MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Arabic World We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR by Mark Helprin /2010/a-soldier-of-the-great-war-by-mark-helprin/ /2010/a-soldier-of-the-great-war-by-mark-helprin/#comments Sat, 06 Nov 2010 19:42:16 +0000 /?p=13448 Book Quote:

“This was the sound that, on the Western Front, had begun to drown out the music of the world. It was clear to Alessandro, and easily understandable, that, for some, music would cease to exist. But not for him, not for him. The electricity rose up his spine and he trembled not from shock but because, over the sound of the guns, he was still able to hear sonatas, symphonies, and songs.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 06, 2010)

Alessandro Giuliani is listening to field guns being tested in Munich in 1914, the year before Italy entered the War against Germany and Austria. Although mostly interested in the visual arts, Alessandro should know about music and beauty of all kinds; as a Professor of Aesthetics, it is his metier. But he learns about it the hard way. When the war breaks out, he is just about to take his doctorate at the University of Bologna. He volunteers for the Italian navy in the hope of avoiding conscription into the trenches, but he ends up in some of the worst fighting of the war nonetheless, facing the Austrians across the river Isonzo. Subsequent phases of the war will take him to Sicily, the high Alps, and many other places, and he proves as natural a soldier as he is an aesthetician. Alessandro’s appreciation of beauty, which shines through every chapter of his reminiscences as an old man in the 1960s, has not emerged despite his exposure to death and danger, but because of them.

“From the quarry, scepters of light emerged at sharp angles, like mineral crystals, and the thicket from which they came was a fume of light. Sometimes the beams were cranked into different positions as if they were choosing new targets among the stars. Hundreds of men worked below, in a brilliance that made the vast quarry look like a piece of bright moon that had crashed to earth. They appeared to be mining not stone but white light, and when they took the stone in slabs and caused it to float through empty space, tracked by searchlights, hanging on gossamer cables and unseen chains, it was as if they were handling light in cubic measure, cutting and transporting it in dense self-generating quanta from the heart of magical cliffs.”

Alessandro’s image of looking down into a marble quarry as men work through the night to make tombstones for the Italian dead is one of dozens that have stuck with me indelibly since I first read this wonderful book a decade ago. It is a magical image, cinematic in its theatricality and scale, yet the men down below are prisoners working murderous sixteen-hour shifts, and Alessandro is about to join them. Yet he finds wonder everywhere: in a midnight bathe in the Isonzo between the two front lines, in the sunlight glinting off a flight of birds that feed off the battlefield dead, in the walls of flame from burning stubble that line the Italian coast as he travels slowly southward on a cattle steamer, in the fury of a thunderstorm breaking over icebound peaks, in galloping a fine stallion across the plains of Hungary. “And how does God speak to you?” somebody asks him; “In the language of everything that is beautiful,” he replies.

I cannot think of any other book more full of amazement. The only other modern thing that comes close in fantasy, wonder, or scale is David Mitchell’s recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. But this comparison also points to a weakness that I noticed on second reading but missed or excused the first time. At 800 pages, it is a long book, slow to get started and over-extended at the end. Although Helprin skillfully sets up the combination of reality and imagination at the beginning, and is careful to ensure that every episode, however colorful, is also realistically plausible, the long sequence of such events demands an increasing suspension of disbelief. There comes a time, after about 500 pages, when one wonders how many more humps and turns this roller-coaster has. There is also a bizarre thread, involving a former employee of Alessandro’s father, a diminutive mad clerk placed in an important position at the Ministry of War, which seems more in the manner of Catch-22 than the basic seriousness of the rest of the book.

And it is serious. It is a book about God, and honor, and joy, and endurance, and above all about love. Love in a spiritual sense, love among families, love between friends, the love of man for woman. There is a moment early in the book when Alessandro comes upon a young girl weeping quietly beside a Roman fountain at night. There is another when he goes to Venice to look at the enigmatic picture by Giorgione known as “La tempesta,” involving a young soldier and a naked woman with a baby facing one another against the background of a gathering storm. Both gleam with that magical grace which Helprin conjures so effortlessly. But both will resonate throughout the book to wondrous effect, more than once bringing tears to my eyes, and lingering in my mind for ever.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 210 readers
PUBLISHER: Mariner Books (June 1, 2005)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mark Helprin
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of:

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]]> /2010/a-soldier-of-the-great-war-by-mark-helprin/feed/ 0 THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE by Orhan Pamuk /2010/the-museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/ /2010/the-museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:35:40 +0000 /?p=12750 Book Quote:

“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 7, 2010)

I don’t know why I resisted Orhan Pamuk all of these years, but one thing’s for sure – I now can’t live without him. I remember the critical acclaim that followed Pamuk in 2005 after the release of Snow, but even with a Nobel Prize under his belt, I was hardly swayed. That may have had something to do with my obsessive relationship with Philip Roth during that time – after all, I’m a loyal gal. And this Pamuk guy was not going to take me away from the legendary Zuckermans and Kepeshes of modern Jewish fiction.

This was all before a few months ago when I stumbled across a review of Pamuk’s literary masterpiece, The Museum of Innocence. The premise of the novel immediately had me fixated: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy spends the next eight years of his life…sitting in a living room with girl, her husband, and her parents, watching Turkish serials and the evening news, night after night. Now that’s what hooked me: the utter devotion and sacrifice that boy made just to see his beloved, day after day, for eight torturous years, with hardly any affirmation from his object of affection.

Speaking of objects, what Kemal, our love-struck narrator of this brilliant, 560-page novel does manage to do, is become a collector of sorts. Unable to recapture the love of his beautiful, distant-relation, Fusun, (who incidentally marries another man after severing ties with our narrator), Kemal begins to secretly collect items from Fusun, ranging from an earring, to a cigarette butt. And this collection begins to grow into a private, perpetual museum which Kemal cherishes and worships like a Marian shrine.

If I seem evasive, it’s because I don’t wish to give away too much of this melancholy tale of love and obsession in Turkey, circa 1970s. And how could I, anyway? This novel is a grand accomplishment for Pamuk, who allegedly worked on this project for ten years. Filled with images of modern Istanbul, with references to Turkish film, fashion, and soda pop, each page is a tender, nostalgic homage to a city now utterly transformed. Pamuk’s desire to seize these memories go well beyond the confines of his novel: this year, at some undisclosed date, the official Museum of Innocence will open to the Turkish public in the town of Cukurcuma, where much of the story unfolds. Fans of his novel will have an opportunity to visit the museum, and see first-hand, the very objects that Pamuk meticulously records throughout the book. For a sneak peak of these objects, see this slideshow.

As this review comes to an end, I have a confession to make. I can’t get over The Museum of Innocence. I think about it…all the time. It haunts me – like Wong Kar Wai’s similar magnum opus, the movie In the Mood for Love. Filled with lingering reminiscence, clandestine love, and most importantly, an era now vanished, the two works are almost companion pieces. There is something cinematic about Pamuk’s novel that begins on the front dust jacket and ends on the final page. I remember holding this giant of a book for the first time and being completely enthralled by the image before me: a group of young, Turkish adults, in a 1950s convertible car, all smiling. And I knew at that moment that this image was akin to a Lynchian smoke-screen – these were not happy people on a joyride. As you soon discover within the first chapter, the main characters of this novel are tormented but hopeful, destitute but euphoric, all because of a few moments of bliss that forever mark their lives.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 64 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage; Reprint edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER: Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Orphan PamukWikipedia page on Orhan Pamuk
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and ExcerptMore on the physical  Museum of Innocence
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]]> /2010/the-museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/feed/ 1 THE ROOM AND THE CHAIR by Lorraine Adams /2010/the-room-and-the-chair-by-lorraine-adams/ /2010/the-room-and-the-chair-by-lorraine-adams/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:15:17 +0000 /?p=7924 Book Quote:

“The case of that pilot crashing was only one of many instances when someone at the White House or Pentagon told Adam that blood and treasure—how he despised the words—would be lost if he didn’t hide information that might or might not have been factual.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 24, 2010)

The talented Lorraine Adams’ debut novel, Harbor, was an absolute tour-de-force. Depicting the lives of Algerian refugees in the United States, it delivered an incredibly moving portrait of men trying to get by—to shake the stigma of being the “other.” Harbor remains one of my favorite books of all time.

Once a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the Washington Post, Adams, revisits familiar terrain—international terrorism—in her latest novel, The Room and the Chair. Set alternately in Washington D.C., Iran and the Afghan-Pakistan border, the novel looks at the interplay between the media and the government and how they work together to determine what information the public is really fed.

As the novel opens, Mary Goodwin, a young fighter pilot navigating an F-16 (a Viper) mysteriously crashes near the Potomac in Washington D.C. An extremely competent pilot, she has no idea why all the control panels suddenly failed, why she ended up hanging loose-limbed in a tree yet walked away relatively unscathed. The unexplained accident ends up haunting her till the end.

The incident gets some coverage in the local media but the leading D.C. newspaper, The Washington Spectator, (presumably modeled after the Washington Post where Adams once worked) barely touches it. It’s more than a case of mere oversight though. Turns out the White House specifically called the paper’s executive editor, Adam, and requested that the story be hushed.

The crash is only one part of the story. Related reasons for what went wrong and why are laid out in a massive government report that runs into thousands of pages—put out by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The report, affectionately dubbed the “Sissy Report,” has actually been in the possession of one of the paper’s other key players, Don Grady, for a while now. Grady who came to fame as a stellar reporter in his younger days, now spends much of his time resting on past laurels and saving key bits of “finds” for books he regularly publishes. He decides the Sissy Report too, while it might have some major reveals, deserves wider treatment in his upcoming book. The paper gets nothing. Worse, the paper gets scooped by the competition.

The competition ends up sensationalizing the report focusing on only one controversial detail—neglecting all other facts. “They’ve seized on one little thing, this thing about the president being under surveillance, a thing that doesn’t matter, that happens all the time anyway, but isn’t widely—well—appreciated, and the things that do matter, the new things, they’ve ignored them,” Adams writes in the voice of one of the players. It’s an accurate portrayal of our 24-hour sound-bite journalism.

To understand why the government would want to hide the truth from the pilot, Mary Goodwin, one must understand that she is soon to be recruited to be a part of a special ops assignment. In this assignment she would help a controversial Iranian nuclear scientist, Hoseyn, flee his native country. If Mary had found out the truth behind her accident, she would have surely rejected the Hoseyn assignment—one that is of vital interest to the United States.

The Room And the Chair moves its narrative to Iran describing Hoseyn’s life, detailing how he ends up being a double agent—on the one hand working for the United States while also being faithful to Ahva Pesarah Persis, the Sacred Sons of Persia. “The Pesarah always needed nuclear defectors who could tell of Iranian progress on the bomb and push Washington into an Iranian invasion to topple the regime,” Adams writes in describing this organization’s mission.

The “Chair” in the book’s title refers to Will Holmes, chair of a secret intelligence program called Media Exploitation Component Services—MECS. The program parses data gathered from combat zones around the world and uses it to sharpen U.S. defense strategies. Holmes will also have a critical role to play in the Hoseyn assignment.

As Adams moves between The “Room”—the news reporting well at the paper—and “The Chair,” she gradually lays bare the connections between what initially look like a disparate set of narratives.

She is at her narrative best particularly in the segments set in Iran where the pace and the story are perfectly tied together and work to tell a compelling story. The parts of the story set at the paper too are interesting enough but sometimes there are so many players all vying for power, that it gets confusing to keep track of them all. To keep the pace going, Adams ends up sacrificing detailed character sketches of the principals. This is not to say that they are not described at all—they are. However, in places, one wishes she could have lingered, actually made the story longer so we could find out more about them.

In the end the constant hopping back and forth can make the reader a tad dizzy precisely because each hop could have used a more extended narrative.

The Room And the Chair also has a somewhat shaky start when the writing feels a touch jolting and strained. But after a chapter or two, Adams really comes into form and dazzles. Her writing is as crisp and intelligent as ever. “Vera Hastings walked with Jesus but pacing herself was a forever problem,” she writes of a rookie reporter at the paper. In yet another instance, an “orderly and the nurse were tranquilized by Hoseyn’s lack of visible symptoms.”

Overall, The Room And the Chair is an entertaining and intelligent read. Sometimes it does strain under the weight of its ambitions—the novel could have used some more pages devoted to each narrative arc. But The Room And the Chair is a worthy successor to Harbor. With its depiction of current-day government subterfuge and media collusion, Adams once again proves she has her finger firmly on the pulse of our complicated current events.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 7 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf; 1 edition (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: WSJ interview with Lorraine Adams
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> /2010/the-room-and-the-chair-by-lorraine-adams/feed/ 0 THE FOURTH ASSASSIN by Matt Beynon Rees /2010/fourth-assassin-by-matt-beynon-rees/ /2010/fourth-assassin-by-matt-beynon-rees/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:06:33 +0000 /?p=7945 Book Quote:

“Omar Yussef descended past boarded-up basement windows and entered a short corridor. The wall was covered with posters of Palestinian children, hackneyed images of defiance and suffering, and political slogans that fatigued Omar Yussef with their posturing and sentimentality. He glanced over a photo of a burned-out car, three victims of Israeli helicopter missiles lying within, their bearded faces vaguely nauseous in death, empty eyes staring past the camera. Is this meant to promote the correct frame of mind for prayer? he thought.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (FEB 23, 2010)

On his arrival in New York for a UN speech on schooling in the refugee camps, Palestinian educator Omar Yussef goes straight to Brooklyn to see his son, Ala. But the door of the Bay Ridge apartment is open and the only occupant is a headless corpse about his son’s size.

His initial horror gives way to shocked concern when Ala appears, but is promptly arrested and taken off to a Brooklyn jail. Underdressed for the New York winter, disoriented by the hard-edged city, Yussef enlists the aid of his old partisan friend Khamis Zeydan, now the chain-smoking Bethlehem police chief, also in town for the UN meeting.

Together they take on the weather, the subways, the busses, the streets and the NYPD, particularly the Arab-speaking detective, Hamza, a Palestinian-American who has been assigned to Bay Ridge’s Palestinian section. Hamza navigates his communities with facility – and a bit of edge.

When his superior finds a Jordanian passport on the Palestinian victim, Hamza explains that Palestine cannot issue passports.

The lieutenant waved the Jordanian passport. “You were born in Bethlehem, Hamza. Do you have this kind of passport?”

“I have an American passport, Lieutenant.“

Ala, even before the police arrive, has complained to his father of his disillusionment with life in America where his computer degree means nothing and decent work is impossible to find. “We’re just another gang of Arabs to the Americans, terrorists or supporters of terrorism, anti-American bigots who deserve bigoted treatment in return.“

But in Rees’ capable hands nothing is quite so simple. Yussef, a secular humanist who rails at the corruption and violence of his own government, quickly determines he must find the murderer himself. His journey leads him deep into the undercurrents of Brooklyn’s Arab community where opportunists are just as likely to wield a cause for their own ends as anywhere else.

Since one of the strengths of this series is Yussef’s Palestinian milieu, it seemed a risk to set this fourth outing in New York, but Rees (a Welshman and a 10-year veteran of Middle East coverage) makes it work.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Soho Crime (February 1, 2010)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE: The Fourth Assassin
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Matt Beynon Rees
EXTRAS: Excerpt read by author and Page 69 test
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

The Collaborator of Bethlehem

A Grave in Gaza

The Samaritan’s Secret

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]]> /2010/fourth-assassin-by-matt-beynon-rees/feed/ 0 THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE by Orhan Pamuk /2009/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/ /2009/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:25:31 +0000 /?p=6810 Book Quote:

“ I would go to the Merhamet Apartments, and, reflecting upon the happy hours Fusun and I had spent there, I would lose myself in daydreams, admiring my slowly growing “collection” with ever renewed wonder. As these objects accumulated, so did the manifest intensity of my love. Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (DEC 14, 2009)

“Irresponsible, spoiled and bourgeois.” One of the characters in The Musuem of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, uses these labels to describe a segment of Istanbul’s young adults. These same descriptors could specifically apply to 30-year-old Kemal, the novel’s protagonist. Kemal, part of Istanbul’s upper class, spends his time managing a portion of the family business. He has the privilege of an education in America and as the novel opens, is about to be engaged to Sibel, the daughter of another wealthy family in the city. It’s slated to be a marriage between equals.

One day, Sibel’s eye catches a designer purse in a local shopping boutique and later, Kemal decides to buy it as a surprise for his soon-to-be fiancée. It is here that he meets 18-year-old Füsun—a distant cousin who will become the obsession of his life. Over the following weeks, the two often meet at an apartment owned by Kemal’s family, which now lies largely abandoned. Füsun gives up her virginity to Kemal and their lovemaking extends over many lazy afternoons. All this time Füsun is torn knowing that she will eventually lose Kemal to Sibel. Nevertheless she hopes the power of their love will be enough for Kemal to stop his upcoming engagement to Sibel.

That doesn’t happen however and Kemal and Sibel get engaged in a lavish ceremony at the Hilton in Istanbul. Istanbul’s crème de la crème attend and Füsun is crushed. At this point, selfishly, Kemal still believes he can have it all—a beautiful wife in Sibel and a mistress on the side.

Having waited long enough for Kemal to come around, however, Füsun decides to call it quits and leaves him hanging. Totally devastated, Kemal ends up breaking off his engagement to Sibel—but this act turns out to be a tad late. When after many months, Kemal does run into Füsun in one of Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods, she is married to a struggling screenwriter Feridun. Now Kemal doesn’t know of any way to stay close to Füsun except by offering to finance one of Feridun’s scripts and in doing so, turning Füsun into a star. Day after day, month after month, for seven years, Kemal visits the Keskin family in their tiny apartment. He shares meals with them and lives on the tiniest slivers of hope that Füsun might some day actually be his.

Over the years, Kemal slowly collects small items that form part of a big collection—these are all items touched by Füsun or connected to her in some way. It is hard to write much more about the story without giving it all away but doing so wouldn’t dilute the fun either. For early on in the story, you can see that this just might turn out to be a modern-day version of Laila-Majnu the story of the ill-fated lovers of Arabia.

The Museum of Innocence is more than just a love story however. In its many layers, it explores various aspects of Turkish life and the country’s history. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has always used his work to showcase a Turkey caught between tradition and Western values. In his earlier novel, Snow, he used the headscarf as a motif for this struggle with change. Here, too, his characters are caught in the tide. Kemal’s young friends all consider themselves “modern” and alcohol flows freely at their parties. They are even beginning to explore intimacy before marriage. Still it is mostly understood that a woman gives up her virginity only to a man she knows for sure, she will marry. This problem haunts Sibel as she decides whether or not to break off her engagement to her straying fiancé. “Sibel knew full well that no matter how high she held her head, no matter how “European” her friends were in their outlook, this affair would not be seen as a love story if we did not marry. It would become the story of a woman whose honor had been stained,” Kemal recounts.

The change that Turkey has to grapple with can be found in the most unexpected places. For example, towards the beginning of the novel, Kemal’s friend Zaim launches a new soda called Meltem. To attract the urban market, he uses a leggy German model to market the product. After a few years though, as the product loses its cachet with the urban rich, Zaim has to rely on a Turkish film actress who can sell the product to the “provincial masses.” This gradual falling out of Meltem to be replaced by Coke and Pepsi is one change that creeps up slowly but is perhaps indicative of the country’s larger struggles with the impact of globalization.

The Museum of Innocence starts off in the early 70s and the political upheaval of the 70s and 80s simmers in the background. That Kemal chooses not to dwell on this discontent too much shows not just how his obsession with Füsun takes precedent over everything else but how a rich kid like him can afford to live comfortably above it all. “I have no desire to interrupt my story with descriptions of the street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent communists at that time, except to say what we were witnessing was an extension of the Cold War,” Kemal says.

As the story begins, as Kemal goes out with both Sibel and Füsun, he emerges as a selfish and vain person, someone the reader cannot immediately empathize with. Even at his engagement party, Kemal looks forward to “partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl—all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price.” It is to Pamuk’s credit that as the story goes on, Kemal matures into a tragic character, someone the reader can feel sorry for.

Pamuk’s new novel describes many of the neighborhoods—Beyoglu, Taksim, Tophane, Fatih, Edirnekapi—he visits in his wonderful non-fiction work, Istanbul: Memories and the City. Especially as Kemal visits with the Keskin family night after night for dinner, he makes his way around Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods and Pamuk beautifully describes these.

Pamuk has always been a fan of well-honed literary devices and here he narrates Kemal’s story through the individual items in his collection of everyday objects stored at the Museum of Innocence. Many a chapter ends with the cataloging of seemingly mundane objects—which nevertheless have some resonance for Kemal. “I have here the clock, and these matchsticks and matchbooks, because the display suggests how I spent the slow ten or fifteen minutes it took me to accept that Füsun was not coming that day,” Pamuk writes in one such instance.

These objects are as disparate as they can get but they are all bound by one unifying thread—they are all touched by Füsun or somehow associated with her. A quince grater, a vast collection of cigarette stubs, a lost earring, a ticket to a movie—together they paint a complete set of memories for the lovelorn Kemal. This endless cataloging of objects can start to wear down on the reader occasionally but Pamuk is skilful enough to know just when to accelerate the pace a tad. Besides, one realizes, love is full of mundane moments mixed in with the sublime.

As Kemal spends endless hours in the Merhamet Apartments with his collection, wallowing in his memories, it becomes obvious that while the objects offer him some measure of relief, they also stifle him in many ways. After all, no collection of objects can really substitute for the warm touch of a loved one. Kemal seeks solace from the fact that even if they might not be the real thing, from their association with his lover, they are enough to offer some kind of daily sustenance.

The Museum of Innocence reminds us that unlike love, which can be ephemeral, objects can be more easily possessed. And, when all else fails, the memories they evoke can be enough to last an anguished lifetime. (Translated by Maureen Freely.)

AMAZON READER RATING: from 64 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf; 1 edition (October 20, 2009)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:

And our review of:

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]]> /2009/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/feed/ 0 ZEITOUN by Dave Eggers /2009/zeitoun-by-dave-eggers/ /2009/zeitoun-by-dave-eggers/#comments Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:02:57 +0000 /?p=4986 Book Quote:

“Why are we here?” he asked a passing soldier.
“You guys are al Qaeda,” the soldier said.
Todd laughed derisively, but Zeitoun was startled. He could not have heard right.

Zeitoun had long feared this day would come. Each of the few times he had been pulled over for a traffic violation, he knew the possibility existed that he would be harassed, misunderstood, suspected of shadowy dealings that might bloom in the imagination of any given police officer.

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (SEP 19, 2009)

It’s been four years since one of the country’s deadliest natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina, hit New Orleans, yet the stories of those affected have been making their way out only slowly. Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun is one such. Here too, as in his brilliant What is the What, Eggers does an expert job narrating non-fiction and making the story come alive.

By all indications, the Zeitouns—Kathy and Abdulrahman—were a successful couple in New Orleans. They owned a construction and painting business and had a vibrant family with four girls. Abdulrahman, a Syrian American who had spent a lifetime wandering the seas, settled in New Orleans in 1994 and married Kathy, a convert to Islam.

Years later, when Hurricane Katrina came knocking, true to pattern, Abdulrahman stayed behind figuring he would need to hunker down only for a day or two. “Their business wasn’t a simple one, where you could lock an office door and leave,” Eggers writes explaining why the decision might have been a hard one to make, “Leaving the city meant leaving all their properties, leaving their tenants’ homes and this they couldn’t do unless absolutely necessary.”

But of course, as we know, things got very bad quickly and Abdulrahman finds his house deep in water. He begins to sleep on the roof in a small tent and uses a canoe he once bought, to help stranded neighbors. He takes comfort in providing some measure of help to his fellow citizens and especially to a few dogs that he takes to regularly feeding every day. As the situation gets worse, as the water gets increasingly toxic, as the looting starts, and the law and order situation gets increasingly shaky, Kathy pleads with her husband to leave. Abdulrahman is still adamant—he is of more use here in New Orleans, he insists. What would he really do away from home waiting for word to get back and merely worrying about his property and business?

So stay he does until one day a group of armed government officers show up at his door and Abdulrahman suddenly finds himself under arrest. He is taken to a makeshift prison at the nearby Greyhound station—the charges against him are unknown. At first Zeitoun naively suspects he is taken into custody because he ignored the mandatory evacuation order. Soon it becomes apparent that his ethnicity and his religion might have something to do with his being held without contact, charges, bail or trial.

Having once fished with his brothers in Syria, Zeitoun accurately uses the metaphor “bycatch” to describe his being caught in the government’s war on terror. “It was a fishing term,” Eggers writes, “…when they pulled in the net, there were thousands of sardines, of course, but there were other creatures too, life they had not intended to catch and for which they had no use.”

The book is full of touching details—you can tell Eggers has done his homework. Family pictures flesh out the characters well. While he was held in prison, Abdulrahman’s brother in Spain, Ahmad, writes letters to American authorities, desperate for any information about his brother. These letters—fractured English and all—bring out the plight of the family extremely effectively.

Prison was full of horrors: “The guards alternated between the pepper spray and the beanbag gun, shooting the men and women in the cages,” Eggers writes. Kathy’s plight as she waits for word from her husband and eventually fights for his release, is also detailed well.

Almost as horrifying as Zeitoun’s ordeal are the gross inefficiencies of the response system with its totally absurd set of priorities. For one, “while residents of New Orleans were trapped in attics and begging for rescue from rooftops and overpasses,” vast amounts of money and energy were being spent on building a complex and efficient prison at the local Greyhound station. Then there were the fan boats which were deployed right after the storm, but which missed calls for help because they were so darned noisy. Months later the Zeitouns have a FEMA trailer deposited on their property for weeks on end—without a set of keys to actually use it. Authorities at local prisons don’t have records of Katrina refugees coming through—“they’re FEMA’s” is the standard reply. Zeitoun chronicles many of these and as such casual asides that they end up making a deeper impact on the reader than any polemic material could.

Kudos go to Dave Eggers who has increasingly used the power of his pen to tell the stories that need to be told. In the incredible What is the What, which I really loved, Eggers chronicled the horrors of war through the eyes of a Sudanese teenage refugee. Here too, Eggers lays bare the heartbreaking story of a man who is subjected to untold horrors simply because of one of the most bizarre confluences of American history and natural disaster. Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Zeitoun is a must-read. It’s heartbreaking to see someone so much in love with his country be betrayed by a justice system gone awry. “In the grand scheme of the country’s blind, grasping fight against threats seen and unseen, there would be mistakes made.” Eggers writes.

“This country was fallible,” Zeitoun sadly realizes. Yes, it is. This sobering realization—that there are hundreds of such “bycatch” in our government’s war on terror—sinks in slowly. It is a realization that is hard to swallow but is also what makes Zeitoun such a riveting read.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 492 readers
PUBLISHER: McSweeney’s (July 15, 2009)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More New Orleans stories:

Fictional experience of post 9-11 fear:

Bibliography:

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2009/zeitoun-by-dave-eggers/feed/ 1 THE LAST WAR by Ana Menendez /2009/the-last-war-by-ana-menendez/ /2009/the-last-war-by-ana-menendez/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:10:55 +0000 /?p=4012 Book Quote:

“That’s how it is, isn’t it? If you’re going to die, you might as well live. Death on a full belly is better than a life of hunger.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Beth Chariton (AUG 10, 2009)

If you become numb to the conflict of constant war, does it prevent you from dealing with your own personal battles? In The Last War, by Ana Menéndez, Flash and Brando get paid to travel and document war – he the “Wonderboy” journalist, she the photographer/wife that follows in his shadow.

Brando travels to Baghdad, while Flash stays behind in Istanbul, waiting for photography equipment, travel papers, or any other excuse she can find to avoid joining him. He calls her from Baghdad, sometimes twice a day, from the rooftop of the mansion he’s staying in, while she answers from their four-bedroom apartment with the fabulous view. Their type of reporting allows them to live several classes higher than their means, and all on Brando’s company’s bill.

Any intimacy between them has slowly diminished from exposure to war, human hatred and revenge. They get by on small amounts of surface dialogue, the war too devastating to discuss out loud or often, and daily topics of conversation too trivial compared to the surrounding destruction.

At first, Flash enjoys her time alone, glad for the break from their strained marriage. While Brando waits patiently for her arrival in Baghdad, she continues to accept small freelance jobs and visits her list of desired tourist destinations in Istanbul.

After two weeks, Flash receives a letter stating the Brando is having an affair in Baghdad, and Flash’s inner battle begins – the constant, internal dialogue, the nagging pre-occupation with not knowing the truth. She starts to wonder if she ever loved him, and if he truly missed her or just the fact that she follows behind him. Consumed by doubt and resentment, she searches his office, looking for clues. She struggles with insecurity, realizing how much time she’s spent in their marriage waiting around for him to return from assignments. Rather than confront him by phone, she tells herself she’s waiting to see him in person, to see his face when she asks. He senses through their phone conversations that something isn’t quite right, and now, he’ll be the one waiting for her.

In the days following the arrival of the letter, she wanders aimlessly through the city, obsessing about the letter and the supposed sender, Mira. Feelings of insecurity, paranoia and inferiority overwhelm her, depleting her concentration and preventing her from working.

Then Flash realizes she’s being followed by a mysterious woman in a black abaya, and that she’s seen her a number of times in her daily travels. The woman finally reveals herself outside Flash’s apartment, and she instantly remembers Alexandra from their previous travels in Afghanistan. She continues to show up unexpectedly and uninvited, and her beauty and charisma make Flash feel awkward and self-conscious. Flash is suspicious of her constant presence, and wonders if Alexandra has anything to do with the letter. But Alexandra denies having anything to do with it, and her reaction is cool, calm, and unsympathetic.

Insomnia and migraines take over, and Flash paces through the nights while her upstairs neighbors argue violently, screaming and dragging furniture across their floor. Unable to decide whether she should return to the States, or join her husband in Iraq, exhaustion takes her on a downward emotional spiral of packing and unpacking the new suitcase she purchases in the marketplace. It’s no longer clear to her where her true home is.

Alexandra’s presence stirs up many restless memories for Flash. Night and day she’s consumed with flashbacks to her time in Afghanistan with Brando, Alexandra, and Alexandra’s boyfriend, Amir. Then Alexandra’s lonely, insecure side is exposed at a party they attend together, and Flash relaxes around her, feeling a mutual empathy for their situations. But it’s the last she’ll see of Alexandra in Istanbul. A week later, she sends Flash an e-mail, saying she’s leaving on a flight for Amman.

An unexpected tragedy forces Flash to realize that her self-righteous martyrdom has conveniently distracted her from her own shortcomings, leaving her a self-made victim. Four years later, Flash runs into Alexandra, who confesses the real reason she pursued Flash in Istanbul. Relishing the moment, she finally exposes the truth to Flash about the hurtful betrayal they had ignored all along. Now both women would have to deal with their own sordid pasts in order to get on with their lives.

Maybe it’s Flash who figuratively threw the first bomb, or shot the first bullet on the battlefield of her marriage. But who would be the first to wave the white flag? Universal or personal, there are no winners when any war ends, and the true enemy is sadly revealed after the damage has been done.

This novel is well written, and just the right length. Ana Menéndez does a wonderful job of bringing the character’s humanity to the page. Written in first person, the author places us right in Flash’s psyche, along with her anxieties, insecurities and their extreme accompanying emotions. The intricately layered themes of war and conflict on all levels are something that every reader will relate to while reading this story.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 28 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper; 1 edition (May 26, 2009)
REVIEWER: Beth Chariton
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Ana Menendez
EXTRAS: An earlier interview with Ana Menedez (2001)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More war torn stories:The Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton

Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward

Certainty by Madeline Thien

More by Ana Menendez:

Adios, Happy Homeland

Bibliography:

]]> /2009/the-last-war-by-ana-menendez/feed/ 0 THE PROOF OF THE HONEY by Salwa Al Neimi /2009/proof-of-the-honey-by-salwa-al-neimi/ /2009/proof-of-the-honey-by-salwa-al-neimi/#comments Sat, 08 Aug 2009 23:38:40 +0000 /?p=3094 Book Quote:

” ‘Whence springs love?’ asks Ibn Arabi.

” ‘I love what fills me with light and increases the darkness deep within me,’ answers Rene Char.

“Between the question and the intimation of a reply, I moved ever closer to the Thinker, becoming more aware of the dangerous game that was defining itself in the space between us.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (AUG 8, 2009)

The nameless seductress of The Proof of the Honey declares, “In my life I have been addicted to beds and stories.” She has studied the classical Arabic erotica of al-Suyuti and al-Nafzawi, as well the Kama Sutra and Western works by Casanova, Henry Miller, and Georges Bataille. She also makes wild and saucy claims of having taken numerous lovers of both genders. These then form the bases of her addictions and a discernable core to her wandering writings about sex in the Near East.

Readers will find themselves trying to “swim” in a sea of contradictions and illusions under the pen of this intentionally unreliable narrator. Pushing us to frequently re-orient ourselves and reevaluate her provocative pronouncements reinforces the mysteries of sex and the vagaries of cultural pressures concerning its expression.

Her eleven chapters are “gates” she leads us through in latter-day Scheherazade style. Instead of a thousand stories, she boasts as many sexual partners. She tells us tales of an ancient mercury bed (to assist physical union) and the legalities of the temporary Shiite “marriage of pleasure”. She quotes Arab songs, verses, and folk wisdom (” ‘There are two kinds of women — lettuce women and women of embers’ “). In free-love fashion she declares, “Some people conjure spirits. I conjure bodies. I have no knowledge of my soul or the soul of others. I know only my body and theirs.” And one body she repeatedly encounters as she passes through her gates is that of the Thinker, the man whose sexual prowess caused her public and secret lives to converge. However, the Thinker is an illusive entity, a concoction actually, on whom this woman desires to hang her feelings and her thoughts on sex in the Arab world at large…and her in own private, swirling enclosure of passionate creation. She contemplates, “I read what I have written and it occurs to me that I have made the Thinker into an allegory….I said, ‘Be,’ and he was.”

Syrian Salwa Al Neimi’s novel (more correctly, novella) reportedly raised a sensation when it was published in Arabic. One can assume in Islamic culture it is a very daring volume. One example: it’s “Ninth Gate: Linguistics” dwells on a very crass word for intercourse. The narrator’s Arabic spell check program won’t acknowledge the word, proving, she says, that it is “programmed for dissimulation.” It has “castrated the language….castrated the computer….castrated me” she rants. Whether true freedom is dependent on the ability to spew the f-word at will is highly debatable, but it illustrates well that The Proof of the Honey intends to foment controversy in Arab society. It desires to poke the stick at the wasps’ nest in a part of the world that remains relatively insular and circumspect about sexual matters.

When a scholar named Sohar says she has heard the narrator intends to write about ” ‘love as seen by the Arabs,’ ” she (Sohar) is confused because there are already ” ‘ lots of books on the subject.’ ” The narrator interrupts with “deliberate rudeness” and corrects her: ” ‘I am writing about sex as seen by the Arabs.’ ” Sex. Not love. Again, she is about the body, about erotic literature, about framing a combustible thesis and goading its debate. The Proof of the Honey‘s author, through her narrator, propounds an extreme feminist view — with curious spears of male chauvinism protruding in some passages. Using this short volume as a barometer, the sexual revolution that shook the Western world in the 1960’s and ’70’s may be, for good or not, edging further into Muslim social consciousness now.

The sensual cover art of The Proof of the Honey suggests a novella of refined eroticism and lyricism. One cannot, upon finishing the book, be entirely satisfied, however, because:

1) The slight plot about an expat in Paris (the author, by the way, has herself lived in Paris since the 1970’s) one also readying a research paper on “ancient Arab books on sex” for a scheduled conference in the U.S. is thin veneer; it is a platform for the author’s mini essays.

2) The author’s/narrator’s thoughts are often confused and partial.

3) Although “sexual honey” and seductive lower backs are embedded (pun intended) in certain passages, for the most part, one needn’t fan oneself from embarrassment. Much original English-language erotic literature is arguably far more developed and arousing than this translation.

Despite its shortcomings as fiction, The Proof of the Honey is a unique and enticing historical and contemporary insight into Arab perspectives on sex…and this book may play a part in causing those existing perspectives to shift.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Europa Editions (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Publisher’s page on Salwa Al Neimi
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More books of interest:

Censoring An Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour

The Isle of Dogs by Daniel Davies

The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle

Bibliography:

]]> /2009/proof-of-the-honey-by-salwa-al-neimi/feed/ 0 MORNING AND EVENING TALK by Naguib Mahfouz /2009/morning-and-evening-talk-by-naguib-mahfouz/ /2009/morning-and-evening-talk-by-naguib-mahfouz/#comments 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:

]]> /2009/morning-and-evening-talk-by-naguib-mahfouz/feed/ 0 ROOFTOPS OF TEHRAN by Mahbod Seraji /2009/rooftops-of-tehran-by-mahbod-seraji/ /2009/rooftops-of-tehran-by-mahbod-seraji/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:05:43 +0000 /?p=2875 Book Quote:

“You need to let go of the past, and focus on the future,” Mrs Naderi says. She hugs me again, and whispers, “I know you’re strong enough to move on. Leave this country as your promised Zari you would. You need to go to the States and get a college education, because only educated people can save this country. While there, tell every American what their government’s senseless support of a dictator has done to Iranian mothers. Tell them there will be no end to these atrocities until they stop paying for our oil with the blood of our children. Promise me that you will do your part toward emancipating our people, because you owe it to Doctor and Zari.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (JUL 17, 2009)

Rooftops of Tehran is both a bittersweet coming of age tale as well as a story of the tragic loss of innocence.

The setting is Tehran in 1973 and 1974, a period when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a brutal dictator, ruled his country with an iron fist with the help of the United States. Members of his National Intelligence and Security Organization, the dreaded SAVAK, were seemingly everywhere. Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, from 1951 to 1953, was famous for his passionate opposition to foreign intervention in his country. He was removed from power by a coup d’etat funded by the British and U.S. governments. The Shah, who had gone into exile during this period, returned to Iran, triumphant, and resumed total power once more.

Pasha Shaheed, our seventeen year-old protagonist, is too busy getting on with his young life and the process of growing up to be concerned with matters that do not involve him, his family and his friends directly. Pasha and his best friend, Ahmed, just completed eleventh grade and will return to high school in the fall as seniors. They are already making plans for college. Pasha’s father desperately wants his son to study civil engineering in the United States so he can return to Iran and build bridges. Pasha wants to study film making. Typical!

The two best friends spend the spring and summer months sleeping on the rooftops, as do most Iranians, in order to escape the heat. They talk, with intensity, about life in general – “There are no walls around what we say, or fears shaping what we think.” There is much humor in their discussions also, and in their schoolboy pranks and antics. Most of all, they talk about the young women they are in love with. Pasha and Ahmed are from Iran’s burgeoning middle class, and live during a period, before the 1979 revolution, when it was OK for unmarried boys and girls to have friendships, even to fall in love and demonstrate modest affection for one another, although this still remains taboo amongst the poor and the more religious people.

Ahmed loves Faheemeh in silence. Everyday he bikes ten minutes to her neighborhood, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He makes friends with her two overly protective brothers to become closer to her, and dreams and schemes about a way to meet her. His father has told him that “Persians believe in silent communication; a look or a gesture imparts far more than a book full of words.”

Meanwhile, Pasha loves Zari, a neighborhood girl who is a close friend of his, but who has been betrothed, since birth, to Pasha’s dear friend and mentor, Ramin Sobhi, a political science major at the University of Tehran. Everyone calls Ramin “The Doctor.” The teenage boy feels torn. He idolizes “The “Doctor,” but is desperately in love with, and desires, the girl his friend is to marry. Guilt abounds.

Eventually, Pasha, Ahmed, Faheemeh, and Zari become close friends.They share their most personal experiences with one another. All four are very aware of the undercurrents of feelings which pass between them. They attempt to delicately balance friendship and love.

“The Doctor” is very political, and hates the repressive mullahs as much as he hates the Shah’s regime. He is extremely intelligent, yet, he is a humble young man. One day, he tells Pasha that he, Pasha, has “That.” “That” is a “priceless quality that is impossible to define, really…but you recognize it in the actions of great people.” He begins to educate Pasha about the lack of democracy in Iran. He tells him of the jails where innocent people are held, sometimes forever, with no trial, formal accusations or evidence. Many are horribly tortured. Others simply disappear.

One day, “The Doctor” tells Pasha that he will be away for a while. He is going to an area near the Caspian Sea with a group of college friends to teach literacy, a service the government frowns upon. He plans to marry Zari when he returns. But he never returns. He is abducted and killed by members of SAVAK. The effects of this tragedy on Zari and Pasha are extremely traumatic, and breed actions which lead to further tragedy.

Mahbod Seraji’s characters come to life on the page. The main characters’ extended families – loving, boisterous and eccentric – bring much humor and some sorrow to the well written narrative.

My one problem with the novel is also a strong point of the novel. The qualities shared by the book’s characters are universal qualities. This story could be about people anywhere, especially in countries where there are repressive governments. It is not difficult to identify with Pasha, his friends and family. They are like us. And we hear and read about such horror in the world today that we have become inured, in a sense, to the unspeakable. The situation in Iran under the Shah is really no worse than life in that country today – or in many other countries.

I did not get a real feel for the fascinating Iranian culture or the Iranian people. I lived in Iran in the late 1960s. My husband worked for an NGO, (nongovernmental organization), and I taught English as a second language. (ESL). In the three years we lived in that remarkable country, I was and am awed by the rich culture and the kindness and hospitality of the people. I wish the author could have incorporated more of the “differences” between the West and Iran, instead of accentuating the sameness.

Otherwise, I really did enjoy the novel and highly recommend it. Mahbod Seraji is a very talented author.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 49 readers
PUBLISHER: NAL Trade (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AMAZON PAGE: Rooftops of Tehran
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mahbod Seraji
EXTRAS: Reading Guide (with link) and Excerpt (with link)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read a review of more Iranian novels:

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour

The Quince Seed Potion by Morteza Baharloo

Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai

In the Walled Garden by Anahita Firouz

And a great love story:

Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors

Bibliography:

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