Lori Eshleman's Blog - Posts Tagged "paris"

Arab Jazz by Karim Miské

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Review of Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské. This thriller plunges the reader into the multi-cultural stew of the 19th arrondissement in Paris, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians rub shoulders. A particularly brutish murder of a cast-out Jehovah’s Witness sets the stage for an unlikely encounter between Ahmed, a reclusive young man of Mauritanian descent, and Rachel, a beautiful Jewish detective. Ahmed, the downstairs neighbor of the murder victim, spends his time reading pulp thrillers which he buys by the pound from a local Armenian book dealer. His neighbor’s murder brings him out of isolation and plunges him back into the kaleidoscopic neighborhood where he lives, as he tries to find the murderer and at the same time prove his own innocence. Meanwhile, Rachel and her partner Jean track down leads that run the gambit from corrupt French police to a Salafist Imam to a Jehovah’s Witness center in Brooklyn.

Arab Jazz is vibrantly and densely written, much like the urban environment where it is set. There are moments of dreamlike introspection alternating with rough brutality and glimpses of pure evil that give it a kind of claustrophobic punch. Of the many characters in the book, a substantial portion are criminals, killers, or wannabes who fantasize about violence. By the novel’s close, the boundaries between guilt and innocence have blurred, and there is little hope that justice will be done. As the chief of police states, “As for the rest, we have done what we can…But there’s no such thing as absolute victory. There is no end to this fight. It has been going on since time immemorial, and it will continue to go on forever” (239). Entangling themes of violence, greed, desire, and religious discord, this novel’s ultimate focus is the human condition.





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Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This short novel reflects on cities, relationships, and writing, through a series of walks. The walks take place in two cities: Paris, where a young Turkish woman named Nunu walks and talks with an older man, M., a British writer whose books are set in Turkey; and Istanbul, where Nunu grew up taking walks with her mother, especially on Sundays, when they habitually went to lunch. Like her mother, it seems, Nunu “gets antsy if she stays in one place” (84). Other walks take place in more private spaces: the narrator’s father walks the length of their train-like apartment in Istanbul, to the balcony on the other side of the marital bedroom, reciting the letters of his daughter’s full name, NURUNISA; and she herself walks telepathically in the “white city” on the ceiling of her childhood bedroom--a place she escapes to “when Istanbul was heavy and dark, pressing in against the walls of our apartment” (203). The narrator makes clear that the stories she narrates may be unreliable and incomplete: “But stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind” (2).

Besides recounting walks, the novel records lists and inventories: of fish and flowers, Turkish dishes, restaurants in Paris and Istanbul, and favorite items. The descriptions of walks, the lists, the fragmented memories of relatives and friends may appear as “a sign of sorrow, a wish to care for and preserve things on the brink of disappearance” (125). --Or perhaps they mark no more than a “residue of absence”(151). Much of what takes place in this novel is mundane, yet oddly profound. It recounts the dislocations that occur as people’s worlds slide past each other like tectonic plates. Istanbul, too, seems fractured from its ancient past. But shared stories, like those between Nunu and the writer, momentarily ease such dislocations. “We passed our stories back and forth until they merged…At that time, brief though it was, we shared a single imagination” (207). In reading and reflecting on this book, I found myself privileged to share in this single imagination.




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