage of educated, jobless and dissatisfied youth. The storyline of  The Cairo Affair, takes place around the above events…and the events are often current, which makes this novel more interesting.

FLASHBACK: It is September 20, 1991, Sophie and Emmett Kohl are on on their honeymoon and madly in love. “Enthusiasm, imagination and commitment” are the qualities she most admires in her spouse. The newlywed couple choose to travel through Eastern Europe for a holiday. From their TVs at Harvard they’d watched the crumbling of the USSR with excitement. At age 22, Emmett has been to Europe previously, but Sophie has never traveled there. She longs to see Paris, the left bank cafes and the wonderful museums. Emmett tells her that they should go to places where “history is happening.” He wants to take a detour from the tourist attractions of Western Europe and travel to Eastern Europe. He tells Sophie that they would travel “the road less taken”…and she agrees.

They wait until September to make the trip so as to avoid the summer heat and the tourists. After four days in Vienna, where they wander down the broad avenues with their wedding cake buildings and museums, they visit the Sacher, the Stephansdom and the Kunsthalle and the cafes Central and Hofburg. Emmett comments that the city reminds him of Graham Greene’s 1949 British film noir, “The Thin Man.” On the fifth day they board a train to Prague. The couple moves on to Budapest and then they make an unexpected detour to Yugoslavia.

Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the dictator of Yugoslavia died in 1980, leaving the country, a socialist federation, without cohesive leadership. In March and April 1981, a student protest in Pristina, the capital of the then Yugoslav and Serbian province of Kosovo, led to widespread protests by the Kosovo Albanians demanding more autonomy within the Yugoslav federation. After Tito’s death in 1980, tensions between the Yugoslav republics emerged, and in 1991 the country disintegrated and went into a series of brutal wars that lasted the rest of the decade.

It is at this time of enormous tension when Emmett and Sophia choose to visit, knowing full well the dangerous situation in the country. They wind up in the city of Novi Sad where they become involved with an exuberant bunch of 20-something locals who insist that the American couple accompany them to a nearby disco. All their newly made friends are from Vojvodina, the city-state where Novi Sad is located. One such “friend” slams  “Miloševi?, took away our political autonomy. Ours and Kosovo’s. It stinks!” It is in a bar, late at night, when they meet Zora Balasevic, an attractive, hard looking woman in her 40s, who overwhelms the couple by discussing, (a one-sided conversation), Serbian history. “We are happy – you see? – to get rid of the Slovenes, but Croats want to steal our coast. Who pay for these beaches? (sic). Bosnia is next. There will be fire…”

FLASH FORWARD: It is winter 2011. Five politically active Libyan exiles have seemingly vanished from the face of the earth at the same time. Jibral Aziz, is a CIA agent working out of Langley and Cairo, and, with increasing frequency, over the border to Libya. He is a young Libyan American whose father was executed by the Gadhafi regime. Aziz is in Cairo under nonofficial cover, although he meets occasionally with Harry Wolcott, head of CIA activities in Egypt. Awhile back Aziz had concocted a plan, “Stumbler,” whose purpose was to have the US literally high-jack the revolution in Libya, using the exiles and revolutionaries as their front, (sound familiar?). The plan had the CIA turning a popular revolution into a CIA coup, thus giving the CIA complete control over the country’s development…. and, of course, OIL! Oil reserves in Libya are the largest in Africa and the fifth largest in the world. For a variety of reasons, “Stumbler was tabled.” So when it appears someone else has obtained a copy of the blueprints, Aziz alone knows the danger it represents as the players converge on the city of Cairo.

In the winter of 2011, Sophie and Emmett Kohl are stationed in Hungary where Emmet’s official title is “deputy consul.” They had worked/lived in Cairo before the transfer. Sophie, however, doesn’t really have “a life.” She is a 42 year-old lady of leisure, who graduated with honors from Harvard. She has tea with the wives of other diplomats, makes small talk at embassy cocktail parties, has her nails and hair done…and is bored out of her mind. On the evening of March 2, 2011 she meets her husband at a fancy restaurant and proceeds to tell him that she has been having an affair with his boss, Stan Bertolli, who is still in Cairo. She believes she loves him and he has certainly expressed his love for her.

Emmett, in a state of anger and betrayal, confides a long kept secret that had been bothering him. He had met, just once, with the infamous Zora Balasevic, from Serbian days. She is now a spy at the Serbian embassy in Cairo and she attempts to recruit him by blackmailing him. He right out refuses and so Zora backs-off. After the main course at dinner, a thug pops into the restaurant and shoots Emmett in the head in front of his disbelieving wife!

In shock, Sophie flees to Cairo and into Stan’s arms. She doesn’t know why the murder happened or who the perpetrator is. Stan will help her, she thinks. And she is in no shape to return to Massachusetts for Emmett’s funeral. Determined to find out why her husband was assassinated, she follows a trail that leads to the American Embassy in a tumultuous Cairo; to the revolution under way in neighboring Libya; to Langley, Virginia; and to her own ill-fated honeymoon in Eastern Europe.

There are many characters in this story, most with hidden identities, multiple roles, and many betrayals which unravel slowly but inevitably as we view events from several characters’ viewpoints. The fact that the narrative unfolds with a current events background makes this novel appear to be real…and perhaps some of it is. And the portrait the author paints of Cairo really brings the city to life with its colors, smells, people, etc.

Olen Steinhauer’s The Cairo Affair is a complex, well fleshed-out story of the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, the CIA, a marriage and an affair, “that leaves the reader with the unsettling feeling that, despite all the information won, lost, and put to use, the world of intelligence is no stronger than the fragile, fallible humans who navigate it.” Here allegiances are never clear and outcomes are never guaranteed.

I highly recommend The Cairo Affair…especially for those readers who are fans of Eric Ambler and John le Carré.

NOTE:  There are no “spoilers” here. The review information takes place in the first few chapters of the novel.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 21 readers
PUBLISHER: Minotaur Books (March 18, 2014)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Olen Steinhauer
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Cold War Eastern Europe Series:

Milo Weaver trilogy:

]]> THE MISTRESS OF NOTHING by Kate Pullinger /2011/the-mistress-of-nothing-by-kate-pullinger/ Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:33:51 +0000 /?p=16852 Book Quote:

“As with the stays and the heavy English clothes I had kept wearing, washing, mending and wearing again, it had not occurred to me to do otherwise. I am accustomed to doing as I am told; to do otherwise would be frightening.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (MAR 25, 2011)

Winner of the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award, Pullinger’s first novel to be published by a US publisher calls on the real-life characters of the consumptive Lady Duff Gordon and her faithful maid Sally to tell a story of adventure, passion and class in the 19th century.

Although the reason behind their journey is not a happy one – Lady Duff Gordon’s failing health – narrator Sally is exuberant. Egypt has always held her imagination and, a confirmed spinster at 30, devoted to her mistress, she is excited to be out of dull England and surrounded by an exotic culture.

From the book’s first line, we know that Sally has a rude awakening: “The truth is that, to her, I was not fully human.”

“She loved me, there’s no question of that, and I knew it and had felt secure in it, but it transpired that she loved me like a favored household pet.”


But we also know she soldiers on: “Once she cast me out, she could no longer control me. No.”

Sally’s transgression is to fall in love and worse, have a child. The man is their dragoman – interpreter, guide, general factotum – an Egyptian with a wife and young daughter. As they travel from Alexandria to Cairo and up the Nile to Luxor (“The name itself felt warm in my mouth.”), Sally drinks it all in.

Her narration makes everything fresh and colorful and Pullinger incorporates the details of domestic life seamlessly into the excitement of it all. Sally is enchanted by the lemon tree in the garden, the thick black cane syrup they put in their tea, the inactivity of Ramadan, the swaths of blue linen drying above the streets, even the suffocating heat of summer.

Lady Duff’s impending betrayal of Sally looms over the narrative, but Pullinger’s prose is graceful and vivid and Sally’s growing strength provides a counterpoint as she settles deeper into Egyptian ways. As she grows happier and ever more intimate with her mistress, she mistakes Lady Duff’s increasing familiarity for real friendship. Sally’s error is in believing that exchanging restrictive English clothes for flowing Egyptian garb means that Lady Duff has also cast off restrictive British class distinctions, which she certainly has not.

The author anchors her characters in their time and the story savors its contrasts – culture, gender, class, health and sickness, independence and dependence – but subtly. An evocative story.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 14 readers
PUBLISHER: Touchstone (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Kate Pullinger
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

A Little Stranger

Bibliography:

With Jane Campion:

]]> CAIRO MODERN by Naguib Mahfouz /2009/cairo-modern-by-naguib-mahfouz/ Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:41:58 +0000 /?p=6989 Book Quote:

“The appointment of government officials is rigged, the award of contracts is rigged, and the elections themselves are rigged: so why shouldn’t the choice of a beauty queen also be rigged.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (DEC 28, 2009)

Set in the 1930s and published in 1945, Cairo Modern is, by turns, ironic, satirical, farcical, and, ultimately, cynical, as the author creates a morality tale which takes place in a country where life’s most basic guiding principles are still uncertain. World War II has kept the British on the scene as a foreign power, a weak Egyptian monarchy is under siege by reformers, and the army is growing. As the novel opens, four college students, all due to graduate that year, are arguing moral principles, one planning to live his life according to “the principles that God Almighty has decreed,” while others argue in favor of science as the new religion, materialism, social liberation, and even love as guiding principles. None of the students have any respect for their government, which they see as “rich folks and major families.”

Among the students, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im is the poorest, living on a pittance, which is all his father and mother can provide him. His father’s sudden stroke, however, reduces Mahgub’s three pounds a month to only one pound, and he must literally starve himself in order to finish the school year, becoming more and emaciated as time passes. His father, unable to work, has only enough money to survive for one month after Mahgub graduates in May, so finding a job is truly a matter of the whole family’s survival for Mahgub. When Mahgub contacts a former neighbor, Salim Al-Ikhshidi, for help, Al-Ikhshidi lays out the facts of life regarding government jobs like his own—certain people will help him in exchange for a flat fee or a portion of his salary over several years—unless he can find a wife among the daughters of ministers, an impossibility considering Mahgub’s poverty.

Before long, however, Al-Ikhshidi, in consultation with higher-ups, has devised a plan for Mahgub, who is in no position to be selective. If Mahgub will agree to marry the lover of a high-ranked government official and become part of a ménage a trois, all his expenses will be paid and a job will be guaranteed in the ministry where Al-Ikhshidi himself works. Desperate, Mahgub agrees, intending to “find satisfaction in a marriage that was a means, rather than an end.” On his wedding day, he meets the bride—the former girlfriend of one of his closest friends, a young man who had been devastated by her unexplained breaking off of their relationship.

The marriage of Mahgub and Ihsan is filled with the expected complications as Mahgub tries to hide his poverty-stricken past and his betrayal of his college friend, at the same time that he is rising in the government, associating with wealthy and influential friends, and becoming arrogant, all sources of great humor and satire by Mahfouz. Elegant society parties attended by people who “surpassed [Mahgub] in his own cynical principles” reveal Mahfouz’s opinion of this level of society. Mahgub and Ihsan become a perfect couple—“Each of us has sold himself in exchange for status and money.”

As the carefully created charade begins to unwind, the final scenes are worthy of the grandest of farces, and it is easy to imagine this as a period film, with the complications turning Mahgub’s life into a disaster. The Egyptian setting, while important, ultimately becomes less important here than the universal themes and attitudes which the author is satirizing—the naivete of college students, the lure of wealth, the arrogance of power, the pretentions of the newly affluent, the willingness to sacrifice principle for expediency, and, ultimately, the ability of “the clique of most powerful criminals to destroy the weaker ones.” As Mahgub’s friends gather to discuss the latest governmental scandal at the end of the novel, they hark back to their arguments at the novel’s opening, wondering about the role of religion, the definition of evil, the mores of their society, and all the interactions among these. Life is busy for these young men, but tomorrow is another day.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Anchor (December 1, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE: Cairo Modern
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Naguib Mahfouz
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Karnak Cafe

Morning and Evening Talk

Bibliography:

* Part of the The Cairo Trilogy (1956-57)

** Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

]]> MORNING AND EVENING TALK by Naguib Mahfouz /2009/morning-and-evening-talk-by-naguib-mahfouz/ Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:56:47 +0000 /?p=3833 Book Quote:

“He let his contempt be known from the first day. He wondered how people distinguished by nothing but their possession of weapons could usurp government. Did it mean then that brigands could become kings? What had happened to noble families? How could the rank of pasha be eliminated with the stroke of a pen?…The world had truly turned upside down—the bottom now at the top, the top now at the bottom. Fires of jealousy and rancor raged in his heart. He glowered angrily at the new world glowering at him.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (AUG 07, 2009)

Written in 1987, this last entry in the Cairo series by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz is not a novel in the traditional sense. The book has no beginning, middle, and end, and no real plot. There is no standard chronology or strong characters who develop fully during the action. In a bold experiment, Mahfouz uses the traditional Arab biographical dictionary as his structural model for the book. These dictionaries came into use in the ninth century, recording the lives of influential people from all walks of life in single-paragraph entries.

Creating sixty-seven individual biographies, Mahfouz arranges them according to the Arab alphabetical order of the characters’ first names, each entry being a personal anecdote which adds life to the book and resembles a short story. Incorporating the history of three Cairo families from the Napoleonic Wars through the assassination of Anwar Sadat, Mahfouz recreates Cairo life and culture in an impressionistic collage which, because it is dependent on the alphabetical order of the characters, jumbles the chronology and the generations of families.

The book begins with the death of a child, who was the best friend of his uncle, only a year and a half older, an episode which is recalled again near the end of the book, and as the child’s family is recreated, in random order by alphabet, the novel grows like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, incorporating different eras and other families over four or five generations. Most of the characters belong to well-off families in Cairo, but the inheritance laws and marriage laws do not benefit women and widows and often leave a family destitute upon the death of the male family leader. This creates a panorama of characters of different economic and educational levels, and different levels of professional success, though they may be within the same generation of the same family.

Since Mahfouz is also incorporating one hundred fifty years of Egyptian history, he is also able to bring history to life by showing how the important influences on Egyptian history affect particular members of these families. Beginning (non-chronologically) with the entrance of Napoleon into Cairo in 1798, Mahfouz shows the progression of political change: the British Occupation from 1882 – 1952; the 1919 Revolution against the British occupation; the Free Officer’s movement, founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser, leading to the July Revolution of 1952; the Tripartite Aggression (the Suez Crisis) of 1956, in which Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for nationalizing the Suez canal; the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel attacked Egypt; the War of Attrition from 1967 – 70 between Egypt and Israel; and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which Egypt and Syria attempted to recapture land lost to Israel in the Six Day War.

As much as the book may be about political change, however, it is at least, if not more, about marriage and its importance in the culture. Throughout these generations, members of the same family intermarry, usually at the level of cousins, to protect inheritance and wealth, but other marriages are also arranged among other “appropriate” families. Some of these marriages are happy, and others are not. Some lead to divorce, while others lead to the taking of additional wives by some of the husbands. Despite the different educational levels between the men and the women, the women are all educated at least at the level of literacy, and as time moves toward the present, the wives are often educated professionals—lawyers or physicians—who may move easily between Egyptian and European cultures.

Though most of the families remain in Cairo, a few of the individual members move to other parts of the world. Some leave for Germany, the United States, France, and Saudi Arabia. Some of the women marry men from Pakistan and Syria. Still, they return often to Cairo, despite their absences for significant periods of time. Among the families in this novel, the religious commitments are casual, not devout, and while some of the characters may be passionately committed to some of the political movements of the day (and others may oppose them just as passionately), none of them are religious extremists.

Readers new to Mahfouz will probably want to start elsewhere for their introduction, perhaps with the Cairo Trilogy or even Akhenaten, written just two years before this novel, both of which are more traditional in chronology and development. An experiment which stretches the bounds of the novel, Morning and Evening Talk was written when Mahfouz was an old man reflecting on history and the meaning of being an Egyptian. The book can be tedious and sometimes frustrating, with characters having similar names making it difficult to remember who is who, and with sixty-seven biographies, some characters also resemble other characters and do not add significant new information to the novel. Still, like an impressionistic or pointillist painting, the individual biographies are colorful and fascinating, and taken together they give a picture of a broad cross section of Egyptian society dealing, over time, with the winds of change.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Anchor; Reprint edition (March 10, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE: Morning and Evening Talk
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Naguib Mahfouz
EXTRAS: Excerpt

Complete review on Morning and Evening Talk
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read a review of Karnak Cafe

Read a review of Cairo Modern

More set in  Egypt:

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany

The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

The Ptolemies by Duncan Sprott

Another interesting narrative approach:

A Dictionary of Magiao by Han Shaogong

Bibliography:

]]> THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING by Alaa Al Aswany /2009/the-yacoubian-building-by-alaa-al-aswany/ /2009/the-yacoubian-building-by-alaa-al-aswany/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:29:05 +0000 /?p=2885 Book Quote:

“This country doesn’t belong to us…It belongs to the people who have money. If you’d had twenty thousand pounds and used them to bribe someone, do you think any one would have asked about your father’s job. Make money…and you’ll get everything, but if you stay poor, they’ll walk all over you.”

 

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (JUL 16, 2009)

The Yacoubian Building is a true literary blockbuster—“the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt,” according to National Geographic. American readers coming to this novel will find it a vibrant and descriptive primer illuminating the various forces in contemporary Egypt that affect its current political climate. It is also a thoughtful analysis of why certain forces are as influential as they are today—the movement for democracy, the growing Islamist counterculture, the power of the sheikhs and their differences in scriptural interpretation, the inbred culture of the military and the police, the student movements, and, most of all, the long-term influence of generations of poverty.

Set in a ten-story building built in 1934 and located in downtown Cairo, the Yacoubian building was once the ultimate in luxury, located in an area in which the most elegant of European activities took place and where Europhiles gathered to eat, drink and socialize. In the ensuing years, the Yacoubian Building has changed its character, as has the surrounding neighborhood, and it is now a microcosm of life in Egypt. The small iron rooms on the roof, which were once used for storage by each apartment owner, are now occupied as tiny residences by poor people who have set up a whole community on the roof. The elegant apartments which once housed the elite have now attracted the military and politicians who took over after the revolution of 1952, when the wealthiest citizens lost much of their property and their investments. The beautiful boutiques on the ground floor are now more plebian retail outlets, and the bars and cocktail lounges there now must hide their alcoholic inventory and make payoffs to stay in business.

Using a conversational and unpretentious style to create characters that the reader comes to care about,  Alaa Al Aswany shows his characters’ home life in the Yacoubian Building, his/her dreams and goals, the nature of life in the city at large, and the impediments to success. Many residents are poor, and some have become poor as a result of their property being seized by the government after the revolution of 1952. No one at the Yacoubian Building is secure in any aspect of his/her life.

Among the residents is Zaki Bey el Dessouki, age sixty-five, a legend, known and greeted by everyone on the street, a man who gives advice about sex to the young men on the block and who is always looking for a nubile woman. His servant, Abaskharon, a cripple who has raised three daughters and who helps support his brother, is secretly and cleverly stashing away funds to buy one of the iron rooms on the roof. He helps Zaki prepare for his assignations.

Taha, the son of the doorman Shazli, having been a conscientious and extremely hardworking student, is preparing for the police academy, a job he’s wanted all his life. He is awaiting his final personal interview. He worries about his long-time girlfriend Busayna, who seems to have changed recently, dressing more sexily, and he asked her to dress more appropriately, in a less revealing fashion.

Also in the Yacoubian Building, Hatim Rasheed, a gay newspaper editor, is in love with Abd Rabbuh, who is in the military service (and married). Hagg Muhammad Azzam, very wealthy, is believed to be involved in drug dealing, using his substantial real estate holdings as a front for money laundering, and he has decided to become a candidate for political office. Kamal el Fouli a law professor who is also a corrupt and hypocritical man, will, for a price, help Hagg Azzam become the candidate of the Patriotic Party.

Within the subplots involving all these characters, their wives, girlfriends, and sisters, Al Aswany creates a vibrant community, and as they all face problems (from small setbacks to major disasters), he also shows how each deals with his problems. Women routinely take jobs in which they know they will suffer sexual abuse because they need the money. One woman resorts to robbery, knowing her lover can’t complain without revealing his secrets publicly. One person tries the legal approach to get the government to respond to a gross injustice. One becomes a victim of the police security forces. Always in the background is the contest for wills between those who wish for true democacy and those committed to an Islamist future. Quotations from scripture pepper the narrative and the daily conversations of the characters, and the reasons for disagreement among some sheikhs also emerge.

Al Aswany’s remarkable study of the conversion of one character into a committed Islamist will resonate with westerners who read it, as it speaks more clearly than anything else I’ve read on why someone would take this route. The reasons that most westerners ascribe to these decisions do not really pertain here, and as Al Aswany shows through his character’s reading of the scriptures why terrorism “makes sense” to him, western readers may also see why there is very little that non-Muslims can do to prevent the kind of absolute thinking that results in jihad, the commitment of people who truly believe that they are doing God’s work.

Simple in style, beautifully descriptive of daily life, insightful regarding the humanity of his characters, and filled with the kind of detail that enables the very best novels to communicate on an emotional level with readers from other cultures, Alaa Al Aswany’s novel has depicted Egypt with all its variety, its energy, and its hopes within the microcosm of The Yacoubian Building.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 55 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial (August 1, 2006)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE: The Yacoubian Building
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Alaa Al Aswany
EXTRAS: Excerpt and an interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More books centered around a building:The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri (opens at Amazon.com)

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous

Ellington Boulevard by Adam Langer

More novels set in Egypt:

Karnak Cafe by Naguib Mahfouz

The Winter Vault by Ann Michaels

Bibliography:

]]> /2009/the-yacoubian-building-by-alaa-al-aswany/feed/ 2 THE WINTER VAULT by Anne Michaels /2009/the-winter-vault-by-anne-michaels/ /2009/the-winter-vault-by-anne-michaels/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:43:13 +0000 /?p=399 Book Quote:

“As the ragged cavity [caused by the on-going removal of the temple at Abu Simbel] expanded, as the gaping absence in the cliff grew deeper, so grew Avery’s feeling they were tampering with an intangible force, undoing something that could never be produced or reproduced again.  The Great Temple had been carved out of the very light of the river, carved out of a profound belief in eternity.  Each labourer had believed.  This simple fact roused him—he could not imagine any building in his lifetime or in the future erected with such faith.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (APR 21, 2009)

Eleven years after the publication of Fugitive Pieces, her only other novel (and winner of the Orange Prize), Anne Michaels has published a monumental philosophical novel which is also exciting to read for its characters and their conflicts.  Complex and fully integrated themes form the superstructure of the novel in which seemingly ordinary people deal with issues of life and death, love and death, the primacy of memory, the search for spiritual solace, and the integrity of man’s relationships, with the earth and the water that makes the earth habitable—huge themes and huge scope, reflecting huge literary goals.  And Michaels is successful, not just in dealing with the big issues and themes affecting mankind itself, but in bringing them to life through individuals who muddle along, seeking some level of personal connection with the world while trying to appreciate life’s mysteries.

Avery Escher is a young engineer in 1964 when he and his wife Jean travel to Abu Simbel, where he is charged with the task of helping to remove the Great Temple of Abu Simbel and reconstruct it in the cliff sixty feet higher.  Gushing water, which will be released when the Aswan Dam is finished, will flood the area where the temple lies, and the new Lake Nasser will cover all the land downstream.  The reconstruction is planned to be so seamless that no one will be able to tell that the temple and its ancient monuments have been taken apart, block by block, and put back together again.  Yet, as he works on the site, slowly and meticulously, Avery feels ashamed, feeling that “Holiness was escaping under the [workers’] drills,” and he wonders “Can you move what was consecrated?”   Surprised at his own response, because he had expected that the salvage would be an “antidote” to the “despair of dam-building,” he comes to believe, instead, that “the reconstruction was a further desecration, as false as redemption without repentance.”

All the Nubian people who have lived in the area below the dam for tens of generations have been relocated (or more accurately, dislocated) to a site a thousand miles away, along with their animals and all their possessions, but they are bereft.  They have not been able to take with them the places where their dead are buried, where they have loved and worked the land, where they have worshipped, and where their memories and their very souls reside.  The new cement-block village, erected in a dry, treeless plain, bears no resemblance to the home where they have always had their roots.  All of Nubia has been displaced by the damming of the Nile and the building of a lake, named for a modern political leader, which has destroyed their own ancient history.

This is not the first time Avery has been exposed to the dislocation of long-time residents through the building of dams and lakes.  His father, William Escher, was an engineer on the Canadian project to build the St. Lawrence Seaway from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, which involved the flooding of ten Canadian villages through the building of Lake St. Lawrence.  Stories about the Eschers’ displaced family friends are touching and bring the thematic development—and the sadness—down to a more intimate personal level.

A third thread involving man’s desire to honor and preserve the past, though the present has changed it irrevocably, takes place in Warsaw, following World War II, after the departure of the German and Russian occupiers. The city decided to rebuild its central historical core to look exactly the way it did before the war, using plans hidden and preserved by polytechnic students during the war and historical artifacts scavenged from the rubble.  The reconstructed city, thought “successful” by its builders, never felt real to many of the people who lived there, however—its heart was missing, as were its memories—along with almost all its Jewish people.  As one Polish character mourns, “I do not know if we belong to the place where we are born or the place where we are buried.”

Within this fully developed thematic framework, filled with symbols, Anne Michaels creates a passionate love story between Avery Escher and his wife Jean, and a generational saga about Avery Escher and his family and friends, alternating their personal stories and their personal relationships to earth and water with the grand stories from Egypt, the St. Lawrence Valley, and Poland.  Avery and his family have lived along the St. Lawrence River and its subsequent Seaway, empathizing with those displaced, though Avery’s father actively contributed to it.  Jean has faced personal displacement following the deaths of her parents.  A botanist, Jean collects seeds and seedlings, transplants the garden that once belonged to her mother, grafts trees to preserve them, and, during a particularly difficult time in her relationship with Avery, plants flowers at night in public places where they will surprise visitors who have not expected them.

While Avery is dealing with technology and man’s desire to improve nature and reconstruct the past artificially, Jean is preserving and growing new life in the land which nurtures it.   Not surprisingly, their love is tested to the limits by their different understanding of man’s relationship with nature and the interconnections of land and water to memory, the past, and ultimately the present and future.  “I think,” Avery says early in the novel, “we each have only one or two philosophical or political ideas in our life, one or two organizing principles during our whole life, and all the rest falls from there.”  Fortunately, mankind—and individuals—are capable of learning and changing.  “Regret is not the end of the story,” we learn.  “It is the middle of the story.”

Michaels’s talent as a poet is obvious in her gorgeous ruminations about the meaning of love and life, and in her evocative, unique imagery, but the beauty of the language is matched by the richness of the novel’s underlying concepts, which give depth and significance to this challenging and satisfying novel.  Raising fascinating questions, Michaels piques the imagination and guides the reader into new realms of thought.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 12 reviewers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (April 21, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Anne Michaels
EXTRAS: Read excerpt
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