1stBookReview.com

"The Speed of Light" by Javier Cercas

2008-05-31T19:28:00.005+02:00

Javier Cercas was born in Ibahemando in Caceras in Spain in 1962. In 1980 he was a teacher for two years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA. Since 1989 he has been a lecturer in Spanish literature at the University of Gerona in Spain where he lives.

He is a constant contributor to the Catalan edition of El Pais newspaper and the Sunday supplement. Javier Cercas is a novelist and essayist. He received several literary prizes for his book about the Spanish civil war, Soldiers of Salamis, published in 2001. It was translated into fifteen languages, sold about half a million copies and was made into a film. He also wrote:
The Motive in 1987
The Tenant in 1989
The Belly of the Whale in 1997
True Tales in 2000
The Speed of Light in 2006

The Speed of Light (La Velocidad de la Luz) is a short book covering a period of sixteen years, in which the author deals with many themes: Guilt, the impossibility of redemption, the difficulty of forgetting the too painful past, the true significance of success and failure and how success can be a source of corruption, the suppressed evil in human nature, psychological trauma due to the Vietnam war and also the valuable legacy of a writer. "I write novels about the adventure of writing novels" Cercas said.

The novel begins with the quiet and uneventful life of the nameless narrator in Barcelona, then his life in Urbana in the USA where he becomes a teacher of Spanish for two years. The climax is reached towards the middle of the book, with the discovery of Rodney Falk's involvement in the Vietnam war, which will shed a light on Rodney's solitude and peculiar behaviour. The story comes full circle at the end of the novel, when the narrator concludes that fame like war, can destroy a person's life. That is the main strong tie that linked Rodney to the narrator, and what made the narrator obsessed with Rodney's mysterious past, in particular about what happened in My Khe by the elite fighting unit called Tiger Force, of which Rodney was a part.

The book is not about the Vietnam war only. The Vietnamese war was used to illustrate the author's message, about how a healthy-minded and ambitious young person (like the character of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness, which takes place in the Belgian Congo and the same Kurtz in the Francis Ford Coppola film about the Vietnam war, Apocalypse Now), can turn into a monster due to harsh circumstances. Like success and fame can also be strongly damaging to a man.

It's "the reality of evil, the impossibility of redemption" and the catastrophe of fame. Cercas suggests in his novel that one can be successful without falling into narcissism. The narrator analyses himself as well as his friend Rodney throughout the novel and enjoys his lengthy literary and witty conversation with him.

Although the novel never reveals the narrator's name, the narrator in The Speed of Light is none other than the author himself. Like the narrator, Cercas has also taught Spanish in Urbana for two years and while he was living there he met a Vietnam war veteran who was sitting on a bench, watching some children play ball. Cercas then asked himself: "What does that man's look hide? What is he doing there?" That image, which refers to Rodney Falk's character, was the starting point of the novel. Cercas, like the narrator, had also a very big success with his book about the Spanish civil war called Soldiers of Salamis. Too many similarities.

Like the French novelist, Marcel Proust, Javier Cercas, in The Speed of Light, has a heavy style of writing long sentences, some of which can extend to almost a page.

Cercas said in one of his interviews: "Most writers, or at least myself, don't have motivations before writing a book. I decide to write a novel to solve a question that I have asked myself, and as I write the novel, I begin raising moral, political, and other types of issues... Novelists aim at persuading their audience that what they are reading is true... I invite my readers to join me in the process of writing the novel. So on one hand I tell them, "this is a novel", and on the other, "this is completely true; this has happened to me and it could happen to you". It's all about shaking the reader's conscience".

Cercas, when asked why he likes to write books about wars, answered: "There is a story my mother has told me hundreds of times that's always fascinated me. The beginnings of my interest in the war may well stem from this. It's the story of the family hero, her handsome sixteen-year-old uncle”. He went to war, died as a hero, and was never forgotten by his niece.

The narrator mentioned twice in the book about traveling at the speed of light in order to uncover the future, once towards the middle in page 106, and the second time towards the end in page 253. He said: "I had the impression that everything had accelerated, that everything had started to run faster than usual, faster and faster, faster, faster, and at some moment there had been a blaze, a maelstrom and a loss, I thought I'd unknowingly traveled faster than the speed of light and what I was now seeing was the future".

Books We Will Be Reading In the Coming Months

2008-05-31T18:55:00.008+02:00

Dear Ladies,

Here, as promised, is the list of the books we will be reading in the coming months:

Friday 26th September 2008
My Name Is Redby Orhan Pamuk.

October 2008
An Old Fashioned Arrangementby Susie Vereker.

November 2008
No Book Club because of the Bazaar.

December 2008
Tears of the Giraffeby Alexander McCall Smith.

January 2009
The Miniaturistby Kunal Basu.

February 2009
Mothers and Sonsby Colm Toibin.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

All the very best,
Chouhrette

"Keeping The World Away" by Margaret Forster

2008-04-26T19:51:00.005+02:00

Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle (England) in 1938. She was educated at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. She won a scholarship to Sommerville College, Oxford where she was awarded an honors degree in History.

Margaret Forster married the writer and broadcaster Hunter Davies in 1960. Today they live between London and the lake district in England. They have three children, two daughters and a son. Their eldest daughter Caitlin also became a novelist.

Margaret Forster worked as a teacher in Islington, North London from 1961 to 1963. Starting from 1963 she worked as a novelist, a biographer, a contributor to newspapers and journals, and as a regular broadcaster for the BBC. She was also on the Arts Council literary panel for three years, and a chief non-fiction reviewer for the London Evening Standard.

Since 1964 Margaret Forster has been very prolific. She has written biographies, criticism, fiction and non-fiction. She has won many prizes and awards for her fiction and non-fiction works. Her bibliography is quite long, amongst her novels is the very successful 1965 Georgie Girl, which was made into a film in 1966, and a short lived Broadway musical in 1970.

Keeping the World Away is the story of a painting, the women who owned it, and the message it bestowed on them. In the prologue, the young school girl Gillian, introduces the original theme of the novel; how about if a painting had a real life of its own, according to who owned it, and what it conveyed to the people who looked at it.

Gillian says to her teacher after staring and staring at one painting in The Tate Gallery for a while and noticing that "something was there which she couldn't quite grasp... The lives of the actual paintings, especially one of hers. I was wondering where it had been, who had owned it, who had looked at it. And other things - I mean,what effect did it have on the people who have looked at it ? What has it meant to them, how have they looked at it, did they feel the same as I did, did they see what I saw."

Keeping The World Away portrays the struggle of female artists in finding their way, their independence and freedom. Margaret Forster who is a feminist, like her predecessor Virginia Wolf in A Room Of One's Own, describes how women from the early days of the twentieth century aspired to gain recognition from a society monopolised by men. They wanted their financial freedom as well as their mental freedom. Virginia Wolf said : "There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of the mind."

The novel is divided into six sections. The first section is a semi-fictionalised story based on a real painting, the corner of Gwen's room in Paris, produced by Gwen John at the beginning of the twentieth century, and of the genuine Welsh artists Gwen John and her brother Augustus who where born two years apart in Haverfordwest, South Wales, Gwen in 1876 and Augustus in 1878 and both became artists. Gwen went to live in Paris and fell madly in love with the famous sixty four year-old French sculptor Rodin. Her passion was short lived by her lover who distanced himself from her young, "vigorous" and "voracious" needs.

Feeling lonely and forlorn, but at the same time serene, Gwen painted the quiet, and what she perceived as a peaceful corner of her Parisian attic room, yearning while waiting for her inattentive lover, Rodin to come and visit her, like in the past. She worked with a great deal of concentration and minutiae, putting her feeling and strong emotions into the painting, in order for her lover to understand her state of mind, and her longing for him: "she had wanted it to prove her own triumph. She had wanted to show Rodin that this was evidence of her transformation. She had imagined him walking into her room and being transfixed, overcome with admiration for what she had achieved." Didn't he tell her that "she must be composed and calm and let his own tranquillity enter her soul. Only then, he told her, would she do good work."

Gwen waited patiently for Rodin who never went back to her. She offered the painting to her dear friend Ursula, who lost it during the journey back to England. From then on the saga of Gwen's room corner painting begins.

The following five parts of the novel follow the journey of Gwen's painting: The different women who owned it, loved it and shared the same aspiration felt by it, despite the different message the painting bestowed on each one of them, and how it had affected their lives, and that true art can have a life of its own.Charlotte, the dreamy, intellectual and art appreciator. Stella, the ex nurse and amateur artist. Lucasta, The artist specialised in portraits. Ailsa, Paul Mortimer's oppressed wife. Then the novel ends as it started with Gillian who is now studying art in Paris and will be inheriting the Gwen's painting after Mme Verlon's death.

The painting of Gwen John's room in Paris is today hanging in the Sheffield city art gallery in England.

The title of the book is taken from Gwen John's own note book. She wrote : “Rules to keep the world away: Do not listen to people (more than is necessary); do not look at people (more than is necessary); have as little intercourse with people as possible.”

Gwen John (1876-1939) and her brother Augustus John (1878-1961) studied at the Slade school of Art in London. During their life time, Augustus became famous at an early age, while his introverted, solitary sister Gwen, who was obsessively in love with Rodin, remained in the limelight. Her paintings mainly depicting interiors, still-lifes and portraits were less appreciated than her brother's bold style of painting. He was considered a great artist of his time. Recently,Gwen's art became internationally renown while by contrast her brother's paintings seem to have fallen into the shadow.

Margaret Forster's combination of fact and fiction is done in a masterly way, with an easy-to-follow plot and a clear and limpid writing.

Books We'll Be Reading In May & June

2008-03-29T20:59:00.002+01:00

Dear Ladies,

This is just a confirmation of the dates for the upcoming Book Club meetings:

Friday, 30th May 2008: The Speed of Lightby Javier Cercas.

Friday, 20th June 2008: The Lady on My Left by Catherine Cookson.

"The Cairo House" by Samia Serageldin

2008-03-28T20:01:00.003+01:00

Samia Serageldin was born in the early fifties in Cairo, Egypt, the daughter of a wealthy landowner of a renowned Egyptian family. She married at twenty and went to England where she obtained an M.S. Degree in Politics from London's school of Oriental and African Studies.

She emigrated with her family in 1980 to the U.S.A. and has lived since then in Michigan, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. She has two adult sons who live in two different continents from hers.

Samia Serageldin worked as a professor of French and Arabic language, an interpreter for an international company, a book columnist, a free-lance writer and as a public speaker on current affairs.

The Cairo House is Samia Serageldin's first novel. It was first published in the USA in 2000, the UK publication followed a few years later in 2004. It's semi-autobiographical, a way for the author to reconcile the present with the past. The book is about the changes and developments in Egypt during the decades following the 1952 Egyptian revolution.

Gigi the main character in the book relates her day-to-day life during the time of the four presidents who took power after king Faruk. President Naguib, then Nasser, followed by Sadat, and then Mubarak.

She starts her story in the good old days, the belle époque, of an Egyptian privileged wealthy, landowner family who went through hardship after president Nasser sequestrated their lands in the sixties. From then on, life will never be the same again neither for Gigi, her family, nor for Egypt.

Gihan (Gigi), the narrator and main character, is an introverted, complicated and tormented person. She hastily married a man who is a complete stranger to her, saying that "she was tired of waiting for life to begin." She was young, inexperienced and believed innocently that life started with wedlock.

The expected happened, her married life was a failure. Her second marriage was not a great success either. Like most expatriates, she didn't feel at home in the USA and she felt out of place in the new Egypt. She seemed to be helplessly lost until the end of the story, seeking a way out of her dilemma.

Despite that, it's not easy to feel much compassion for Gihan, her character lacks some depth. The events and turmoil surrounding her life are described more elaborately, although some subjects could have been more developed.

The metaphors of the Chameleon for the constant readjustment between the two worlds, the East and the West, and the kaleidoscope for the change in fate, which are mentioned in several parts of the novel are, of essential importance to the author. It conveys what destiny is about. The slightest change in the kaleidoscope, like a small occurrence, can alter the route of one's life and therefore make a substantial difference to one's destiny.

The story of Gihan and her clan in The Cairo House reveals Egyptian culture, traditions, politics and unrest amongst the different classes in society under each new regime. The novel starts with a vivid and rich description of Egyptian society of the time, but as the author moves her character to the western world, the images are fading and are no longer of substance.

The Cairo House is an entertaining book to read. Written by an Egyptian who lived the various events that occurred in her country first hand, it's valuable historically for the important Egyptian period of the first half of the twentieth century and the significant changes that followed whether in politics, culture, way of life or even the country's infrastructure.

Samia Serageldin, in one of her interviews, says about The Cairo House : "I've been often asked why, since The Cairo House draws so heavily from my personal history, I did not simply write a memoir. It is often said that a memoir is fiction in disguise and a novel is fact masquerading as fiction. For me, at least, I could not have written as freely without the fig leaf of fiction...The great satisfaction of being read comes from taking others with you on that fascinating journey."

"The Swallows of Kabul" by Yasmina Khadra

2008-03-01T12:22:00.005+01:00

Yasmina Khadra is the pen-name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian ex-army officer who while still in the army used this pseudonym in order to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by the military censors, due to his notoriety which irritated his superiors. He was encouraged by his wife to work clandestinely by using her first two names, Yasmina Khadra.

He started writing his collection of stories "Houria" at the age of 17. Six more novels were published under his real name while in the army and before adopting his pen-name, Yasmina Khadra.

Mohammed Moulessehoul was born in Kenadsa in the Algerian Sahara in January 1955. His father joined the National Liberation Army in 1956 in the war against the French occupier. After Algeria's independence in 1962, Mohammed Moulessehoul was sent by his father to cadet school to become an officer which also satisfied his mother's wish.

After thirty six years in military service, Mohammed Moulessehoul decided to go into exile in France in 2001, and devoted his entire time to writing. He currently lives in Aix-En-Provence in the South of France.

Mohammed Moulessehoul received the Médaille d'Or from the Académie Française in 2001 and the Prix des Libraires in 2006. He was also awarded the trophy of Créateurs sans Frontières, presented to him on the 19th of February 2008 at the Quai d'Orsay, by the French minister of foreign affairs, Bernard Kouchner.

Some of Mohammed Moulessehoul's books have been translated in 25 countries, but only a few books were translated from French into English : "In the Name of God" in 2000, "Wolf Dreams" in 2003, "Morituri" in 2003, "The Swallows of Kabul" in 2004 and "Double Blank in 2005.

He wrote several books about the civil war in Algeria and is today one of Algeria's most important writers. The Swallows of Kabul has been a best seller, it will be made into a film and will be released soon in the cinemas.

The Swallows of Kabul is a parallel story of two doomed Afghani couples who have seen better days but now have to endure a hard life under the Taliban's oppressive regime.

Mohsen Ramat and his wife Zunaira are well educated, they meet at university, he comes from a middle-class family of prosperous merchants and she is the daughter of a distinguished man. Mohsen is looking forward to a diplomatic career, and Zunaira's ambition is to become a magistrate. She is a liberated feminist and a human rights activist when a student at university. All these dreams are shattered when the Taliban come to power. Mohsen's family business is destroyed and Zunaira has to stay home because women under the Taliban ruling are not allowed to study, have a job or go out without wearing the burka, which Zunaira felt was stripping her of her identity and her freedom.

Atiq Shaukat an ex-mujahideen fighter from the Russian war, and now a part time jail keeper, lives with his wife Musarrat an ex-nurse who is suffering from a painful and terminal illness. He married her twenty years ago out of gratitude because she saved his life when he was severely wounded by the Russians during the war. He doesn't love her and can't bear the thought of coming back home to find her lying in her corner and him having to deal with the household chores.

Mohsen and Atiq have many things in common. The dissatisfaction of their gloomy life, the fear of the unknown, the boredom and the aimless and endless wandering in the streets of Kabul day after day, and the rejection of the intolerable situation the Taliban had led the country into. The two couples are deeply depressed and distraught by the frightening nightmare they are going through. They try to remain sane amongst all the insanity surrounding them caused by the Taliban's repressive regime and the state of advanced decomposition in the city.

Mohsen releases his rage by joining a crowd stoning an adulterous woman to death. He always had a gentle nature, he felt horrified by his act, and couldn't even believe that he was capable of such a deed. In order to unburden himself of such a heavy weight on his conscience, he had to confess to his wife what he had done: "I don't know what came over me. It happened so fast. It was as if the crowd put a spell on me. I don't recall gathering up the stones. I only remember that I couldn't get rid of them, and an irresistible rage seemed to come into my arm... What frightens me and saddens me at the same time is that I didn't even try to resist."

Atiq doesn't know what's happening to him, he can no longer withstand the pitiless violence of the Taliban regime he genuinely believed in at the beginning. He feels claustrophobic in his prison cubby hole called an office. He feels disoriented and lost : "What's happening to me? I can't bear the dark, I can't bear the light, I don't like standing up or sitting down, I can't tolerate old people or children, I hate it when anybody looks at me or touches me. In fact, I can hardly stand myself. Am I going stark raving mad?" "The prison world is getting Atiq down. During the last several weeks, he has devoted much consideration to his position as a jailer. The more he thinks about it, the less merit he finds in it, and even less nobility. This realization has put him in a state of constant rage."

Zunaira loses her mind by becoming shockingly extreme in her attitude and behaviour towards her husband. She doesn't want to see him any more because she holds him responsible for the shame she had to endure from a Taliban police agent in the street. She no longer respects him. In order to stop her husband arguing with her she pushes him violently, his head hit the wall, and he dies instantly.

Musarrat leads a tortured life without any hope of recovering from this long, mysterious and consuming disease. She decides in her own drastic and extreme way, to sacrifice herself in order to make her husband happy. She wants to substitute herself for the woman he fell in love with and who is sentenced to death. She tell her husband : "I've been inspired by the Lord : That woman is not going to die. She'll be everything I couldn't be for you. You have no idea how happy I am this morning. I'll be more useful dead than alive. And at long last, you're being offered a chance. I beg you not to ruin it. Listen to me, just this once..." She is a selfless, angelic figure amongst all the surrounding abominations.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in his powerful, realistically disturbing and traumatic, short but very dense story is able to convey the misery, injustice, suffocation and oppression of the devastated city of Kabul under the Taliban regime. He writes with great compassion about the complexity of human nature when faced with extreme hardship, absurd rulers and rules, and how extreme repression and senseless violence can bring people to the brink of helplessness and despair to the extent of losing their souls. They end up dying or raving mad.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in The Swallows of Kabul is writing about an Afghanistan that he has never visited. He says in one of his interviews that he understands the era of the Taliban very well.

"I understand that Taliban mentality very well. The landscape, the struggles, the hardness of life-all these are just like my homeland." He points to the cover of his book: "Look at that photo (of a woman in a burka crossing a parched, desolate city scape) , that could be the Sahara village where I was born... I wanted to bring a new look from a Muslim on the tragedy of Afghanistan. And to bring to it a western perspective at the same time. When there are two perspectives there is a better chance of understanding."

Understanding that it is extremism which is the cancer of Islam.

"Staying On" by Paul Scott

2008-02-03T18:49:00.000+01:00

Paul Scott was born in the north London suburb of Southgate in 1920, from a Yorkshire commercial artist father and a South London mother Frances Mark, a former shop clerk. He was the younger of two sons.

Paul Scott was educated in Winchmore Hill Collegiate, a private school where his education was abruptly ended at the age of 16 due to his father's business being in financial difficulty. He decided to make a career in accountancy.

Paul Scott was conscripted to the army in 1940, and in 1941 was married in Torquay to Nancy Edith Avery called Penny. He was sent to India in 1943 as an officer cadet and ended the war as captain in the Indian Army Service Corps.

After completing his duty in India, he went back to live in London with his family. His two daughters, Carol and Sally were born in 1947 and 1948.

In 1950 Paul Scott became a director while working for the literary agent Pearn Pollinger and Higham and from 1960 onwards he dedicated himself full time to writing. His books were not recognised until quite late and he died in 1978 in hospital in London from colon cancer.

Paul Scott wrote several novels:
Johnnie Sahib in 1952.
The Alien Sky in 1953.
A Male Child in 1956.
Mark of The Warrior in 1958.
Chinese Love Pavilion in 1960.
Birds of Paradise in 1962.
The Bender in 1963.
The Corrida at San Feliu in 1964.
The Raj Quartet:
1. The Jewel in the Crown in 1966.
2. The Day of the Scorpion in 1968.
3. The Towers of Silence in 1971.
4. A Division of the Spoils in 1974.

The Raj Quartet was made into a television series under the name of "The Jewel In The Crown".

Staying On in 1977 won the Booker Prize award and was made into a film in 1979 by Granada television. He also wrote reviews for The Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and Country Life.

In 1976 and 1977 he was "visiting professor" at University of Tulsa in Oklahoma U.S.A.

Staying On is a sequel to The Raj Quartet set in the Anglo-Indian frame several years after India gained its independence in 1947.

The two main characters are Tusker and Lucy Smalley, a retired ageing British couple, mentioned briefly in The Raj Quartet novels. Married for forty years and living an uncommunicative marriage, they decide to Stay On in a small bungalow in the hills of Pankot, a small town in India. Despite being deprived of their colonial status and despite the changing times in India and the seediness of the place, they opt to stay rather than return home to England due to financial need. "I knew the pension would go further in India than in England" Tusker says to his wife.

The novel is set in 1972. It narrates the present and the past with funny, sometimes sad and sometimes touching style, the poignant silent loyalty and the resentful trust and reliance between the ageing couple (Tusker and Lucy).

The story starts with Tusker's death. All the events in the book are a flashback till the end when the author brings back Tusker's death in order to re-knot the beginning with the end.

Throughout the book Tusker is painted as a selfish, inconsiderate, grumpy character, but by the end and before his death, he reveals his soft, hidden, endearing side, which makes his departing deeply moving.

Nothing much appears to happen in the book, but the story is still engrossing due to the vivid description of the characters and the bittersweet subject.

Tusker and Lucy have seen better days during the time of the Raj, but those days are over and now they have to lead a modest life, “hang on”, swallow their pride, and endure the grotesque Mrs Bhoolabhoy's bad temper. “ 'Oh, Mrs Bhoolabhoy, Lucy began, we're expecting a guest on Wednesday. I wonder if you'd kindly book a room-' 'I have already told Colonel Smalley I can't be bothered with that... I have other things to deal with. All I want to know is about the shears.' 'Shears?' 'Shears. Shears. Shears!' Mrs Bhoolabhoy raised her arms and made motions. Snick-snick. Shears!' she shouted... I will not have my property taken off the premises...She waddled away, leaving behind her a trail of sandalwood perfume which,to Lucy, was like the pungent smell of her own smouldering outraged dignity.”

Ibrahim, the Smalley's manservant is etched in a funny light hearted way. His conversation with the mali gardener, Joseph, is hilarious : “'Ibrahim,' Joseph said,'what happens if you are pushed by both Sahib and Memsahib ? 'Given push, not pushed. Get idiom right.' 'what happens if you are given push by Sahib and Memsahib at one and the same time?' Ibrahim looked at him thoughtfully. He said.'Suddenly you are a philosopher as well as a gardener? You are entering realm of metaphysics ? Joseph Einstein is it ? Versed in the theory of time and relativity? Haven't I just made it plain that Sahib and Memsahib are always at logger-heads and that sometimes they do not even know what time of day it is, even in Pankot ?”

Paul Scott chose India as a rich and colourful frame work for his books, because since the time he was posted there, he fell in love with the country and wanted to convey his enthusiasm to English people, in particular for those who heard about this vast country but never visited it nor interested themselves in discovering its varied cultures.

In 1972 referring to his whole career to date, Paul Scott told his audience during his British council tour of India : "My proper answer to the question,'why do you, as a modern English novelist of serious pretensions, bother to write about the time-expired subject of the British Raj?' is, must be, if my novels are novels at all, because the last days of the British Raj are the metaphor I have presently chosen to illustrate my view of life."

"The Pilot's Wife" by Anita Shreve

2008-01-31T17:42:00.000+01:00

Anita Shreve was born in Dedham Massachusetts in 1946 from an airline pilot father and a housewife mother. She graduated from Tufts University. She worked as high school teacher at Amherst College, Massachusetts. She started writing her novels while working. She was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her book "Past The Island, Drifting".

She then stopped writing fiction in the late 1970s and worked as a journalist in Nairobi, Kenya for three years. She wrote for Quest magazine, US magazine, New York Times and New York magazine. She decided to give up journalism and dedicate herself full-time to writing fiction. Her books were translated into many languages and she won The Pen L.L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction. She currently lives between Longmeadow Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Anita Shreve wrote several novels :
Eden Close in 1989.
Strange Fits of Passion in 1991.
Where or When in 1993.
Resistance in 1995.
The Weight of Water in 1997.
The Pilot's Wife in 1998.
Fortune's Rocks in 2000.
Sea Glass in 2002.

She wrote non-fiction books :
Dr. Balter's Child Sense in 1985.
Dr. Balter's Baby Sense in 1985.
Working Woman in 1986.
Remaking Motherhood in 1987.
Who's in Control in 1988.
Women Together, Women Alone in 1989.

Kathryn is the pilot's wife and she is the main character of the novel. The story is about her tragedy, her distress, her love, her deceit and her rage, and how she has to deal with the initial shock when she is woken up in the middle of the night by a knock on the door to be told by Robert Hart, the pilot's union employee, that her husband died in a plane crash with 103 passengers, 10 miles off the coast of Ireland and that there were no survivors.

The novel is divided in two parts, the first half describes in simple, clear prose Kathryn's struggle to deal with her shock, loss and grievance, while trying to pull herself together for the sake and protection of her 16-year old daughter Mattie, with the help of the kind Robert Hart.

This part holds some hints to prepare readers for what follows in the second half which is full of unexpected painful revelations, challenging Kathryn's prowess to deal with the truth of her marriage and what has become of it. What appeared at the beginning to be a sad and quiet story turns out to be a gripping one, a thriller combined with the difficult defiance between loss, love and betrayal but also about some hope for the future.

Anita Shreve manages to make a good, captivating read out of a banal, common theme of betrayal and adultery.

Kathryn finds it very hard to bring together her happy memory of a stable, peaceful and uneventful married life in a beautiful home overlooking the ocean in Ely, New Hampshire, a bright teenage daughter, with a husband she cared for dearly, and thought that she knew, with the harsh deceitful reality of who Jack really was. A mixed feeling of grief and danger which triggers her determination to seek the truth at any cost after hearing all the unbelievable rumours, and after discovering various pieces of paper in Jack's pocket and in his bath-robe with initials and phone numbers which she knew nothing about. She was ready to go through it all even if its outcome turns out to be devastating for her. In any case Kathryn knew that nothing will ever be the same again.

Anita Shreve portrays Kathryn's confusion and disbelief in switching the chapters constantly from the present with all it's unpleasantness and cruel devastation, to flashes of the serene, tranquil and more reassuring past. She has masterfully succeeded in conveying Kathryn's feelings by contrasting the two lives through juxtaposition.

Anita Shreve's books are often categorized under "women's novels" due to her acquired art of describing women's distressful feelings and sensibilities. The Pilot's Wife appears to be a puzzle that Kathryn tries throughout the novel to unravel piece by piece. She thought she knew her husband but found out that she was living with a complete stranger she knew nothing about.

The readers are aware of that through what Mattie was telling her mother about the rumour that the pilot committed suicide : "Mattie you knew your father." "Maybe". "What does that mean ?" "Maybe I didn't know him" Mattie said. “Maybe he was unhappy”. “If your father was unhappy, I'd have known.” “But how do you ever know that you know a person ?” she asked. What Kathryn didn't know is that no matter how well you know a loved one intimately, there is always a little secret garden that each one keeps to oneself.

After meeting Muire Boland, Jack's second wife and seeing their two children, Kathryn was overwhelmed with the sad and crude reality of her suspicion, which led her to drive all the way to the Irish coast, where the plane crashed. She decided to unburden herself from the weight she was carrying by throwing her wedding ring into the sea to join Jack at the bottom of the ocean. She wanted a new start by getting rid of the past and like that the healing operation can take place.

The Pilot's Wife is an easy, readable book, the style is clear and simple. The plot was progressing well but then the author decided to end the story abruptly leaving a couple of loose threads untied.
The involvement of Jack with the IRA which led to the plane explosion was not explained sufficiently, and the relationship between Kathryn and Robert Hart was left undeveloped.

Anita Shreve was asked in an interview where did she get the idea for The Pilot's Wife? She answered : “A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel... I overheard a conversation between a pilot and a woman at a party. Something he said lodged in my consciousness and wouldn't go away. The thing he said was : When there's a crash, the union always gets there first. He meant that when there was a crash of a commercial airliner, a member of the pilot's union made it a point to get to the pilot's wife house first. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most important of which is to keep her from talking to the press. And there was a collision of ideas.” which produced The Pilot's Wife.

Books We'll Be Reading In The Coming Months

2007-12-06T05:05:00.005+01:00

Dear Ladies,
Here as promised is the list of books we will be reading in the coming months in The Book Club...

1. The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve will be discussed in the Villa at
2pm on Friday 14th December.

2. Friday 25th January 2008: Staying On by Paul Scott.

3. Friday 29th February 2008: Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra.

4. Friday, 28th March 2008: The Cairo House by Samia Serageldin.

5. Friday, 25th April 2008: Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster.

6. Friday, 30th May 2008: The Speed of Lightby Javier Cercas.

7. Friday, 20th June 2008: The Lady on My Left by Catherine Cookson.

Have a wonderful holiday, a Merry Christmas and a good and healthy new year.
All the very best,
Chouhrette

"In The Country of Men" by Hisham Matar

2007-10-27T18:00:00.000+02:00

Hisham Matar was born in New York in 1970 to Libyan parents. His father worked for the Libyan mission to the United Nations. But in 1979 being against the regime, he left Libya and went into exile in Egypt with his family. After living in Cairo for eleven years, his father was kidnapped and sent back to Libya where he was sent to prison and since 1995 Hisham Matar has no news of his father's whereabouts. His mother and elder brother still live in Egypt.

Hisham Matar spent his young years in Tripoli and Cairo. He lived in Cairo for four years, and at fifteen went to boarding school in England. Then he studied architecture at Goldsmith college London University and still lives in London, married to American photographer, Diana Matar. He is working on a new novel set in Cairo and London.

In his twenties Hisham Matar worked as an architect and also wrote articles for the London based Arabic daily newspaper, Al Shark Al Awsat. His essays have been published in The Independent, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Times. In 2002 he was a finalist in East Anglia's Best New Talent Awards for his poems, before preferring prose to poetry.

Hisham Matar's first novel In the Country of Menwas first published in 2006 and was nominated for The Guardian First Book Award. It was on the short list of The Booker Prize of 2006 and won The Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2007. "In The Country of Men" was a big success and has been translated into 22 languages. Despite its short length it took five years to write.

The novel is narrated by a bewildered nine year-old Suleiman who is trying to decode the adult world that takes place inside his own family and in Tripoli, ten years after the 1969 Libyan revolution. The book starts in 1979, the year before he left Tripoli to go and live in Cairo.

Little Suleiman is confused as would be a nine year old who lives with a depressed, domineering, alcoholic and emotionally unpredictable mother (Mama), a nearly non-existent figure-head of a businessman father (Baba), and suspicious men (the secret police) moving around Tripoli and his neighbourhood.

Apart from Suleiman's mother, the main character in the story who plays an important part in Suleimen's life, the story is mainly about men, as the title of the novel suggests. The novel is not only about politics, it's also about strong emotions, compassions and relationships between people sharing almost the same fate.

The story is poignant. Suleiman who at his age should be living a carefree life, is burdened by the cruel events surrounding him. Like nine year old Michele in "I'm Not Scared" by Niccolo Ammaniti and twelve year old Amir in "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini, he is ejected too soon into adulthood due to circumstances and without any mercy.

Throughout the novel there is a sense of danger, fear, betrayal, and a very heavy atmosphere of oppression, that the nine-year old child caught in this claustrophobic world would rather not even attempt to decipher but instead escape to a freer place.

Nevertheless, the story is evoked with great subtlety and compassion. "In The Country of Men" is an interesting novel because it's about Libya, a country which has encountered many world-wide controversies in recent years and yet remains completely unknown to the outsider.

Very rarely would one come across a book about Libya, its every day life and its regime. In one of his interviews Hisham Matar says : "I would have liked to write a book that had nothing to do with politics... I'm not really interested in politics, but politics was part of the canvas. I had to say something about it, otherwise all the different forces that are shaping these characters would be abstract."

The characters in the novel are not fully developed but rather sketched apart from the character of Suleimen's mother who stands out vividly among the other hazy characters, emphasising the endearing love binding the little boy to his mother, love that will remain just as strong even when the little boy becomes a young man in exile in Egypt.

"I look down at my legs, my grown-up legs in their grown-up trousers.... You're a man, I tell myself. And she (his mother) is coming to see you, to see what has become of her darling boy, her only son. How will she be? ...What will she think of me... Then I see her. She is standing next to her suitcase like a girl in the city for the first time... Mama, I say and say it again and again until she sees me. Mama! Mama! When I reach her she kisses my hands, my forehead, my cheeks, combs my hair with her fingers, straightens my collar."

The style, in its unpretentious appealing simplicity, speaks to the heart on an emotionally realistic level. In one of his interviews, Hisham Matar denies that his novel In the Country of Menis autobiographical. He said it's pure fiction and that he chose to fictionalise events of his childhood:

"The book is a product of my imagination: a human faculty that many, I am learning these days, are suspect of. This book took me five years to write; I am not yet interested enough in my own autobiography to spend that long writing it down. Besides, knowing what will happen next bores me... I enjoy the pleasure of inventing characters and their circumstances on the page. They remain mysterious even after the work is complete; in some ways even more mysterious. It's magic."

"Libya is a silent and silenced country. Somewhere between the covers of my book is a Libya that speaks. But most of all, I hope anyone who reads my novel is entertained and perhaps nudged a little."

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2007-09-30T06:04:00.000+02:00

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Arcataca in the north of Colombia in March 1928. His parents struggling to make a living,little Gabo was raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a Colonel, a liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days, a hero and a very good story teller who lived an intriguing life.

His grandmother was full of superstitions, premonitions and ghost stories. She was also a very talented story teller and had the art of telling tales as if they were real.

Garcia Marquez will be deeply influenced by both his grandparents. Many years later he will use these unforgettable tales in his famous and most successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years Of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness." Garcia Marquez will say later in his life: "I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents".

When he was eight years old he went to live with his parents in Sucre, a department in the north of Colombia, due to his grandfather's death and to his grandmother's blindness. His father was a pharmacist. The young Garcia Marquez was sent to a boarding school in Barranquilla, a port city in Colombia. He was known as the shy, serious, non-athletic boy who wrote humorous poems and drew cartoons. At the age of twelve he was awarded a scholarship in a Jesuit-run secondary school for bright students.

After graduating at eighteen in 1946, Garcia Marquez, to please his parents, enrolled in the Bogota University as a law student against his wishes. But he didn't like his studies. He quitted university.

His life changed when he came across Kafka's famous book "The Metamorphosis". He says: "I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing long time ago... That's how my grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice."

From now on Garcia Marquez is going to read many books and dedicate his life to writing. He started his career as a journalist and moved unto literary writing.

He wrote fiction:
"In Evil Hour in 1962
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" in 1967
"The Autumn of The Patriarch" in 1975
"Love In The Time of Cholera" in 1985
"Of Love And Other Demons" in 1994
"Strange Pilgrims" (twelve stories) in 1992
"Memories of My Melancholy Whores" in 2004

His Novellas:
"Leaf Storm", "No One Writes To The Colonel", "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" in 1961
"The General In His Labyrinth" in 1989

He wrote non- fiction:
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailorin 1970
The Fragrance of Guavain 1982
Clandestine in Chilein 1987
News of a Kidnappingin 1996
For The Sake Of A Country Within Reach Of The Childrenin 1998
"Living to Tell the Tale" in 2002
He also wrote many short stories.

In 1981 Garcia Marquez was awarded the French Legion d'honneur medal, and in 1982 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude had sold 36 million copies by July 2007.

Garcia Marquez has been married since 1958 to Mercedes Barcha and has 2 children, Rodrigo Garcia, the television and film director in the USA, and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, who also works as a title designer for the cinema in the USA.

In 1999 Garcia Marquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He lives in Mexico city.
He has released the first volume of a promised set of three volumes of his memoirs in 2002, "To Live To Tell It", the story of his life till 1955.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a spell-bound novel with multiple events and stories. An epic, like La Chanson de Roland, it has its base seamlessly interwoven from reality combined with fantasy. A chronicle of life and death. A tragicomedy with many characters and through these characters we are introduced to the life of the mythical village of Macondo which is in reality the story of Colombia and its civil war between the Liberals and the Conservatives which had the peak of its bloodshed in 1899 and ended in late 1902.

And like his novella, "In Evil Hour", where Garcia Marquez writes about the killing of a hundred and fifty thousand Colombians by 1953, in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" Marquez describes the terrible massacre of a hundred thousand people with the defeat of the Liberals. Garcia Marquez's grandfather fought in that war. He also wrote about the anti western massive workers strike against The United Fruit Company and their banana plantations in Macondo, and the massacre that followed.

The author has mixed together reality, fantasy and history with great magical success. The influence of Marquez's grandparents is strongly felt in the book, with the raging war between the Liberals and the Conservatives, the mysterious gypsies, like the enigmatic Melquiades and his prophecies, and his ghost that kept on appearing and disappearing in the house. Also the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar who keeps on inviting itself into José Arcadio Buendia's house after being killed by the latter because of jealousy over his wife Ursula. For many years after his death he will haunt the house in search of water to clean its wound and Ursula taking pity on him and leaving for him water jugs in every corner of the house.

The story of Macondo is the story of the people who founded the village from beginning to end during a hundred years. It all started with “twenty adobe houses,built on the bank of a river of clear water... It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and no one had died.” The head of the tribe was José Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran. They will have children, grand children and great grand children. Five generations of descendants, who all seem to follow the same pattern of character, each living his self imposed "solitude" and despair, their own way.

José Arcadio Buendia is fascinated by the unknown, sadly he is incapable of differentiating between magic and knowledge. He has his lab where he works and tries all sorts of inventions in the hope of making gold, till he ends up going mad.

Ursula Iguaran, his wife, is hard working, she cleans, cooks, and has a little business in candy animals, and raises the offspring of the Buendia family. She is strong-willed and remains lucid till her death at over a hundred years old.

It's a gigantic saga where cruel and violent reality are mixed with a wholly fantastic world of the author's fertile imagination. All the people killed during the war. Aureliano, the military leader, and his prolific sex life. He had seventeen children from seventeen women, all queuing to have heroes from him. The tragedies of Renata Remedios who couldn't marry the man she loved, her mother's guard fired a bullet into his spine “which reduced him to his bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest...tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies.” Renata Remedios was put by her mother into a convent for the rest of her life. The tragic death of Amaranta Ursula while delivering the baby she was carrying from her nephew.

Funny moments, like Mauricio Babilonia and his trail of yellow butterflies, the tricks that the grandchildren played on their nearly blind grandmother Ursula. And Remedios the Beauty who ascends to heaven with a sheet while hanging out laundry in the back yard. Not to forget the most unusual insomnia illness and collective amnesia, a weird “plague” that attacks the whole village, an infection from some Indians who were passing the village with gypsies.

Garcia's style is easy, natural and simple. Without any doubt he mastered the art of magical realism. He skillfully blends the tragic and the comic in his astonishing novel where there is always a new amazing happening. Like a magician, under his wound Macondo becomes an enchanted village from The One Thousand And One Nights. Pungent with life, the surreal, undefined, uncertain, whether it's time, place or people, seem to be most conventional in the novel.

Unfortunately, Macondo the village of mirages is cut off from any civilisation, it has prostitution, incest, and “Solitude”, so like its inhabitants it was doomed to disappear. The incestuous marriage of José Arcadio Buendia and Ursula and five generations later the relationship between Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt Amaranta Ursula, resulting in having a baby born with a pigtail, illustrate what Pilar Ternare,the fortune teller knew : “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”

Macondo the village of all fantasies goes back to oblivion with its inhabitants after witnessing a hundred years of violence, cruelty, love, passion, hatred, ghosts, fantasy, prostitution, incest, but most important of all, witnessing One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Books We Have Read At The UNWG Book Club

2007-09-06T07:24:00.000+02:00

Dear Ladies,

As a follow-up to my last post, here is a list of the books we have previously read and discussed:

24th October 2003: “The Life Of Pi” by Yann Martel.
12th December 2003: “The Human Stain” by Philipp Roth.
6th February 2004 : “Palace Walk” by Naguib Mahfouz.
26th March 2004 : “The Alchemist” by Paulo Cuelho.
10th May 2004 : “Youth And The End Of The Tether” by Joseph Conrad.
11th June 2004 : “English Passengers” by Matthew Kneale.
24th September 2004 : “Samarkand” by Amin Maalouf.
15th October 2004 : “Portrait In Sepia” by Isabel Allende.
26th November 2004 : “Youth” by John Coetzee.

14th January 2005 : “Waiting” by Ha Jin.
11th February 2005 : “Silk” by Alessandro Baricco.
8th April 2005 : “Notes From The Hyena's Belly” by Nega Mezlekia.
20th May 2005 : “Crabwalk” by Günter Grass.
17th June 2005 : “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath.
23rd September 2005 : “The Shadow Of The Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
18th November 2005 : “The Remains Of The Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro.
2nd December 2005 : “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe.

13th January 2006 : “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini.
24th February 2006 : “Fear And Trembling” by Amélie Nothomb.
31st March 2006 : “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri.
5th May 2006 : “Eve Green” by Susan Fletcher.
9th June 2006 : “The Palace Tiger” by Barbara Cleverly.
22nd September 2006 : “The Time Traveler's Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger.
27th October 2006 : “The Buddha Of Suburbia” by Hanif Kureishi.
1st December 2006 : “The Pickup” by Nadine Gordimer.

12th January 2007 : “The Bookseller Of Kabul” by Asne Seierstad.
23rd February 2007 : “The God Of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy.
30th March 2007 : “Embers” by Sandor Marai.
11th May 2007 : “Palace Of Desire” by Naguib Mahfouz.
11th May 2007 : “Sugar Street” by Naguib Mahfouz.
15th June 2007 : “I'm Not Scared” by Niccolo Ammaniti.

"I'm Not Scared" by Niccolo Ammaniti

2007-06-16T17:35:00.000+02:00

Niccolo Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He studied at Liceo Classico and then at university where he read biology. He quitted university before obtaining a degree and decided to breed fish in his bedroom in twelve aquariums containing two thousand litres of water, as a business, in order to earn some money.

Ammaniti wrote his first novel “Branchie” in 1994 and in 1995 published an essay titled “Nel nome del figlio”. In 1996 a collection of short stories called “Fango” came out. As for his great rural novel “Ti prendo e ti porto via” which was written in Scotland during his six months there, it was published in 1999. He then went to the United States in 2001 in order to write the script for an American production called “Gone Bad”. His third novel, "I'm Not Scared" (Io non ho paura) was published in Italy in 2001. Niccolo Ammaniti is the youngest ever winner, at the age of 34, of the prestigious Viareggio-Repaci prize for his novel “I'm Not Scared”, which has been his biggest success so far.

"I'm Not Scared"became a best-seller in Italy for months, and was translated into 20 languages. It was also made into a feature film directed by Gabriele Salvatores, the Academy-award winning director of “Mediterraneo”. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2003. Niccolo Ammanity, who lives in Italy, mentioned that he is longing to be a film director, and that his novel “I'm Not Scared” was originally conceived as a film project.

In "I'm Not Scared"a thirty year-old Michele remembers a shocking episode from his childhood in the very hot summer of 1978, twenty years ago in Aqua Traverse, an isolated community living in a hamlet of five houses in the middle of wheat fields, in an unidentified poor region in southern Italy, a nine year-old boy Michele discovers a horrifying secret, unbearable for his age, which is going to change his whole life. He will be thrown into adulthood when he loses his innocence and his faith in the adults around him,and realises that those closest to him are not what he thought they were. And through finding out adult cruelty in kidnapping a child his own age and demanding a ransom from his parents. Michele is put through a dilemma, whether to keep his promise to his father by not going back to see Filippo, or listen to his pure heroic nature. He is helpless and confused as a child and yet courageous and righteous as an adult. The complexity inherent in growing up.Having lost faith in his idealised father and mother and all grown ups surrounding him, he has to work things out by himself and act like a humanitarian hero.

The whole novel is narrated through the nine year-old Michele's eyes, therefore the language is simple, the sentences short, the paragraphs brief and the image clear, which conveys strength and authenticity to the narration. The author writes with great accuracy the feeling of fear and fantasies of corpse-eaters, ghosts, monsters, and bogeymen that come out at night, which are part of everyday life of a child. Michele is intimidated, like the other children of the hamlet, by Skull (Antonio), who seems to have hold over them through fear and seems to take a sadistic pleasure in ordering his friends around and getting away with it. There is also the fear of Skull's brother, Felice Natale, who is portrayed as a despicable character.

The story is very well constructed, Michele's character springs to life while the adults are portrayed in a sketchy way. Ammaniti excelled in capturing with great precision, Michele's childish thoughts and vocabulary.The story starts in a slow rhythm which conveys the stifling summer heat and also the isolation of the Aqua Traverse people. Nothing much seems to be happening, the children are glad to get together every day to go cycling in the middle of the wheat fields, happily, innocently and without any worries, away from the adults' evil tension, kidnapping, blackmail and guns. Then comes the black side of the story, the dark black hole opposed to the sunny wheat fields, Michele's terrible discovery which he keeps to himself. Then follows the tension and violent arguments among the adults which holds the suspense going strong à la Hitchcock, leading to the climax which carries the twist at the end.

Niccolo Ammaniti, a talented story-teller with vivid imagination, is considered one of the best novelists in Italy.

Naguib Mahfouz - The Cairo Trilogy

2007-05-13T16:54:00.000+02:00

Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in Gamaliya, a popular commercial quarter of Cairo. He was named after Naguib Pasha Mahfouz, the physician that delivered him. Later the family moved to Al-Abassiya a middle class quarter of Cairo. These are the two districts that provided the backdrop for Mahfouz's famous Cairo Trilogy.

Mahfouz graduated from Cairo University in 1934 with a BA degree in philosophy and followed his father's footsteps by working as a civil servant until he retired in 1972. He was working as a civil servant while writing on the side, even after his novels became successful. He began writing at the age of seventeen, but his first novel was not published until 1939.

In his lifetime Mahfouz wrote about forty novels, over a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred articles. Many of his novels have been made into films. The publication of The Cairo Trilogy in 1957 made him well known in the Arab world. Thirty one years later, in 1988, when Mahfouz was the first Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature, Jacqueline Onassis registered the rights for Doubleday on 14 of his books and arranged for the first translation into English of The Cairo Trilogy and some of his other books.Since then Mahfouz has often been referred to in the western world as the Balzac of Egypt or the Egyptian Tolstoi.

The Cairo Trilogy, named after three streets in the heart of the old part of Cairo, "Palace Walk", "Palace of Desire" and "Sugar Street", is a very gripping story. It's a saga of three generations of a Muslim family, the Sayed Ahmed Abdel Gawad family, living in a thousand- year- old district of Cairo, during the British occupation. After world war one Egypt was in turmoil with its people fighting in every way to achieve their country's independence. The story unfolds during these bleak years, between the two world wars, from 1917 until 1944.

The two main characters are Sayed Ahmed Abdel Gawad, the prosperous middle- aged merchant grocer, who is the tyrannical family patriarch, and his submissive wife Amina who genuinely finds peace and serenity in her servitude.

In "Palace Walk", the story evolves around the rhythms of the household of Sayed Ahmed Abdel Gawad, in Palace Walk. Mahfouz describes in detail the every day life of the family: Amina who awaits every night for her husband's early morning return from his parties with his friends and mistresses. In fact Sayed Ahmed has two personalities, he is joyful, witty and charming with his customers, friends and mistresses, and unpleasant, domineering and tyrannical with his own family at home. A life of double standards.

Also described are the daily rituals: the early morning baking of the bread, the family evening gathering round the glowing brazier of the coffee hour, the siblings bickering...
Yasin is portrayed as a chip off the old block; he likes to enjoy life and especially women. Fahmy is the studious patriotic son. He is full of ideals and devotion to his country, and dies at the end of the first book by a British bullet during a street demonstration.
Kamal is an easy going child fond of each member of his family, and in return they all like him.Khadiga is the ugly sharp-tongued realistic daughter.
As for Aisha she is the beautiful soft romantic and dreamy daughter.
"Palace Walk" ends with Fahmy's tragic death, especially that he was the most promising son of Sayed Ahmed's family.

"Palace of Desire" the second book of the trilogy, continues where "Palace Walk" ends. But some years have passed and things are changing in traditions, in the country as well as in the Sayed Ahmed's family. The father becomes more understanding and less oppressive after his son Fahmy's death. Kamal the youngest son of Sayed Ahmed is the major character in this book , he is now a young man about to undergo his university studies. He is passionately and platonically in love with an upper class girl, Aida the sister of his best friend Husayn Shaddad. It's a love without hope but he seems to be content with it. He disappoints his father by wanting to join the Teacher Training college rather than joining the Medicine or Law faculties at university as his father had wished for him.

Yasin moves out to his late mother's house in Palace of Desire street in order to feel free to marry as his heart desires. Aisha and Khadiga now have children of their own and live with their husbands, the two brothers, in the Shawkat household in Sugar street.

"Palace of Desire" ends with Sayed Ahmed's health failing with age. A typhoid epidemic killing Aicha's husband and two sons. And the passing away of the great nationalistic Egyptian leader, Saad Zaglul.

The third book "Sugar Street" evolves mainly around the second and third generation of Sayed Ahmed's family saga. Sayed Ahmed and his wife Amina are old, their children middle aged and their grand children entering their twenties.

Yasin is settled with his wife Zanuba and his daughter Karima but still pursues his hedonistic life. Aisha becomes a prematurely aged widow after the death of her husband and two sons from typhoid, and her daughter's death during labour, after marrying her cousin Abdel Moneim, Khadiga's son.

Khadiga has problems with her two sons. Abdel Moneim is a devout muslim, a great believer and follower of The Muslim Brotherhood underground political party. And Ahmed the devoted, hard-core communist, even marries beneath him to prove that he doesn't care about classes to the annoyance of his mother. Both end up in prison. Abdel Moneim whispered softly into his brother Ahmed's year "Am I cast into this hole merely because I worship God? Ahmed whispered merrily in his brother's ear, what could my offense be then, since I don't?"

Radwan, Yasin's son who contrary to his father dislikes women, meets success thanks to his relationship with the homosexual Issa Pasha. He climbs the ladder very fast and ends up with a very well paid civil service job. He also arranges for his family to benefit from the highly influential Issa Pasha.

The book ends soon after the death, of the two main characters, Sayed Ahmed, who dominates the book, and his timid, faithful wife Amina, due to old age.

Naguib Mahfouz's famous Trilogy is autobiographical in nature. The setting is a very familiar one to Mahfouz, the crowded neighbourhood, the narrow walks and the many centuries old mosques in the Gamaliya quarter where he was born and afterwards Al Abassiya where he moved and where the Cairo Trilogy is set.

Like Kamal he is the youngest son of a middle class family, and like him was also a patriot and a free, liberal thinker, and wrote philosophical articles in intellectual magazines. And like Kamal he also went through periods of doubts and disbelief.

All the characters in the Trilogy are very real, very human and deeply moving. Mahfouz goes to great length to provide detailed descriptions of his complex characters. One gets the impression that not much is happening and yet there is a lot going on in the rich psychological depth and description of culture.

His style is unique, full of humour at times, talking about the two brothers Abdel Moneim and Ahmed who ended up in prison for their different belief. Mahfouz wrote through one of his characters saying : "The one who worships God and the one who doesn't...You must worship the government first and foremost if you wish your life to be free of problems". Another amusing quotation by Yasin : "After a few months as tasty as olive oil, your bride turns into a dose of castor oil". Mahfouz also writes sad, important and upsetting happenings Mahfouz's words are chosen with great care and subtlety. His style is elegant without ostentation, he adopts the classical style for which he is famous. His novels convey his big love of Egypt.

The Associated Press interviewed him on his 94th birthday. Mahfouz said: "I wrote 'The Seventh Heaven' because I want to believe something good will happen to me after death. Spirituality, for me, is of high importance and continuously provides inspiration for me."

Naguib Mahfouz died in August 2006 at the age of 95 leaving a widow and two unmarried daughters.

"Embers" by Sandor Marai

2007-03-31T17:32:00.000+02:00

Sandor Marai was born in Kassa in the Austro-Hungarian empire, on April 11, 1900 to an old Saxon family. He became famous in 1930 as one of the prominent writers in Hungary. When he was young, Marai lived in many different cities: Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, then lived in Budapest in 1928.

Persecuted by the communist regime in 1948 - the communists banned Marai's books and destroyed every copy they could find - Marai escaped to Italy before deciding to settle in San Diego in the USA where he obtained citizenship.

Marai considered writing in German but in the end settled for Hungarian, his mother tongue. Even when living in San Diego he continued to write in his native language. His work was not published in English until the mid 1990s. After his wife's death, Marai lived a secluded life before committing suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1989 in San Diego.

Marai is a novelist, short story and memoir writer, a poet, a journalist and a playwright. He wrote “Casanova in Bolzano” in 1940, "Embers"in 1942, “The Rebels” to be published in 2007 and “Memoir of Hungary” in 1971. Marai was the first reviewer of Kafka's work.

Marai's work was unknown outside Hungary for a long time. He has been rediscovered recently and republished in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and many other languages. He is now considered one of the important writers of the 20th century. In 1990 he posthumously received the Kossuth prize. "Embers" became a best-seller both in Europe and the USA, and the English version of "Embers" has been translated from German.

"Embers"is an original and unusual book. The setting is a fairy tale from the pre-war splendid era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The aristocrat's life is described with all its splendour, its rules and values. The novel is set along those lines. It's about how sacred friendship is, and how the important sentiment of honour, betrayal, love, hate and passion can grow old and weak with time. It's a deeply moving monologue, a sort of meditation related out loud. It is also about age and patience that grows wise with maturity.

The General had all the patience it took to wait for 41 years for the return of his one and only best friend Konrad. He was convinced that like all criminals, Konrad was bound one day to return to the scene of the crime, when his waiting has been rewarded, by Konrad announcing his long awaited visit. He set meticulously the same setting of the last dinner the three of them had together forty one years ago, the General, his wife Krisztina and his best friend Konrad, after the unforgettable stag hunt in the forest. Not forgetting any little detail. It's in the same dining room, in the same old castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. He even remembers the exact date: the 2nd of July 1899, 41 years and 43 days ago.

The General spent his life counting the days until his friend Konrad came back after the unspoken act of betrayal that shattered three lives, and left each one of the inseparable threesome to live in complete solitude.

Now the time for explanation has arrived, at last. Since the memorable day of the hunt in the forest with Konrad, Henrik (the General) lived secluded like a hermit. He knew the day would come when things will be solved. He spent a good part of his existence dreaming of this day and preparing for it, for his revenge. But with age he become more wise and deliberate. His revenge ended up being like a duel without swords. The two old men who were once the best of friends, sit opposite each other after dinner in front of a smoldering fire. The General in front of an almost silent protagonist, starts to unravel very slowly, layer by layer, their whole, long dead past friendship. He ponders over all the events that lead to break the honourable tie that once united them, despite their differences and despite the fact that Henrik was born into nobility and Konrad was impoverished.

The seventy five year-old retired general keeps us in suspense. Throughout his pedantic narration we expect a twist at the end. We discover that the twist is that there is no twist, as the guest, Konrad says quietly: “why do you ask me when you know that the answer is yes”. The general knew the answer to all his questions all the way along, but because of his obstinate obsession, he had to go through this confrontation for his peace of mind and as a last farewell to his once best and loyal friend.

In “Embers” or “The Candle Burns to a Stub” (its Hungarian title), nothing much happens, there is no plot. Just the smoldering fire inside an old man's heart and soul. We discover that for him finding the truth is of no importance any more; with age and time everything mellows, the important thing is to discharge oneself from a burden. Once this is dealt with, his wife's portrait can be hung back on the wall again, and he can sleep peacefully, knowing that he accomplished the task he has been longing to accomplish all these years. “Now you may hang it up again.” “Yes,” says the nurse (Nini). “It's of no importance anymore” the general says. “Are you feeling calmer now? asks Nini. “Yes,” says the General.” Now he is relieved after things have been said once and for all. He can go to sleep now. “Good night Nini.” “Good night.”

"Embers"is a sad book. A lot of sadness is revealed in the General's monologues and throughout his reminiscence, which he had time to develop and dwell upon during his many years of solitude. “And when the longing for joy disappears, all that are left are memories or vanity, and then finally, we are truly old. One day we wake up and rub our eyes and do not know why we have woken... Nothing surprising can ever happen again.”

"The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

2007-03-03T16:09:00.000+01:00

Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born on the 24th November 1961, the daughter of a Christian woman from Kerala and a Bengali Hindu tea planter. Her parents divorced when she was a child. She hardly knew her father, she only saw him a couple of times in her whole life.

I grew up in very similar circumstances to the children in the book. My mother was divorced. I lived on the edge of the community in a very vulnerable fashion. Then when I was 16 I left home and lived on my own... in a squatter's colony in Delhi. She made some money by selling empty beer bottles. Later on she joined the Delhi School of Architecture.

Arundhathi Roy spent her childhood in Aymenem, province of Kerala, she said a lot of the atmosphere of The God of Small Things is based on my experiences of what it was like to grow up in Kerala. Most interestingly, it was the only place in the world where religions coincide, there's Christianity, Hinduism, Marxism and Islam and they all live together and rub each other down. When I grew up it was the Marxism that was very strong, it was like revolution is coming next week. I was aware of the different cultures when I was growing up, and I am still aware of them now... To me, I couldn't think of a better location for a book about human beings. I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives in you. I don't think it's true of people who have grown up in cities so much, you may love building but I don't think you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth, it's a different kind of love.

The God of Small Things is a very sad book and somehow the sadness is what stays with me. It took five years to write and I keep finding myself making an effort to be happy. A lot of people ask is it autobiographical? It's a very difficult question to answer because I think all fiction does spring from your experience, but it's also the melding of the imagination and your experience. It is the emotional texture of the book and the feelings which are real. Even though I think of myself as a writer, I can't write unless it comes from within.

Arundhati Roy's first novel "The God of Small Things", was published on April 4th 1997 in Delhi and won the Booker prize in London on October 14th 1997. The rights to her book were sold in 21 countries and was translated to 18 languages. Two weeks later, nearly 400.000 copies had been sold all over the world. It has since topped the best-seller lists everywhere. In October 1997 Arundhati Roy became the first non-expatriate Indian author and the first Indian woman to win the Booker prize.

After "The God of Small Things" was published, Arundhati Roy dedicated her time and effort to other non-fiction subjects. She wrote books like "The Cost of Living" in 1999, "The Algebra of Injustice" in 2002, "Power Politics" in 2002, "War Talk" in 2003, "An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire" in 2004, "Public Power In The Age of Empire" in 2004, and "The Check Book" and "The Cruise Missile" in 2004.

She also wrote essays, articles and has given several speeches. "Insult and Injury in Afghanistan" in 2001, "War is Peace" in 2001, "Stop Bombing Afghanistan and Instant Democracy in 2003.

In 2002 she was awarded the Lannan Foundation's cultural Freedom Award for her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity. And in 2004 she won the Sydney Peace Prize for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence.

She was presented with the Sahitya Akademi award in 2006 for her collection of essays on contemporary issues in her book "The Algebra of Infinite Justice", but she declined to accept it.

The God of Small Things is set in Aymenem, a province of Kerala, in southern India,in 1969. It is a story of the decline and fall of an Indian family.

After the death of Sophie Mol and the scandal of Ammu and Velutha, the whole family is shattered beyond retrieve.

The story is narrated by seven year old Rahel who moves crabwise, backwards and forwards. In fact it's a constant shuttle between the twins Rahel and Estha's past. They learn that things can change in a day and that life can take sometimes an ugly twist. A few dozen hours can affect the outcome of a whole lifetime Estha predicted . It took only Chacko's ex English wife, Margaret Kochamma, and his daughter, Sophie Mol, to arrive on a Christmas visit to Aymenem for the tragedy to unfold. Estha
will go through a terrible experience with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man that no child should ever experience. It's also during this visit that Ammu will discover her love to the untouchable Velutha, and that Sophie Mol will drown in the river and die.

The book begins from the end, the whole story is a flash back. The novel tackles important issues like family, race and class. Through the narrator we are confronted with a very conservative society, no one is allowed to break the rules or cross the frontier of long established things.

The novel portrays very varied characters, some endearing and some less so. The description of the landscape is detailed which helps the reader to be transported to Aymenem.

Arundhati Roy's style of writing is original and unique. She plays with words, repeats sentences, creates her own vocabulary a viable, dieable age. Little Man. He lived in a caravan. Dum dum.

For me, the way words and paragraphs fall on the page matters as well the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel were so playful on the page...Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. Later became. Lay. Ter An owl become A Nowl. Sour metal smell became sourmetalsmell.

Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot.

"The God of Small Things" is not just about small things, it's about how the smallest things connect to the biggest things that's the important thing. And that's what writing will always be about for me...

"The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger

2007-03-03T16:07:00.001+01:00

Audrey Niffenegger was born in June 1963 in south Haven Michigan. She grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is the first suburb north of Chicago. She is a spinster with a permanent boy friend, a writer and an artist.

She obtained a BFA in 1985 from the school of The Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA in 1991 from Northwestern University.

She is a full time professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing, and fine edition book production.

Audrey Niffenegger loved writing books and illustrating them since she was a young girl, as a part-time.

Her first book was about an imaginary road trip that she went on with The Beatles (the pop group). She was eleven years old when she wrote and illustrated this book.

But Niffenegger's first real book is The Time Traveler's Wife published in 2003. It was a bestseller when it came out.

She says: " The title came to me out of the blue, and from the title sprang the characters, and from the characters came the story... I got the title first, and played around with it for quite a long time, slowly evolving the characters in my head. I wrote the end before anything else, and then began to write scenes as they occurred to me.
The Time Traveler's Wife was written in a completely different order than the one it finally took. I understood early on that it would be organized in three sections, and that the basic unit was the scene, not the chapter. It has a rather chaotic feel to it, especially at the beginning, and that is deliberate-there is a slow piecing together, a gradual accumulation of story, that mimics the experience of the characters. I made a lot of notes about the characters. I had two timelines to help me stay organized, but no outline of the plot.”

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story in a science fiction setting.

Clare and Henry love each other very dearly. Clare knows that she is destined to marry Henry, which creates an element of fatalism in the story.

They have to live with each other, go through the every day tasks, Clare being a free- lance artist, and Henry De Tumble a librarian in the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, while overcoming Henry's genetic disorder called Chrono-Displacement Order. Which whisks him around in time. He disappears against his own will, to find himself transiting somewhere in a different year at any time or season.

For Clare to have Henry appearing and disappearing without any notice, spontaneously, and unpredictably, when he is needed, is quite a challenge for her love. She fears the consequences of Henry’s disappearance since she doesn’t know each time he comes back how that is going to affect her life in real time, according to whether he is returning from the past or the future.

Periodically, Henry finds himself travelling in time, faced with very emotional and sometimes dangerous situations in his existence. He is struggling to keep his sanity and is coping with his disease quite well.

Like Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s Magic Flute, Clare and Henry had to undergo the Love Test in order to come out of it worthy of each other.

Niffenegger says:" I wanted to write about a perfect marriage that is tested by something outside the control of the couple."

But then, The Time Traveler's Wife is not only about love, it's also about the notion of time, about the endless waiting, which is one of the themes in the novel we discover in the prologue.

" I wanted people to think about the intimacy of time, how ineffable it is, how it shapes us. I wanted to write about waiting, but since waiting is essentially a negative (time spent in the absence of something) I wrote about all the things that happen around the waiting."

Clare is six years old when she meets Henry for the first time, while Henry has travelled back thirty-six years to meet Clare. But then, when they get married Clare is twenty-three and Henry thirty- one.
They both have to be patient in order to fulfil their destiny, and to prove that no matter how long it takes nothing alter their passion for each other.

Henry summarizes his love for Clare in the letter she is meant to read after his death: “ Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.”

Clare on the other hand, carries on living patiently waiting for the right time when Henry will come to her, when she is in her eighties, and takes her with him. Henry had seen that day and told her about it.

Niffenegger likes to go into the minute details in order to bring some life and plenty of essence to her story. We learn about different places in Chicago, about the pop groups of the time, about the taste of various characters. Even the couple's sex life is described in details.

The author says in one of her interviews: "I am interested in mutants, love, death, amputation, sex, and time (the themes of my novel, The Time Traveler's Wife)

She has also written two other books. The Three Incestuous Sisters, a 176- page graphic novel or "novel in pictures" as she calls it. And The Adventuress published 1st September 2006.

The actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston bought the rights to the film, which is going to be released in 2008.

In an interview, Audrey Niffenegger was asked: "How much of Clare or Henry is you?
The answer was: "Contrary to popular belief, not much. I died my hair red as a way of saying goodbye to Clare, as I was finishing the book. She makes very different art from mine, and she's much quieter and more patient. Henry and I share a quirky sense of humour and a taste for punk, but not much else. First novels are often said to be thinly disguised autobiography. This one uses my places and things I know something about (libraries, paper making) but alas, this is not my life, and these characters are not me.

"The Palace Tiger" by Barbara Cleverly

2007-03-03T16:05:00.001+01:00

Barbara Cleverly has been a teacher in Cambridge and today lives in a medieval house in an English Suffolk village. She has been a teacher of French, English and Latin, but stopped working in order to dedicate herself to writing full-time.

Barbara Cleverly is the inventor of the Scotland Yard detective, Joe Sandilands, and his adventurous investigations in India.

"The Palace Tiger" is Barbara Cleverly's fourth novel. The first was "The Last Kashmiri Rose" published in 2001. This was followed by "Ragtime In Simla" in 2002, and by "Damascene Blade" in 2003. Her fourth novel, "The Palace Tiger" was published in 2004, and her fifth was "The Bee's Kiss" which first appeared in 2005.

Her annually published novels are mysteries solved by the clever British detective, Sandilands, a First World War hero.

Barbara Cleverly explains how she had the idea of writing a series of books all taking place in India. "The battered old tin trunk I found in the attic didn't look inviting at first sight. Full of family bits and pieces, my husband said. You know, sepia postcards from the Pyrenees, funeral lists, old bank books..." "I opened it anyway. Out spilled more than two centuries of memories, the memories of a family whose exploits and achievements marched in time with the flowering of the British Empire, a family of soldiers, statesmen, architects, doctors and explorers, but my attention was caught by the photograph of a young boy.

Handsome even by today's standards, his resemblance to my stepson, even down to the haircut, was extraordinary. "Ah, that's Brigadier Harold Sandilands, my husband explained, when he was a schoolboy at Harrow. My great uncle spent a lot of time in India."

"The Palace Tiger", like Barbara Cleverly's other four novels, is a Whodunit à la Agatha Christie. Joe Sandilands, a Scotland Yarder, finds himself compelled to unravel the mysterious deaths of the dying Maharajah's three sons and heirs as well as to eliminate a man-eating tiger terrorizing the northern villages. The whole complicated plot takes place in Ranipur in India. The author doesn't miss an opportunity to describe in detail and in a colourful way, 1920's colonial India.

The Maharajah's luxurious palaces, the harem's quarter, their clothing, their day-to-day life, the death rituals. The beautiful gardens and lake, but most important the conspiracy between different people in the palace. Each character serves a purpose in the complicated plot.

This is an action thriller which keeps the reader in suspense until the end. A good, rich description also of Machiavellic ambitions and greedy characters. All together a very colourful, thrilling and entertaining book.