Category: book reviews / recommendations
My review of Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Shalimar the Clown, appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here’s a snippet:
Despite all the political turmoil around him, Shalimar’s embrace of the fundamentalists is not an ideological choice but a personal one. His wife’s betrayal turns him into a killing machine, and he willfully joins with a group that can satiate his hunger for revenge while he awaits the right moment to strike. The trouble with Shalimar, Rushdie suggests, is that he values his honor more than his life — indeed, more than the lives of others. In so doing, he becomes part of the war that results in the destruction of his father’s dream, the artistic legacy of Pachigam and its multicultural way of life. Taking the reader from wartime Strasbourg to Bombay, from London to Los Angeles, from the valleys of Kashmir to Algeria, Rushdie weaves a tale in which all these characters, Muslims and Hindus, Jews and Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists, are ultimately connected. Their failure to understand this simple fact threatens them all.
“Shalimar the Clown” is a wonderful example of Rushdie’s trademark ability to mix high and low culture, to quote bits of Baudelaire as well as scenes from “The Magnificent Seven,” to describe the Indian legend of Anarkali as well as the regulars at Jimmy Fish’s boxing club in Santa Monica, Calif. As a prose stylist, Rushdie is in fine form here, his delicate sentences seamlessly taking the reader from English to Urdu and back. Add to this the characteristic humor and unflinching observation of a master storyteller, and you have Rushdie’s best work in many years.
You can read the full text here.
My review of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion appears in the September 26 issue of The Nation. I have talked about the novel several times on Moorishgirl, but this (longer) piece was an opportunity to critically examine it and put it in context with other works by Gurnah. The review is available to subscribers only online. Here’s a snippet:
The desertion of the title should, by now, be fairly straightforward. White men desert their native lovers, Muslim men desert liberated partners, and young, educated men desert Zanzibar for the comforts of Britain. But there is another kind of desertion that haunts the novel: the British colonial experience. Indeed, Gurnah seems to suggest that Britain “deserted” its colonies, like the islands of Zanzibar, before the time was right. In a postcolonial novel this might seem like a startling assertion, but it is not new to Gurnah. One of the main characters in By the Sea remarks that he married in 1963, “a year before the British departed in a huff and left us to the chaos and violence that attended the end of their empire.” Gurnah appears to fault the British for not living up to their responsibilities, for disrupting a social order without being asked and then leaving the resulting problems for others to solve. One could even argue that the disjointed narrative in Desertion is deliberate, that it is Gurnah’s way of reflecting a world in which relationships between people, between countries, are interrupted before they have run their course. Seen in this light, the novel has a staying power that belies its quietness.
The issue hits newsstands next week.
The appetite of Western readers for books about Muslim women shows no sign of declining. Take, for example, The Almond, a novel written by the pseudonymous Nedjma, billed as “the first erotic novel to be written by a Muslim woman.” It became an instant hit in France when it was published last year, selling nearly 50,000 copies. It received enthusiastic reviews from Alexie Toca in Lire and Marianne Payot in L’Express, and was recommended in Elle and Le Point. Foreign rights were quickly sold in the UK, Germany, Italy, Holland, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Finland, and elsewhere garnering a total of 500,000 Euros for the author.
When it was published in the United States last month, The Almond received a starred review from Publishers’ Weekly and considerable coverage in the New York Times (a Sunday review and an author profile.) At a time when only 3% of fiction published in the US today originally appeared in another language and when otherwise internationally renowned authors are having trouble finding American publishers, the attention heaped on The Almond is quite rare. But it is not surprising. It’s an excellent time to be writing about the “plight of Muslim women,” about “life behind the veil,” about “taboos in Islam” and so on. What is troubling, however, is that, in their rush to hear about the sex lives of Muslim women, few reviewers have bothered to engage the novel critically. And, even more telling, none of these reviewers appear to be Muslim, Arab, or North African, much less Moroccan.
The story told in The Almond is one many readers of erotica will recognize: A village girl (Badra) escapes from her loveless and sexually barren marriage to the big city (Tangier) where she lives with a liberal relative (Aunt Selma) and meets a handsome, experienced man (Driss). He introduces her to the pleasures of the flesh, and the two of them carry on a torrid affair, ultimately ruined by one of the lovers’ insatiable desire for novelty. The book is written in a straightforward style that occasionally manages to rise above the mundane, particularly in Nedjma’s sexy description of Badra’s first night with Driss, which is written with boldness and obvious pleasure.
Most of the novel, however, is consumed with descriptions of Badra’s village life, which contrasts sharply with the more liberal one she has in Tangier. To the careful reader, there are many details that make these accounts of life in Morocco rather unconvincing. For instance, Badra claims to love the comedian “Bzou” a curious amalgam of the famous comedic duo Bziz ou Baz, who ruled the stand-up scene in Morocco in the 1980s and who were intermittently banned in the 1990s. Elsewhere, a saint’s mausoleum is erroneously referred to as Sidi Brahmin, a rather Indianized version of the real saint, Brahim. A man who falls in love with Badra, bursts out that he has come for the “bent el hassab u nnassab,” an Egyptian expression that seems rather out of place in the medina of Tangier. The woman who comes to dress Badra for her wedding is named Neggafa, without a hint of irony. (Neggafas are a cross between hairdressers and wedding planners, and their role is to prepare the bride for her big day. Imagine if a novel featured a character named “Hairdresser” while everyone else is blessed with simple names like John and Jane.) There are references to village brides wandering as “far as the sand dunes,” a rather difficult geographical undertaking since they are in the North of Morocco, hundreds of miles away from the Sahara. In the hammam, young Badra describes women who carefully wrap themselves in big cloths and hide behind bathroom doors before undressing. Clearly, Nedjma has never stepped into a Moroccan hammam.
But does any of this matter?
Probably not. After all, The Almond is a work of fiction, not a treatise on village life in Morocco. However, if the novel’s problems were simply restricted to authenticity, they could easily be shrugged off and attributed to poor research. The greater problem here is not factual truth; it is emotional truth. The characters in this book never fully rise above the caricature, never convince us that their struggles are real, never make us feel any emotions for them beside sorrow or titillation. Badra’s mother, sister, cousins, friends and neighbors all make brief appearances in order to deliver their lines of dialogues like so many grenades. They service the plot, and then they disappear. Unsurprisingly, the roles that they have been given are to demonstrate, bit by bit, their sexual repression. Here’s the long-suffering mother who advises Badra that she “must accept her fate like the rest of us.” Here’s the mother-in-law who ties Badra down to her bed to enable the husband to deflower her more easily. Here’s the sister who leans over and whispers, “Close your eyes, bite your lips, and think of something else.” Here’s the sister-in-law, who is treated like a leper because she had the misfortune of getting pregnant out of wedlock. None of these characters are memorable, none stick around long enough to have a distinct identity. They are only ideas, not people made of flesh and blood, with desires and dislikes, aspirations and contradictions. If all writing is a war against cliche, then Nedjma must be an avowed pacifist.
In the prologue to The Almond, Nedjma declares, “My ambition is to give back to the women of my blood the power of speech confiscated by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.” Despite this lofty claim, there can be little doubt that this book was not written for an Arab audience, but, rather, for Western readers, for those among them who will be suitably shocked at the catalog of horrors perpetrated on women, those who will be flattered when they are told that having “European skin” is desirable, those who will nod with approbation at Driss’s literary recommendations (Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, Louis Aragon). This book is not literature; it is comfort. And I prefer to get my comfort by other means.
When she appeared on Thierry Ardisson’s television show “Tout Le Monde En Parle” in France, Nedjma hid behind a hat and glasses, and her voice was altered. The camouflage was necessary, she said, because she feared reprisals from Islamists for the erotic material in her novel. And yet, for years, Moroccan women have been writing about their lives, including their sex lives, without the need for such simulacrum. Who bothered Fatema Mernissi when she wrote Dreams of Trespass and Beyond The Veil? Who bothered Soumaya Naamane-Guessous when she published her wide-ranging study of sexual practices among men and women, Au Dela De Toute Pudeur? Who bothered Ghita El Khayat when she published The Affair? That Nedjma, who’s written a novel that is so unremarkable, could claim that she fears for her life is not only ludicrous, it is an insult to the women who dare to speak about their condition, face unveiled, and live with the consequences.
Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building comes to us sheathed in the kind of hype usually reserved for Da Vinci clones: it is the bestselling novel in the Arab world for two years running; the screen adaptation is the highest-budget Arabic-language movie ever made; and the real-life residents of the Yacoubian have threatened lawsuits.
The ten-story building of the title, like its namesake in Cairo, was built in 1934 by an Armenian businessman. It’s a beautifully designed building, we are told, with balconies “decorated with Greek faces,” marble corridors, and a Schindler elevator. It became home to Cairo’s rich and powerful when it opened. Things changed after the revolution, however, with the storage sheds on the rooftop being rented out to poor families–a sort of sky-high slum. The Yacoubian became the sort of place that housed both squatters and bigwigs.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the residents of the Yacoubian building in Alaa Al Aswany’s novel are meant to represent different players in modern Egyptian society, from the old guard to the new. Zaki Bey El Dessouki, for instance, is an aristocrat and an incorrigible womanizer who is nostalgic for the days of King Farouq. He cannot abide what Nasser’s revolution has done to Egypt, and he merely wants to live out his days in peace and comfort while seeking refuge in whiskey and the occasional bit of opium. His neighbor, Hagg Azam, is a self-made millionaire with political ambitions. He made money from a chain of clothing stores that cater to “modest women.” Now the Hagg wants to run for a seat in the People’s Assembly, not out of political ambition, but out of a desire to belong into the rarefied circles of the powerful, where real money is to be made. In other words, Hagg Azzam is the nouveau riche to Zaki Bey’s aristocrat.
Then there’s the young generation. Taha El Shazli, the doorkeeper’s son, is a straight A student with loads of ambition, but when he applies for the Police Officer’s Academy, his candidacy is dismissed with one question, “What does your father do?” His social class prevents him from getting ahead, and despite his entreaties to the highest level of government, he has to turn to Plan B: majoring in Political Science. At the university, he finds kinship with a group of religious students, and is soon taken in with their right-wing imam. Meanwhile, Taha’s girlfriend, Busayna, the sole breadwinner for her family, struggles to make ends meet. She is sexually harassed at every job she gets and soon realizes that the only way she can make it is if she puts up with her bosses’ advances. Egypt’s young men are easy preys to religious extremism while the country’s young women are victims of sexual exploitation.
In the world Al Aswany has devised, there are also elements of a multicultural society. The brothers Abaskharon and Malak are Coptic Christians who save every penny they make, by legal and illegal means, in order to finally afford a room on the roof. The Yacoubian is also home to Hatim Rasheed, a half-French gay intellectual and brilliant editor of Le Caire newspaper. Hatim has a fondness for Nubian men, those who remind him of his first homosexual experience, with one of his servants. All these characters are forced, at one point or another, to make choices that ultimately result in either their downfall or redemption. In at least one case, the outcome will be interpreted entirely differently depending on the political and social persuasions of the reader.
The Yacoubian Building is reminiscent of the large-scale melodramas so often produced by Egypt’s huge film industry–young idealists, desirable ingenues, old predators, and so on. The novel wallows in manipulative emotion: Countless scenes end in cliffhangers that are not resolved for another thirty pages. In fact, the writing style itself is reminiscent of the visual language of the movies. Each section is introduced with a paragraph or two of exposition, a sort of establishing shot for the action that is about to unfold. The narrator in these introductory sections is omniscient, and he is given to sweeping and rather infuriating generalizations. He tells us, for instance, that women “all love sex enormously,” that miscegenation produces children who are “confused,” that the faces of homosexuals are marked by “miserable, unpleasant, mysterious, gloomy, look[s],” that gays, “like burglars, pickpockets, and all other groups outside the law” have developed a secret language of their own, and so on. Such pronouncements make it difficult to inhabit the world of the characters and to experience their lives in the way one expects from a novel.
Still, Al Aswany manages to mine his material for satirical purposes. For instance, God is invoked countless times, both by the righteous and by the corrupt. In a particularly humorous scene, a group of government officials who are discussing the price for a bribe to fix upcoming elections repeatedly call on God to bless them. They even conclude the agreement by reading the Fatiha (the first Sura of the Qur’an). Similarly, the Prophet’s hadith are cited both to encourage patience and to justify preventing a young man from having an education. Al Aswany also does a good job of portraying the tough choices faced by Egyptian youth in the face of a corrupt, repressive regime: Join the (Islamic) opposition or leave the country and go work elsewhere, never to return. It is in his commentary on Egyptian politics that Al-Aswany (a frequent contributor to local newspapers) really hits his stride.
The Yacoubian Building is an ambitious novel, but ultimately a flawed one. As a portrait of a country in crisis, however, it is a worthwhile read.
My review of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter appears in the Sunday Oregonian. Here’s a snippet:
Part family saga, part chronicle of a tumultuous time in Mexican history, the novel is an enduring examination of the ways in which the divine and the logical come together, and how even the most reasoned people sometimes must surrender to the beauty of that which they cannot see.
Urrea has more than just a creative interest in this saint — Teresita’s real name is Teresa Urrea; she is his great-aunt. But this familial relationship is to the reader’s benefit: The story of the saint is told with such love and care that it will make a believer out of anyone.
I am far from alone in my praise of the novel. The Hummingbird’s Daughter has been collecting rave reviews so far. (See for example Marta Barber’s review in the Miami Herald and David Hiltbrand’s write up in San Jose Mercury News.) You can also check out this post, by Los Angeles writer (and frequent Moorishgirl.com contributor) Dan Olivas, and read his interview with the author:
DANIEL OLIVAS: One of the things the rave reviews keep on mentioning is the fact that your novel is based on a real person–your aunt. Why did you decide to fictionalize her life rather than attempt outright biography?
LUIS ALBERTO URREA: The simplest answer is you can’t footnote a dream. The book has taken many forms over the years of research. But fiction kept asserting itself. I think the magic of fiction is that in many ways it’s more true than non-fiction. By that I mean that fiction can take you into truths of feeling and it lends itself better to the kind of trance that allows a reader to smell and taste the world I’m trying to evoke. Also, as a lifelong reader, I can say that I come from a generation where the great achievement was the novel. So, you know, I wanted to try to honor her with an attempt at a masterpiece. You never know if you’ve gotten there or not, but no guts, no glory.
So, do yourself a favor, and go read The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
My review of Reza Aslan’s excellent No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here is an excerpt:
Debates [between traditionalists and reformers], Aslan concludes, show that Islam is as ordinary in its development as Christianity or Judaism: It is going through the same tensions between traditionalists and reformers that its monotheistic predecessors have. At this moment in its history, Aslan says, the Ulama, or clerics, still wield an enormous amount of power over the interpretation of faith in most Muslim countries, as well as a large amount of control over matters of the state in places such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Afghanistan. But that is changing, with reformers in Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and the United States speaking up and demanding changes.
In much of “No god but God,” Aslan castigates the Ulama for the powers they have retained. But Aslan himself is an alim of sorts. While he might claim to be a mere scholar of the Islamic Reformation, he is also one of its most articulate advocates.
Read it in full here.