Paging All Bookworms! discussion
PAGE COUNT TRACKING - 2021
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JamesFoster 2021 Page count
Jan 11. Max Frisch, Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie [1953, rev. 1961] 102 pages [Kindle, Open Library, in German]
We all know Don Juan was a great lover -- of Geometry? It's amazing to me after reading ten versions of Don Juan (this is the last before the book by Peter Handke) that all of them manage to make it a totally different story. Frisch's play has an afterword which explains his conception of the character.
Jan 32. Atef Alshaer, ed., The Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba [2019] 257 pages [Kindle]
This anthology contains a selection of some of the best Palestinian authors, and writers about Palestine, from the 1930s to the present. It has poetry, short stories and nonfiction. It also has some excerpts from longer works, which I always dislike in an anthology; the novels were not designed to be read in excerpts and the context is missing. Most, but not all, of the selections are about the Nakba, the "catastrophe": the driving out or massacre in 1948 of 780,000 Arab Christian and Moslem Palestinians by terrorist methods to create the single ethnic and religious state of Israel, one of the major atrocities of the twentieth century. The selections which directly describe the Nakba in realistic style are brutal and heart-wrenching, and gave me a better understanding of what happened in 1948; other selections, especially the poetry, are more literary, and describe the events in images and symbols. A smaller number are concerned with the results of the Nakba: the struggle of the Palestinians to regain their homeland, the invasion of Lebanon, and the everyday life of Palestinians both in Israel and the diaspora.
A highlight of the anthology was the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish; I am looking forward to reading more of his poetry next month.
While the focus on the Nakba might seem to limit the scope of the anthology, I imagine most Palestinian writing since that time focuses on the loss of their homeland and the trauma of exile. The Palestinians have been betrayed, first by the Western "liberals" who almost all supported Israel and ignored the Palestinians, secondly by the bourgeois Arab states which gave only token assistance, more fearful of mobilizing their own people than of the Israelis, and ultimately and most tragically by their own leadership.
Of course, after almost three quarters of a century, conditions have changed and the solutions put forward in the past are no longer possible. Having been pro-Palestinian since the 1967 war, I have little respect for liberals who, having ignored the Palestinians when they could have made a difference, now want to get liberal brownie points for being anti-Israel and repeating the old slogans. Most of those driven out in 1948 died in exile, and even the children of that time are in their seventies and eighties; the present Jewish population of Israel are no longer foreign occupiers but were born there, and even second and third generation. No one can say with Darwish, go home and give us back our country, any more than Native Americans can seriously say that in America. The secular democratic leadership of the Palestinian struggle in the fifties and sixties has been largely displaced by Islamicists who think in terms of religious jihad, forgetting that the victims of the Nakba were not all Moslem. Today, the fight of the Palestinians must be, not to destroy Israel, but to forge alliances with Israeli Jewish workers to transform Israel into a secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews, Christians, and Moslems, Arab and non-Arab; and to fight for the same thing in the Arab states and wherever they are in the diaspora.
But having said that, there is no excuse for erasing the history, the facts about the Nakba, and the long and heroic struggle of the Palestinian people, any more than the changed conditions in Northern Ireland would justify forgetting the martyrs of the IRA. If this anthology contributes to preserving that memory, then I can ignore its faults and recommend it.
Jan 113. Peter Handke, Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos [2002] 759 pages [Kindle, Open Library, in German]
I think that this is the longest book I have ever read in German, with the possible exception of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes, and it wasn't really much easier. Both Hegel and Handke use endless sentences, invent their own words, and are concerned with metaphysics and epistemology. Handke's novel (like many of his plays) is filled with strange compound words and compound phrases, and abounds in seemingly random lists of things that have no apparent connection with one another.
The "plot", if one can call it that, is simple: the protagonist is a middle-aged woman, an orphan from a "Wendish" village, who was once a filmstar and later a leading figure in the world of banking and finance, who commissions an author to write her life story. She is unusual in that she sees "pictures" -- "Bilder" -- which are a kind of involuntary vision or hallucination of places she has been in the past; as long as she is in a picture she is in a different timeflow and cannot be reached by the outside world. She sets out from her unnamed Northern "Flußhafenstadt" to meet the author in La Mancha (yes, there are many references to Cervantes), crossing the Sierra de Gredos, first by car, then by bus, and ultimately on foot. She stops over in several places, each stranger than the last -- or perhaps her perceptions just become stranger. There are also mentions of a brother, who has just been released from prison as a terrorist, and a runaway daughter. As in most of what I have read by Handke, there are no proper names given for any of the major or minor characters, who are all referred to by descriptions -- in this novel often followed by "or whatever he/she was". The real "adventure" takes place in the mind of the woman, the "Adventurer", in her perceptions, feelings, memories, and interpretations.
The woman and the author agree that the author will use his imagination in telling her story; there is also mention of "false authors" who have changed facts or misinterpreted them; and much of the book is mental (or real) dialogues between the woman and the author about what to put in the book -- "is this still said", "find another word", "avoid such and such a word", "should I include this" etc. The narration as we read it is therefore not necessarily "factual" or consistent; many chapters read like dream experiences with the same characters reappearing in different times and places playing different roles, with different occupations and so forth, and with events which are inconsistent with each other or with past reported events, and have no causes and no consequences. We aren't told that these sequences, which are incorporated in the narrative on the same footing as other events, are dreams, although other dreams are mentioned and reported briefly as such.
Throughout the book there is discussion of time, of different relationships to time, of a "great time" which lies behind the normal time we experience, of "clocktime" as against time measured by normal life, and so on. Not surprisingly, then, it isn't clear in what time period the novel is set. There are mentions of cell-phones, computers, the Internet, jet contrails, in-flight movies, and other technologies which suggest it is set about the time it was written; on the other hand, throughout the book there are propeller-driven bombers flying overhead and a threat of war from Africa, which suggests the time of the Spanish Civil War; and toward the end it is mentioned that during her journey the first manned spaceship has landed on Mars. Not to mention the occasional appearences of King and Kaiser Karl the First and Fifth, or an actor in a re-enactment of his life, "or whoever he was."
There are some interesting ideas and much good writing in this novel, as well as much that was just unclear or even boring, but I couldn't put it together as a whole.
Jan 13Wolfgang Köhler, The Mentality of Apes [1913; rev. ed. 1924; tr. 1927] 293 pages
This book is a classic of primate psychology, based on experiments Köhler carried out on captive chimpanzees in Tenerife in the Canary Islands just before and during the First World War. He was among the first investigators to reject the dogmatic insistence of most psychologists that animals were incapable of intelligent behavior and demonstrate experimentally that chimpanzees, at least, were capable of solving problems by considering the situation and adopting "roundabout" methods, including making and using simple "implements". He also rejects the lay anthropomorphism which exaggerates similarity to humans, and tries to determine what the limits of the chimpanzees abilities are and what that can teach about the origins of human intelligence. Of course, since that time much more has been learned, such as the abilities of chimpanzees to learn sign language and the way they behave in the wild, but this was the beginning.
Jan 175. A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization [1964, rev. 1977] 445 pages
A. Leo Oppenheim was one of the most prominent Assyriologists of the twentieth century; this book, originally written in 1964, was being revised at the time of his death and the revision was completed from his notes by Erica Reiner. It is a very personal, not to say idiosyncratic, but quite interesting account of Mesopotamian (Akkadian) culture. It is not a history (there is just one chapter which gives brief schematic histories of Babylonia and Assyria from Sargon to Nabonidus), but written in his own words from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology; although he takes into account the development through time, the book is organized by topics rather than chronology. While there are occasional references to the Sumerians, the book essentially deals only with the Akkadian culture, from the time of Sargon on. Nearly everything is based on cuneiform texts, rather than archaeological evidence. Throughout the book there is a polemic against what he considered the shortcomings of the Assyriology of his day. Nevertheless, it was used as a beginning textbook for some twenty years (that is probably how it should be regarded, rather than as a popularization for the general reader) and despite being a half-century out of date it is still an important starting point for anyone who wants to know something about the Ancient Near East.
Jan 206. Peter Handke, Don Juan (erzählt von ihm selbst) [2005] 159 pages [Kindle, Open Library, in German]
Near the ruins of the Port-Royal convent, an unsuccessful innkeeper is sitting in his garden, when Don Juan leaps over the garden wall to escape pursuit from a couple on a motorcycle. For the next seven days, Don Juan narrates the story of the previous week, a day at a time; or rather the innkeeper relates his narration. This is another version of Don Juan, neither a seducer or a victim of women, but someone with a great sadness, who somehow liberates women's desires with his "look" and then feels a "duty" to satisfy them for the night. The stories are all very sketchy, especially after the first three days. Hard to follow, this is written in the same style as Der Bildverlust with the same metaphysical ruminations on time: even the same confused pizza delivery boy on a motorbike shows up everywhere, as in the earlier novel.
Jan 227. Jane Glover, Handel in London: A Genius and His Craft [2018] 430 pages
Jane Glover, a British conductor, has written a very readable popular biography of Handel for the general reader, focused mainly on the performances of his operas and oratorios. This was not intended as an original contribution to scholarship, and there is a minimum of references and a very short bibliography. There is no technical analysis of his music. Despite its length it was a quick and enjoyable read.
Jan 238. Adonis, Mahmud Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim, Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry [1984] 165 pages
An anthology of three of the most important twentieth-century Arab poets, translated by Abdullah al-Udhari. Each is represented by fifteen poems, written shortly before the anthology was published; in fact many of the poems are published here for the first time in Arabic, and all for the first time in English translation. Mahmud Darwish (Palestinian, born 1942) is probably the best known; one of his anthologies is next month's reading for the World Literature group I belong to on Goodreads. Samih al-Qasim (born 1939) was also Palestinian. Both were represented by a small number of poems in the anthology by Alshaer (The Map of Absence) that the Goodreads group read for this month. Adonis (pen name of Ali Ahmad Said, born 1930) was the oldest of the three, and one of the pioneers in modern Arabic poetry; he was born in Syria, but after being imprisoned for his political activities (as were the other two as well) he went into exile in Beirut when he was 26.
As always, I have to begin by admitting that I am unqualified to review modern poetry, and particularly when I don't read the language of the original; however, I did find all three poets enjoyable and full of striking images -- although in some cases I think I didn't have the cultural knowledge to fully appreciate them. A highlight was the long poem "The Desert" written by Adonis during the 1982 siege of Beirut.
Jan 259. Mahmoud Darwish, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? [1995, tr. 2006] 197 pages
A bilingual collection of poetry by Mahmud Darwish, translated by Jeffrey Sacks. The collection begins at least as a kind of verse autobiography, which gave the poems more of a sequence and connection than in some of his other collections which I am reading, and I really found much that spoke to me; toward the end, on the other hand, I couldn't understand a lot of what he was saying. What I understood was incredible.
Jan 2810. Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly's Burden [2007] 327 pages
Another bilingual anthology of poetry by Mahmud Darwish, this one translated by Fady Joudah. It actually contains three of his collections: The Stranger's Bed (1998) is mainly love poetry; A State of Siege (2002) is about the siege of Ramallah; and Don't Apologize for What You've Done is both personal and political. All were consistently good; this is probably the best poetry I have read in a long time.
Jan 29
11. Mahmoud Darwish, Almond Blossoms and Beyond [2005, tr. 2009] 95 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Another collection of great poetry by Darwish, translated by Mohammed Shaheen.
Jan 3012. Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence [2006, tr. 2011] 171 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
(Translated by Sinan Antoon) This is a "self-elegy", a classical Arabic genre; it presents itself as a sort of funeral oration at his death (it was written two years before he died), in a dialogue between his two selves, the self of presence and the self of absence. It's not poetry (although it incorporates poems, usually at the end of each chapter), but neither is it exactly prose; it's written in the same style of images as his poetry. It includes a certain amount of autobiography, but is really more of a self-portrait, looking back over his lifetime and what it meant. It combines personal feelings, political commentary, and aesthetic discussions of poetry.
Jan 3113. Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst: Journals [2008, tr. 2009] 153 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
(Translated by Catherine Cobham) His penultimate collection, this and I Don't Want This Poem to End were both published posthumously. It has both normal poems and prose poems, the latter predominating. There are many subjects treated, including some of his most biting political satire.
Feb 114. Mahmoud Darwish, I Don't Want This Poem to End: Early and Late Poems [2017] 242 pages
This anthology, the book I read for the Goodreads World Literature group that is reading Arabic literature in translation this year, contains three collections of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry translated by Mohammed Shaheen, and some additional matter in the back, most importantly his essay "On Exile" which I think is very important for the understanding of how his poetry evolved over time. The three collections represent three different phases of his writing, although I think the subtitle is somewhat misleading. The first collection, The End of Night (1967), is from his earlier period, when he still lived as an "internal exile" in Palestine, and the earliest poetry I have read by him, but from what I have read about him it is already in a more mature poetic style than his first few collections (the earliest is from 1960) which were apparently more directly political without much poetic sophistication, although I would love to read some of them. The second collection, It is a Song, It is a Song is not really early or late, but belongs to his "middle" period when he was in exile in Lebanon, Tunis, and France, and the third collection, I Don't Want This Poem to End was put together posthumously, after the establishment of the "Palestinian Authority" when he divided his time between Ramallah in the PA and Amman (the Introduction by Elias Khoury explains how the poems were found and edited after his death.)
Darwish is widely regarded as the "National Poet of Palestine"; a young child at the time of the Nakba, his entire life was spent in internal or external exile, and his poetic work is imbued with the ideas of resistance, exile, and return, although the forms in which he envisioned them changed over time. (I should apologize for one comment I made in my review of Alshaer's anthology of writings on the Nakba, where, mislead by Alshaer's introduction and not yet knowing much about Darwish, I attributed to him the statement that the Israelis should go home and give the land back. Actually, he explained that the one poem in which he said something like that was referring to the territories seized in 1967 and not to Palestine as a whole, and because of the misunderstanding he never included that poem in any of his collections or allowed it to be anthologized.) Darwish always clearly focused his fire on the Zionist enterprise of establishing an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine, and unlike some of the dubious supporters of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world (and elsewhere) never descended into anti-Semitism or ethnic or religious hatred, which he considered the characteristics of the enemy, and refused to dehumanize Israeli Jews. He attributed his knowledge of literature to a Jewish teacher, and pointed out that his early political activity in the Israeli Communist Party was side by side with Jewish comrades. This is exemplified by two of the best poems (and the most criticized by extremists) in The End of Night. One is "Rita and the Rifle", about his Israeli Jewish lover (a comrade from that time; apparently they lived together for a couple years, but of course marriages between Jews and non-Jews were not allowed by the Zionist government, an example of their apartheid mentality.) Some critics think that much of his anonymous love poetry is actually about Rita, although he did have two short-lived marriages. The other is "A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies" about an Israeli soldier who admits to committing atrocities and just wants to go home. (The Israeli military has always had problems with soldiers who resist committing war-crimes.) In fact, the soldier was Shlomo Sand, who later became a famous historian who undermined the "historical" justification for Zionism in his book The Invention of the Jewish People.
All three collections are about exile, but the second and third collection have a somewhat wider focus; the second collection seemed a bit more disillusioned, more about coming to terms with an extended exile, and the third collection is concerned also with personal death; there is also more about poetry as such, and about love. This is some of the best poetry I have ever read.
Feb 6 15. Secondary Works on Mahmoud Darwish, 9 articles, 202 pages
Articles from Academic Search Premier.
Yair Huri, "Who Am I Without Exile: Mahmûd Darwish's Later Poetics of Exile" (Digest of Middle East Studies, Fall 2006) 13 pages -- Discusses Darwish's new attitude to exile after his return to Ramallah, especially in the collection A Stranger's Bed.
Hussain Hamzah, "The Image of the Mother in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish" (Holy Land Studies, 8, 2, 2009) 35 pages -- Discusses Darwish's use of the image of the mother in four ways: as his own literal mother; as the mothers of the Palestinians collectively; as a symbol for Palestinian culture; and as a symbol for the land.
Muhammed Siddaq, "Significant But Problematic Others: Negotiating "Israelis" in the Works of Mahmoud Darwish" (Comparative Literature Studies, 47, 4, 2010) 17 pages -- Darwish's attitude towards Israeli Jews.
Mustapha Marrouchi, "Cry No More For Me, Palestine -- Mahmoud Darwish" (College Literature, 38, 4, Fall 2011) 43 pages -- A general study of Darwish's poetry.
Hamoud Yahya Ahmed and Ruzy Suliza Hashim, "Resisting Colonialism Through Nature: An Ecopostcolonialist Reading of Mahmoud Darwish's Selected Poems" (Holy Land Studies, 13, 1, 2014) 18 pages -- A superficial and very literal reading of Darwish's images of Nature as an illustration of the authors' new literary theory of "ecopostcolonialism", with many factual mistakes. Not worthwhile.
Hussain Hamzah, "Resistance, Martyrdom, and Death in Mahmoud Darwish's Poetry" (Holy Land Studies, 13, 2, 2014) 27 pages -- Discusses the changes in Darwish's views of armed resistance, martyrdom, and death in different periods of his writing.
Fadia Suyoufie, "Mahmûd Darwish's Athar al-farâshah: The Poetics of Proximity" (Journal of Arabic Literature, 46, 2015) 32 pages -- Discusses the imagery of Darwish's collection, literally in Arabic titled "the butterfly effect" but translated in English as A River Dies of Thirst.
Abdul-Rahim al-Shaik, "The Political Darwish: "In Defense of Little Differences"" (Journal of Arabic Literature, 48, 2017) 30 pages -- Discusses Darwish's political views, mainly in his nonfiction prose.
AbdulKarim Daragmeh and Ahmad Qabaha, "Rifts, Ruptures and Fractures: The (ir)relevance of Postmodern Conceptual Frames from the Point of View of Palestine's Poet Mahmoud Darwish" (Arab Studies Quarterly, 42, 2, 2020) 17 pages -- Too much quotation of trendy Western literary theories but not as bad as the title would suggest.
Feb 1316. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day [1945] 895 pages
This is probably the best-known book in English on the history of philosophy. Russell describes it as an attempt to provide the history of philosophy with its historical context; in fact, he gives a certain context for the philosophers themselves, when and under what circumstances they lived and wrote, but there is very little to connect the historical context to their actual doctrines except in the most general terms. The historical background itself, although certainly better than the twenty years older book by Durant (The Story of Philosophy) that I negatively reviewed previously, is rather superficial, though not actually wrong as in that book; it is also very outdated, not just because the book was written during the Second World War, but because, to the extent that he cites sources -- the book is poorly documented and has no bibliography -- they are almost all from the teens and twenties, if not earlier.
My major problem with the book is that it is less a history of philosophy than a description of Russell's own philosophy using the past philosophers as opportunities to bring in various aspects of his own as criticisms or commentaries. Of course, to some extent any history of philosophy will do this, especially when written by a philosopher, but it is very noticeable here. The philosophers from the nineteenth century on, in particular, are briefly described, and in some cases caricatured, before presenting Russell's views on the subjects they deal with. The earlier writers are dealt with somewhat more fairly.
In short, this is an important book for understanding Russell and the analytic tradition in philosophy, but not a really good source for understanding the history of philosophy. For that, I would still have to suggest Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy for the Greeks and Copleston's History of Philosophy for the Middle Ages through Kant; I've never found a really good book on more recent philosophy -- I suppose any book would be tendentious, but perhaps the nineteenth and twentieth century writers don't need much context. In any case, there is no substitute for reading the philosophers themselves.
Feb 1517. Thad Q. Bartlett, The Gibbons of Khao Yai: Seasonal Variation in Behavior and Ecology [2009] 170 pages
This is a summary of the author's field studies of a population of white-handed gibbons (Hylobates lars) in the Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. The study focuses on two groups (i.e. two pairs of male and female with associated infants, juveniles and adolescents) over a period of a year, from February of 1994 through January of 1995.
Since most studies of gibbons had been done in rain forest environments which were more or less similar year-round and many of the hypotheses about gibbon behavior assumed a year-round equal abundance of fruit, the author wanted to study a population in a seasonal environment where fruit was scarce during parts of the year. For example, some hypotheses suggested that gibbon social structure evolved as an adaptation to a preferred diet of figs, but the data from this study showed that figs were not preferred but a "fallback" food when fruit was scarce.
The book ends with discussions of various hypotheses to explain why gibbons evolved territoriality and social monogamy; this was very interesting and did not come to any definite conclusion beyond a preference for defense of scarce but stable resources.
Feb 1918. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq [Third ed., 1992] 547 pages
A history of Mesopotamia from the Neanderthals of the Middle Palaeolithic (c. 70,000 years ago) to the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus in 539 BC (with a short chapter on the later Persian, Hellenistic and Parthian periods). Georges Roux, though very knowledgeable about Mesopotamian history and culture, was not an academic (he was a medical officer for Iraqi Petroleum) and the book is written for the lay reader, as readably as one could expect, given the large amount of information which is hard to assimilate in a relatively short book (relatively short for what it deals with, as compared to say the Cambridge Ancient History). He discusses the literature, art, and general culture, but it is integrated with the history and the book is in general chronological, as opposed to the topical organization of the last book I read on the subject (Oppenheim's Ancient Mesopotamia).
The most interesting parts to me were the earlier chapters on the development of agriculture, pottery, and urbanization, and the Sumerian invention of writing; the later parts rather overwhelmed me with the political and especially military history, but at least (unlike the Oppenheim book) it had a few maps, which were very necessary. I wish it had had more, and in particular maps for the different periods rather than putting all the sites mentioned in the book onto the same maps. I would recommend reading this along with H.J. Nissen's The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 BC which is the best book I have read on the subject.
Roux points out in the preface to the third edition that in the twelve years since the second edition there had been an incredible amount of new archaeological research which had already made that edition outdated, so I was worried that after twenty eight years this might be similarly outdated, but then I read his statement that archaeological excavations had "temporarily" ended because of the Gulf War, and realized that given the history since then it might not be so obsolete after all, unfortunately.
Feb 2119. Khaled Khalifa, In Praise of Hatred [2008, tr. 2012] 299 pages
In Praise of Hatred is a novel about the violence in Syria under the regime of Hafez al-Assad in the late 1970's and 1980's. I know very little about the history, but according to the introduction this is the background: In 1970, a section of the military, composed mainly of the members of the minority Alawi sect (Shia), and led by al-Assad, took power, claiming to represent the interests of both the Alawi and majority Sunni peasantry against the Sunni urban bourgeoisie. By the mid-70's, the regime had shown itself to be corrupt and repressive, and the government and security forces (the army and the mukhabarat or secret police) were dominated by the Alawi sect. The regime also intervened in the Lebanese Civil War on the side of the right-wing Christian Phalange militias, also supported by Israel, against the Moslem, leftist and Palestinian alliance. As a result, an opposition was formed, led by the Muslim Brotherhood. In order to win support against the government, the opposition promoted ethnic and religious hatred against the Alawis, and of course the religious fanatics soon gained control of the organizations. The government responded with increased repression, the opposition launched a campaign of assassinations not only against the government but against the Alawi civilians and those who were insufficiently fanatic against them, and the situation spiraled into a virtual civil war which resulted in tens of thousands killed, mainly by the government. The uprising was crushed by the early 1980's. (The regime of al-Assad, followed in 2000 by his son Bashar, has remained in power, although a second uprising which was ongoing at the time the introduction was written (part of the so-called "Arab Spring") has led to the Syrian Civil War which has been going on ever since.) I don't know how accurate this description is, but it sounds reasonable, although I suspect a fuller account would involve world politics. In any case, this is the situation presupposed by the novel.
The book tells the story of one family in Aleppo; the unnamed first-person narrator at the beginning is in her early teens, for some reason disliked by her mother and living with her unmarried aunts Maryam and Safaa after the death of her grandparents. The household is very religious and strict even for Aleppo; at school, she and other religious girls form a small group which is made fun of as the "Penguin Club" for their conservative black clothing. From the beginning, the narrator is lonely and repressed, and considers herself a victim of persecution. Another aunt, Marwa, returns to the household after an unsuccessful marriage; there are also three uncles, Bakr, Selim and Omar who occasionally visit, and a blind servant named Radwan. Later on, Bakr's wife Zahra also joins the family, while Safaa leaves to marry Abdullah (who is connected to the mujahideen in Afghanistan). These are the major characters.
The novel is divided into three parts. The first part, "Women Led By the Blind", begins rather slowly, and deals with the household and her school days. It is also sometimes a little obscure without more knowledge than I have of the cultural background; in particular, I'm sure that the various surahs of the Quran that are mentioned have a significance to the narrative. Eventually, through her Uncle Bakr, a leader of the opposition organization (throughout, Khalifa avoids naming historical people or organizations; the Sunni and Alawi are only referred to as "the sect" and "the other sect", the Muslim Brotherhood is just "the organization" and so forth), the narrator (now a medical student) becomes involved in a "prayer group" which is actually an activist cell. Here she learns to hate not only the death squads and the regime (which is understandable) but "the other sect" and virtually everyone who is not part of "the organization". She comes to be contemptuous of her family (other than Bakr and her brother Hossam, also an activist) for their "weakness" in not hating the "other sect". For a time, she is very repellent as a character, and finds her meaning in life in "praise of hatred." The novel is really a study in the psychology of fanaticism. The second part, "The Embalmed Butterflies", follows the family through the state of siege in Aleppo; the third part, "The Scent of Spices", shifts to another setting (I won't go into detail to avoid spoilers.) I'm not sure how the novel originally ended; the translator's afterword tells us that the ending was modified "with the approval of the author". In the translation at least, the narrator eventually overcomes her devotion to hatred and adopts the tolerance which is the message of the novel.
Feb 2320. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text [1930, 1985] 267 pages
Faulkner is a classic American author that I have somehow never read much of; in fact nothing except The Sound and the Fury in college a half-century ago. I read in a review of one of the next books I am reading (Khaled Khalifa's Death Is Hard Work) that it was similar in plot to (perhaps modeled on?) As I Lay Dying and decided to read it first. Probably too well-known to require much summarizing, this is a dark comedy about a poor family taking the body of the mother to be buried in her hometown some forty or fifty miles away, despite multiple obstacles (the rivers were flooding, bridges washed out, etc.) Like The Sound and the Fury, written the year before this, it treats a basically realistic story in an experimental manner, using multiple, not entirely compatible perspectives in a sort of "stream-of-consciousness" technique. I will probably want to read more of Faulkner at some point.
Feb 2421. Khaled Khalifa, Death Is Hard Work [2016. tr. 2019] 180 pages
Khaled Khalifa's Death Is Hard Work retells the story of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, set in Syria during the still-ongoing Civil War in that country. Three estranged siblings, Hussein, Bolbol and Fatima, transport the body of their father, Abdel Latif, from Damascus to be buried in his native village of Anabiya outside Aleppo, as he desired. The trip, which should take no more than four or five hours, takes three days; the place of the flooding rivers in Faulkner's novel is taken by the checkpoints set up every few miles by the al-Assad regime, the Free Syrian Army, and the Islamicist extremists, the three warring factions which have divided Syria since the "Arab Spring".
The novel combines the personal stories of the three siblings, presented in memories, and the depiction of the ravages of the Civil War, as they pass dead bodies lying in the roadside and bombed out and abandoned villages; they are continually passed by convoys of tanks and witness bombings and shellings in the near distance throughout the trip. As the body of the father decomposes, so does what is left of the family, just as in Faulkner's novel. This is a very powerful book; while Khalifa seems obviously more favorable, or least less unfavorable, to the FSA, the essential message is that the violence and hatred on all sides are destroying the country.
Feb 2822. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher [1991] 334 pages
This book divides more or less into two parts; in the first four chapters, Vlastos argues that the "Socrates" of the early dialogues of Plato, through the Gorgias, is essentially the historic Socrates, while in the last four he examines these dialogues to try to work out the major features of Socrates' moral philosophy.
He begins by showing that the "Socrates" of the earlier dialogues, ironic and "elenchic" and limited to moral philosophizing, is significantly different from and incompatible with the "Socrates" of the middle dialogues, who presents positive theses and deals with non-moral questions of metaphysics and epistemology and has distinctively Platonic theories about the Ideas, the tripartite soul, and so forth. Oddly, he spends much time arguing that the "Socrates" of the middle dialogues is Platonic rather than historically Socratic, something which no one would question, rather than what he needs to prove, that the "Socrates" of the earlier dialogues does not represent an earlier Platonic theory different from that of Socrates. He then deals with the evidence of Xenophon and Aristotle, showing that it is broadly compatible with the early Platonic dialogues; where Xenophon differs from early Plato, he tries to show either that the features in Xenophon which differ from Plato also contradict other claims in Xenophon himself, or are unlikely on general principles. He makes a big point of the fact that Plato was "closer" to Socrates' circle than Xenophon, who was in Anatolia at the time of the trial and execution of Socrates; he also argues that Plato as a philosopher would have understood Socrates better than the "litterateur" Xenophon, although this really cuts both ways. I think it is probable that the early Plato is basically still following the philosophy of Socrates (as he understood it), but I find it difficult to believe that he didn't add or change anything until after the Gorgias. Without the lost dialogues (which we know existed) of those like Crito, Phaedo and so forth who actually (unlike both Plato and Xenophon) belonged to Socrates' "inner circle", I think it is really impossible to be sure. (Guthrie's history still seems to me to be better balanced.)
The second part is a good discussion of some of the major questions of the early Platonic dialogues; it doesn't really matter if we consider it a study of Socrates or of the early Plato. He focuses especially on the rejection of "retaliation" and the relationship of virtue to happiness, and everything he says is interesting if not completely convincing.
One point I need to make is that while Vlastos says he is trying to write in ordinary, non-technical language for non-scholars, this is disproved by his constant polemical references to other writers (not to mention his frequent untranslated Greek quotations.) This is a book for students of the history of Greek philosophy with a certain amount of background.
Mar 423. Naguib Mahfouz, The Mirage [1948, tr. 2009] 385 pages
Since one of my reading projects this year focuses on Arabic literature, I'm taking the opportunity to read more of one of the best novelists I've read, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, in roughly chronological order. Written three years after Cairo Modern and a few years before The Cairo Trilogy, two of my favorites, The Mirage is a very different kind of novel, with no politics or history; it is a psychological study of a man who was raised by an overprotective mother and is pathologically shy and fearful, with no confidence in himself. It is written in the first person, as a kind of confession. Everything Kamil, the protagonist and narrator, attempts ends up in failure or tragedy; at the end one is not really sure whether or not he has changed in any real way. Definitely a good book but not really in a class with his more political novels.
Mar 624. Peter Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer [1987, tr. 1989] 86 pages
A translation of Handke's 1987 novella Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers.
I've been working my way through Peter Handke's writings in the original German for over a year, since he won the Nobel Prize at the end of 2019. I bought his first novel, Die Hornissen, a collection of his plays (which he is probably best known for), and his three most often mentioned novels, Die Angst des Tormanns am Elfmeter, Wunschloses Unglück, and Die linkshändige Frau, apart from which I limited myself to the five novels available free on Open Library. Although this gave me a fairly representative selection, it left one long chronological gap of over twenty years. So when I noticed that the local library (where I work, until I retire in two months) had acquired this book which fits right into that gap, I decided to break my rule against reading translations of works I could read in the original and borrow it.
The subject is just what the title suggests, one afternoon in the life of a writer. He writes his usual one or two sentences and then goes out for a walk through the nearby city (unnamed as often in Handke) and the wooded outskirts, stopping at a restaurant and later a pub, and coming home to go to bed. The style is typical of many of Handke's works from Die Hornissen on, a sort of stream-of-consciousness but with special attention to minute descriptions of sights, sounds and smells. The writer reflects on the relationship of writers to critics, readers, and "second-hand readers" who are hostile to reading due to their school experiences (I could expound here on my own theory of high school English classes as vaccination, but I won't.) This probably represents Handke's own opinions. In light of how prolific a writer Handke is, it's less likely that the difficulty the fictional writer has in transferring his experiences onto paper reflects Handke, although perhaps it represents an anxiety which most original authors must have about developing a long-term "writer's block" eventually -- his book I am reading now, Die Morawische Nacht is about a former author who no longer writes.
One typical feature of Handke's prose which I missed here was the constant hesitation of his narrators between near-synonymous words that my German-English dictionary translates by the same English word, one of my biggest difficulties in reading his books. I don't know whether he doesn't use that device here, or whether the translator just omitted it as untranslatable.
This short book is more readable than much of his writing and would probably be a good introduction to him for English readers, which may be why the library chose it (usually we wouldn't buy a fiction work more than thirty years old, other than recognized classics.)
Mar 1325. Ibrahim Nasrallah, The Lanterns of the King of Galilee [2012, tr. 2014] 549 pages
Ibrahim Nasrallah has written many novels, including a long (and still ongoing) series called The Palestinian Comedy. The title is obviously modelled after Balzac's Human Comedy, but apart from being made up of numerous independent (but somewhat interconnected) novels, the two series are quite different. Where Balzac's novels are mainly contemporary fiction, and none are set more than about fifty years before it was written, Nasrallah's novels span some four hundred years; even in those which are set in the recent past, the purpose is to present historic events rather than as with Balzac to present the mores of a class or geographic area. As far as I know, only three books of Nasrallah's series have yet been translated into English, The Lanterns of the King of Galilee, A Time of White Horses (next month's reading for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, covering the first half of the twentieth century through the Nakba) and Gaza Weddings, which is set in the near past.
The subject of The Lanterns of the King of Galilee is a part of history I was not acquainted with, the rebellion of Daher al-Umar of Tiberias at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which for a time wrested Palestine, much of Lebanon and part of Syria from the control of the Ottoman Empire. Of course, Nasrallah chose this subject to demonstrate a historical context for the later struggles of the Palestinians for independence from foreign domination, by focusing on the closest they came to achieving it. There is some anachronism; as with those of Tariq Ali's The Islam Quintet, the hero is sometimes too perfect to believe, too modern and tolerant and too "feminist" to be really credible for the time and place he was in. This is a matter of opinion, of course, and I remember Ali argues for the reality of a more tolerant Islam in the past, but this is not the Middle Ages but the Ottoman Empire. Less debatable anachronisms are in the military history, with cannons firing explosive shells far into cities constantly, something that dates from the American Civil War (to some extent) and the Franco-Prussian War -- cannons at the time of the novel fired solid cannonballs. None of this, however, affects the basic theme of the book.
Whether the rebellion could have actually created a lasting independent Arab state in the region given the power the Ottomans still had at the time, is open to doubt. The fatal error of Nasrallah's Daher, and presumably the historical Daher so far as the little we know about him goes, was the same as that of Alexander the Great: the failure to establish a definite succession. At least Alexander had the excuse of dying young; Daher was 85 when he was killed. Whether his sons and generals would have accepted a settlement of the succession question of course is also unknown; this is the Achilles heel of any hereditary absolute state.
This was a well-written and fast-paced novel which never became boring despite its length, and I learned a lot of history from it.
Mar 1326. Cathryn J. Prince, A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science [2011] 254 pages
This book is a short biography of Benjamin Silliman, one of the first American academic scientists to gain international recognition, and a fairly interesting account of the 1807 meteorite fall in Weston, Connecticut, which he investigated and wrote about, giving the first real chemical analysis of a meteorite and establishing that they come from "outer space" (Prince's term). The president (Thomas Jefferson) is something of a red herring, as his alleged comment on the fall only takes up a page or two of the book.
Unfortunately, the author, a journalism professor who has written books on a number of miscellaneous topics, seems to have no understanding of the scientific background which she puts together from a variety of mutually inconsistent and mostly popular secondary sources. She tells us that "It would be some time before people knew that Earth plows through hundreds of tons of meteors every day. Orbiting in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, these meteors make shooting stars." In another place, she tells us that one of the main reasons for studying meteorites is that they help us to understand the big bang theory. She constantly tells us that "we now know" or "scientists think" followed by some very speculative hypothesis taken from the Internet. Her forays into history aren't any more successful. She tells us that the earliest recorded meteorite fall was "about four thousand years ago" in Phrygia, and it was immediately brought to Rome; knowing that Rome didn't exist four thousand years ago, I looked at the reference in her endnote, and the title of the article says the meteorite fell in "467 Be" -- assuming that Be is a typo for BCE, that falls a bit short of four thousand years ago. In addition, the writing is very awkward and often just ungrammatical; there are many non sequiturs, introducing a totally unrelated subject with an initial "But".
Despite the interest of the main story, I can't really recommend this muddle to anyone.
Apr 327. Ibrahim Nasrallah, Time of White Horses [2007, tr. 2012] 584 pages
This month's reading for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, Time of White Horses is a historical novel set largely in a fictional Palestinian village called Hadiya, from the beginning of the twentieth century through the Nakba of 1948. It is part of a series called The Palestinian Comedy, only three novels of which as far I know have been translated into English. (See my review of The Lanterns of the King of Galilee.) The book is divided into three parts; the first part deals with the declining years of the Ottoman Empire before the First World War, the second with the period of the British Mandate and the "Great Revolt", and the third covers the period of World War II and the Nakba. The first two parts are about the life of Khaled, the son of Hajj Mahmud, from his boyhood through his death at the hands of the British; the third part focuses more or less on his sons Mahmud and Naji. As in The Lanterns of the King of Galilee, there is a white mare who plays a major role in the book, or in this case a line of white mares.
Some reviews of the book, including one of the book-jacket "blurbs", compare it to Naguib Mahfouz' The Cairo Trilogy, also a story about one family against the background of anti-colonial resistance (and one of the best works of contemporary fiction I have ever read), but I would have to say that if there is any similarity to Mahfouz, it is not to the realist author of The Cairo Trilogy but to his earlier, romantic histories in the style of Sir Walter Scott. The novel is written in a very Romantic style, with a larger than life hero and a few totally and consciously evil villains -- no "banality of evil" here, or any of the later Mahfouz' nuances. Although I liked the book and would recommend it, it lost a star for me for its undifferentiated treatment of the "enemy" groups, the British and the Jewish settlers, very different from the novel of Habiby and the poetry of Darwish which I read for the same group. Perhaps because it is not entirely realistic, it was less difficult to read than I expected given the tragic nature of the subject matter. There are even some comic passages -- Naji's revenge on his military superior, for example.
The book does have one feature which is more modern, or "postmodern": there are italicized passages which purport to be "oral history", eye-witness accounts of events, and there are "historical footnotes", some of which refer to actual history and some which treat the fictional characters of the book as if they are historical, thus blurring the distinction between fiction and fact.
The novel opens with the arrival of the white mare Hamama in Hadiya, and the forging of a sort of mystical bond with the young boy Khaled -- similar to that of Sheik Daher, the historical main character of Lanterns, with the white mare in that book. When she is later taken by the Ottoman tax collector, the barely teenage Khaled follows them and like a Palestinian Rambo single-handedly wipes out a whole squad of Ottoman soldiers, gaining a mythical reputation which he largely keeps throughout the book. He leads many struggles against the Ottomans. Then there is a gap between the first and second parts, and we find him leading a guerilla struggle against the British, which is somewhat more realistically described (according to a secondary source I read, this part is at least partially based on a real figure of the Great Revolt.) This part of the book was the most interesting to me because I knew little about the revolt, and that little was mainly about the urban workers' struggle and the General Strike, rather than about the peasant struggle. The third part returns to more familiar -- and discouraging -- ground, with the increase in Zionist settlement and the contradictory relations between the Zionists, the British, and the Arab states, ending with the destruction of Palestine in the Nakba. The interesting thing here is Nasrallah's focus on the Palestinians' resistance, rather than treating them the way much of the literature does as passive victims of the Zionists. (He may exaggerate somewhat in the opposite direction.)
Apr 528. Peter Handke, Die Morawische Nacht: Erzählung [2008] 560 pages
The last novel of my reading in Peter Handke. At first, I was somewhat surprised by seeing the subtitle, "A Story" on a novel of over five hundred pages, but this is essentially a "story" which is told orally by the protagonist in one night on the Morawa River, aboard a houseboat called "The Moravian Night". The subject of the story is the boat captain's "Rundreise" or circular trip through Europe. At first sight the various episodes seem fairly random, as in the (more linear) trip through the Sierra de Gredos in his earlier long novel, but as I thought more about it there does seem to be a symmetrical structure, though not obvious or worked out in detail.
Apart from a brief prologue where the Hearers gather on the book and an equally brief epilogue, the novel begins and ends aboard the boat. The trip itself starts out with a description of the enclave of Porodin and a bus trip, and finishes up the same way. The first episode (a meal in a cemetary) and the last (a "conference" of "cranks" who want to re-establish a united Balkan state) deal with the past and future of the Balkans. The next episode (a return to a place of his past, the island on which he began his career as an author, and a meeting with his girlfriend from that time) corresponds to the next-to-last episode (the return to his birth-village and meeting with his brother) and form a triangle with a chapter on a visit to his father's grave. There is a sort of chiasmus, with chapter 3 (a synposium on "Noise") matching up with chapter 6 (a jew's harp convention) and chapter 4 (on disguises and apparent madness) matching with chapter 8 on the same themes. The meeting with the "foreign woman" also in chapter 4 is similar (although of more importance) to his meeting with the woman reader on the train in chapter 7.
The various episodes are more interesting than in his earlier "trip" novels; if I hadn't already formed a fairly negative impression of Handke's work, this one might have interested me in his writing. It is the latest book (chronologically) I have read by him.
Apr 729. Ibrahim Nasrallah, Gaza Weddings [2009, tr. 2017] 156 pages [Kindle]
The third book from The Palestinian Comedy; the first two were long historical novels based on fact, while this is a concentrated, emotional novel. It is the story of two neighboring families in the Gaza Strip more or less at the present time. I can't say more; the situation begins unclear and there are gradually revelations. A very powerful book.
Apr 930. Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems [2003] 194 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
This anthology was apparently added to Open Library a few days after I read his other books. About forty percent of the book consists of his long poem Mural, written in 2000 after his near death due to heart failure, which is a meditation on death. It contains some really amazing passages, unfortunately linked together by less interesting passages (although I suspect some may have been more interesting if I picked up on allusions to the Qur'an) It also contains selections from other collections, Fewer Roses (1986) with 25 poems, I See What I Want to See (1991) with one long poem, "The Hoopoe (very difficult, again many allusions to the Qur'an), and two I had already read complete, Why Have You Left the Horse Alone (1995) and A Bed for the Stranger (1999). The book ended with three of his best-known early poems. Very good poetry from one of my favorite poets.
Apr 1031. Taha Muhammad Ali, So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005 [2006] 197 pages
An anthology of poetry by another Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali. Ali's style is quite different from al-Qasim and Darwish, less intellectual and symbolic, more about everyday life; the introduction says it was written in a more vernacular language, although of course that wasn't obvious in translation. (The book is actually bilingual, but I don't know Arabic.) Some of the poems were humorous. I enjoyed the collection. The book also includes a short story, the title story "So What". The book is a longer version of a book that was published earlier called Never Mind.
32. Nawal el-Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor [1957, tr. 1988] 103 pagesHer first novel, this had a big impact as the first feminist novel by an Egyptian woman, although she hadn't at the time read anything about feminism. She says it was not autobiographical, although it represented her experiences and opinions as a medical student. It was censored, and the original manuscript was lost, so it is not complete. I plan to read more of her later work over the next couple months as part of my mini-project of reading Arabic literature in translation.
Apr 2033. Adina Hoffman, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century [2009] 454 pages
A biography of the Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammed Ali, by Adina Hoffman, a friend and the wife of his translator. The author is Jewish, and immigrated to Israel from the United States, where she gradually became shocked by the realities of the history and situation of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, especially after becoming friends with Taha. (He is referred to throughout the book by his first name.) The book contains much background about the history of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians, and about the history of Arab and specifically Palestinian literature.
Taha Ali was born in Saffuriyya, the ancient city of Sepphoris in Galilee; the biography traces his boyhood up to the time the town was destroyed by the Israelis during the Nakba. Like Nasrallah's fictional village of Hadiya, Saffuriyya was considered a stronghold of Palestinian resistance under the Mandate. One of the most interesting parts of the book were the interviews with Dov Yermiya, the commander of the Israeli forces which captured Saffuriyya; he was later dismissed from the Israeli army for criticizing the actions of the Israelis in the invasion of Lebanon. One of the themes of the book is that people can change.
Like his younger contemporary, Mahmoud Darwish, Taha and his family initially fled north; after a stay in the refugee camps, they became "illegals" in their own country, eventually settling in Nazareth, where Taha would spend the rest of his life, opening a souvenir shop near the Christian Church of the Annunciation. They later managed to become Israeli citizens. Although he published some short stories earlier in magazines, he became a poet late in life, much after his younger contemporaries had made their reputations; like Umberto Eco, he published his first book after he was fifty.
Hoffman explains that he was initially more or less ignored in Israel, partly due to literary conservatism which did not recognize free verse as poetry, partly because he was not formally affiliated with either the Communist Party or the nationalists; his first recognition was from outside the country where his style was more in keeping with the avant-garde. That should not be taken as meaning that his poetry was in any way academic or obscure; in fact he writes in a much simpler and more direct (though less directly political) style than for example al-Qasim or Darwish (I recently read his book of poetry So What translated by Hoffman's husband Peter.)
Apr 2234. Fadi Zaghmout, The Bride of Amman [2012, tr. 2015] 192 pages
I am somewhat ambivalent about this book. Formally, it is a novel, but it isn't really. It tells the story of five people, four women and a gay man, in Amman, Jordan. Each of the characters exemplifies an aspect of the oppression of women and gays in the traditionalist culture of Jordan: Leila, the woman who has just gotten a college degree and is greeted by her mother with "now you should get married"; her sister Salma, who has passed the optimal age for marriage and is looked down on as a "spinster"; the friends Hayat, a victim of sexual abuse who is having an affair with a married man and Rana, a Christian who is in love with a Moslem; and the gay man Ali. What makes this not quite a novel is that while the stories, which alternate throughout the book as first person monologues, are interesting and convincing enough at some level, and eventually interact, they are essentially just examples: the book is very didactic and the characters have no lives apart from the "problems" they illustrate. Their interior consciousnesses tend to become little essays discussing the questions of social relationships in almost theoretical terms, full of Western liberal catchphrases like "the transgender community". Zaghmout, the (male) author of the book, is described as a "gender activist" and blogger, and he says that the book originated from things he was blogging about. The reviews of the novel on Amazon tend to discuss it in terms that are more appropriate to nonfiction, describing it as a work of sociology and an example of "intersectionality." The author also seems to have an exaggerated view of the degree of sexual equality that exists in the West; I remember having a discussion with a Swedish feminist who had a very different account of conditions in that country. The happy ending(s) of four out of five of the stories also seem a bit unbelievable. On the other hand, if the book was actually a bestseller in Jordan as the Amazon description says, then perhaps there is a need there for this kind of social description packaged as a work of fiction.
Apr 2535. Naguib Mahfouz, The Beginning and the End [1949, tr. 1985] 412 pages
Although not published until 1949, this novel was written in 1942-43, thus contemporary with his earlier historical romances about ancient Egypt rather than the more realistic novels he wrote after the war; yet it seems much more in keeping with his postwar realist style. It is a tragic novel about a poor family from the countryside living in Cairo about 1936. It opens with the death of the father, a minor official, which plunges the family into desperate poverty. In addition to his widow, there are four children. The daughter, Nefisa, in her twenties, is rather homely and already resigned to never marrying; there are a nineteen-year-old son, Hussein, and a sixteen-year-old named Hassanein, who are the central characters. There is also an older brother, Hassan, who is somewhat of a vagabond, unwilling to work at a serious job. We see the effects of poverty on the family, as well as both good and bad choices they make in trying to deal with it. Like everything I have read by Mahfouz, it is incredibly well-written, which comes through even in translation.
Apr 2636. Nawal el-Saadawi, Searching [1968, tr. 1991] 114 pages
I was saddened to see on the internet that Nawal el-Saadawi, whom I have just begun reading, died on March 21 at the age of 89. A doctor, she was for a time the head of the Egyptian Public Health Service, before being removed by the conservative religious government of Anwar Sadat; she was later imprisoned by the Sadat regime for her political opinions and then spent the rest of her life as an activist for women's rights.
This short, early novel opens with a young woman realizing that her boyfriend has not shown up for their usual Tuesday evening date. We learn that she has a degree in chemistry and has been working for six years in a dead-end government job where she does no research. She makes a decision to open her own chemical laboratory. Over the course of the novel she begins questioning her life, goals and feelings, as well as the nature of the society around her, and gradually it becomes difficult to separate reality from her nightmares.
Apr 2937. Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs [1961, tr. 1984] 135 pages
Mahfouz's first book since The Children of the Alley in 1959, this was the beginning of a series of short novels dealing with the failure of the 1952 revolution to achieve real progress in Egypt. The protagonist, Said Mahran, has just been released after spending four years in prison for burglary, which we are given to understand was in support of the political opposition to Britain.
While he was in prison, his former associate Ilish has married his divorced wife Nabawiyya and taken his daughter Sana, who no longer recognizes him; he suspects, whether rightly or not, that he was caught due to their betrayal. Also during that time Egypt has gotten its independence.
He visits his radical mentor Rauf Ilwan, who is now wealthy and publishes a newspaper; basically Ilwan disowns him. In a mostly stream-of-consciousness style, we see Said destroy his life and that of his one real friend Nur by his attempts at getting revenge against the three traitors.
Apr 3038. Fadi Zaghmout, Heaven on Earth [2014, tr. 2017] 213 pages
Zaghmout's second novel, this is a science fiction novel. It takes place in 2091; the setting naturally is in Jordan, although there is nothing apart from the names to differentiate it from any Western city. As with much speculative fiction, the book is investigating the ethical dimension of scientific progress. The premise is that, following a worldwide pandemic in 2026 (only off by six years) medical research accelerated, resulting in a nanobot technology to reverse the aging process, which on the face of it seems like a utopian dream. The book then deals with some of the ethical dilemmas which result from that, in terms of the right to die, the limiting of procreation, family dynamics and so forth. The book is occasionally satiric; the political situation hasn't changed in almost a century. Perhaps because of the science fiction form, or because of the humor, the thesis aspect of the book was less distracting than in The Bride of Amman, his first novel; he also develops the characters more rather than just treating them as examples. The book is enjoyable and has some interesting and original ideas, although there are also echoes of more famous science fiction novels; in particular, I was disappointed with his superficial treatment of the Omar theme, compared with the way a similar idea is treated in Alfred Bester's classic The Demolished Man, which won the first Hugo Award back in the 1950s..
May 439. Nawal El Saadawi, God Dies By the Nile [1974, tr. 1985] 138 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
In the novel that El Saadawi considered her most significant, she turns away from the urban settings of her first novels to deal with the corruption and superstition in a rural village on the banks of the Nile, Kafr El Teen, perhaps similar to the village in which she was born. The book opens with the widow Zakeya going out before dawn to work in the fields; when she returns at dusk, she learns from her brother Kafrawi that his oldest daughter Nefissa has run away. Over the course of the novel, we see that the village is run by a corrupt Mayor from Cairo, a relative of an important minister in the national government who has contempt for the peasants and oppresses them, especially the women, with the help of his three henchmen, the head of the Village Guard, the barber and "doctor", and the Sheik of the village mosque. The style is direct and powerful, and the novel moves through one crime after another to a climax which is perhaps not unexpected.
May 640. Naguib Mahfouz, Autumn Quail [1962, tr. 1985] 185 pages
In Autumn Quail, the second of his novels of the 1960's, Mahfouz returned to the time of the Revolution of 1952. The book opens with the protagonist, Isa, returning from the massacre of the Egyptian policemen by the British at Suez, to find Cairo aflame, both literally and figuratively. He is an important bureaucrat of not quite the highest rank; he belongs to the "loyal opposition." Once, he had been an activist, suffering arrest and torture for taking part in demonstrations, but now he and his party have become corrupt and part of the establishment. When he learns that the king has been overthrown by the army officers led by Nasser, he is ambivalent; the new regime has accomplished at once all that his party has claimed to be promoting for decades, but his party has had no part in it. He is soon demoted and then removed from government service entirely for past bribery and corruption; out of a job,and dishonored, he loses his fiancée. Whether from pride or just lethargy, he obstinately refuses to make his peace with the new order, represented by his radical cousin Hasan. He sums up his state of mind in the statement, "although my mind is sometimes convinced by the revolution, my heart is always with the past." The novel follows his gradual degeneration for five or six years, to an ambiguous ending.
The novel is not so much a study of the revolution or its results as it is the study of what happens to the person whose idle dreams of reform have been carried out by a movement that bypasses the reformist political games he is accustomed to; one could think of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) or the Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, for example. Or what would happen to the "liberal" Democrats if there were a revolution in the United States. As with all of Mahfouz's novels, the political is combined with the personal to shed new light on both.
May 841. Fadi Zaghmout, Laila [2018, tr. 2020] 115 pages
Laila, Zaghmout's third novel, is a bit weird. It is told as stream-of-consciousness of a dead woman. The novel begins when Laila, a dominatrix, drops dead while pegging her submissive lover Tariq with a strap-on dildo. After getting out of his bonds, he cuts up her body and dumps it (in a trash bag) into a dumpster near the airport. For the remainder of the book, her thoughts alternate between observing the consequences and remembering her past life. Like the author's first novel, The Bride of Amman, the book is very didactic, with her thoughts, like those of the five characters in that novel, often resembling a feminist pamphlet rather than fiction. The translation is evidently not by a native English speaker and is occasionally very ungrammatical; the publisher would do well to invest in a copy-editor.
May 942. Naguib Mahfouz, The Search [1964, tr. 1987] 140 pages
This noir crime novel about a man searching for his father shows that Mahfouz can write well in any genre, but otherwise it is a very minor work.
May 1143. Sinan Antoon, I'jaam [2004, tr. 2007] 97 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
I had previously encountered Sinan Antoon only as a translator. This short novel, his first, has the form of a memoir written in prison, composed mainly of memories and dreams/nightmares, detailing life under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The title is untranslatable, as there is no equivalent concept in English; it refers to the dots which distinguish letters in written Arabic. The memoir was supposedly written without dots, thus making the meaning ambiguous; the dots were added by an official, along with stupid comments handwritten in the margins. A very interesting book.
May 1244. Naguib Mahfouz, The Beggar [1965, tr. 1986] 143 pages
Another in his series of short novels about Egypt after the Revolution, The Beggar is sort of a cross between two earlier novels, The Thief and the Dogs and Autumn Quail, and Sartre's La nausée. The protagonist, Omar, like Isa in Autumn Quail and Rauf Ilwan in The Thief and the Dogs, is a former activist (and also former poet) who has abandoned the political struggle (and poetry) for material success, in his case a successful law practice, and become relatively wealthy. He succombs to what today would be seen as clinical depression, but is presented here as an "existential" crisis, a feeling that his life has lost all meaning; he has lost interest in his work and in his wife Zeinab.
We also meet two old friends, the cynical Mustapha, who has also become successful but seems to have no self-doubt, and Othman, who has spent many years in prison for refusing to implicate Omar and Mustapha in a bombing attempt and has retained his original idealism. We might expect Othman to be similar to Said in The Thief and the Dogs, but he is not; although disappointed that Omar and Mustapha did not make use of his sacrifice to continue the struggle, he does not hate them or seek for revenge. We also meet Omar's wife and his teenage daughter Buthayna, who has also developed an interest in poetry.
The book revolves around Omar's attempts to find some meaning to his life. The book becomes somewhat surrealist toward the end, as we are not quite sure what is real and what is Omar's dreams or hallucinations.
May 1745. Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer [2010, tr. 2013] 200 pages [Kindle]
The first person narrator is a corpse washer for the Shiite community in Baghdad, the equivalent of a mortician but without embalming; he washes corpses with ritual prayers and shrouds them for burial. He is also an artist, who studied to be a sculptor, and the metaphor of statues is present throughout the book. The novel takes place mainly during the period of the American invasion and occupation, although there are flashbacks to the period of the dictatorship. His previous novel, I'jaam dealt with the oppression of Saddam Hussein's regime; the motif of this one is expressed by an old man who keeps repeating, "The student is gone, the teacher has arrived."
Like the two other novels I have read set during the occupation, Ahmed Sadaawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad and Muhsin al-Ramli's Daughter of the Tigris, we see the rise of random violence, both sectarian (Sunni vs. Shiite) and criminal, as religious hatreds intensify and the occupiers do little to maintain public order. Antoon, however, presents more real political analysis than either, especially in the chapter about the visit of Uncle Sabri, a former Communist who went into exile during the Saddam period, and who predicts the rise of sectarian violence.
The book is well-translated, by the author, who was previously known mainly as a translator.
May 1946. Naguib Mahfouz, Adrift on the Nile [1966, tr. 1993] 167 pages
Anis Zaki, a low-level civil servant in the Department of Archives, and a small group of his friends meet regularly on a houseboat on the Nile to smoke kiff. They are joined one night by a journalist and would-be playwright, Samara Baghat. Thus begins a discussion on seriousness versus absurdism, and one of Mahfouz's most interesting short novels.
47. Antoine de Saint Exupery, Le Petit Prince, Avec dessins par l'auteur [1943] 113 pages [in French]
Ostensibly written as a children's book, this parable shows the absurdity of grown-up behavior through the eyes of a child -- from another planet.
May 2148. Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar [1967, tr. 1978] 156 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
One of Mahfouz' most important novels, Miramar combines the realistic, political concerns of the Cairo Trilogy from the forties with the more modernist and symbolic techniques of his previous novels of the sixties. The novel is set in a pension (in American English, a boarding house) in Alexandria, the Pension Miramar, at about the time it was written. It is told from the perspectives of four of the lodgers. The beautiful young servant girl Zohra, a peasant from the countryside who is fleeing her grandfather's attempt to force her into marriage with a much older wealthy man, and wants to learn to read and write and learn a trade, is in some ways the real center of the novel, as we learn the characters of the others by the way they interact with her. The introduction by the well-known author John Fowles, which is very good on Mahfouz' development and on the meaning of the book, as well as explaining the historical allusions, suggests that she "symbolizes" Egypt; certainly she represents the majority of the Egyptian population who are peasants.
The first and last chapters are from the perspective of Amer Wagdi, an over eighty-year-old retired journalist and former Wafd activist from the time of the first revolution in 1919, who was a friend and colleague of Sa'ad Zaghloul, the leader of the Wafd and first prime minister of formally independent Egypt under the monarchy of King Fouad. An honest supporter of Egyptian independence, he broke with the party when it began collaborating with the British during the Second World War. He is dominated by his memories, but seems like the most honest of the men at the pension, and takes a paternal interest in Zohra. As a foil to Amer, there is another aged boarder, the reactionary Tolba Bey, who owned a huge amount of land (probably 2000 times the average peasant holding) which has just been "sequestered" (i.e. expropriated) by the Revolutionary government of Gamal Abdul Nasser.
The second chapter is told from the perspective of Hosni Allam, an idle, hedonistic young man from the same class as Tolba Bey, who still has enough land to live without working but occasionally talks about starting a business.
The third chapter is told from the perspective of Mansour Bahy, also a young man, about whom we don't really know anything to begin with, so to avoid spoilers I will leave it at that.
The fourth chapter is told from the perspective of Sarhan el-Beheiry, an opportunist who argues for the Revolution but about whom we find out some secrets.
The novel is more directly political than Mahfouz' others of the period, showing the corruption overtaking the Revolution and the hollowness of its claims to be socialist -- like most anti-imperialist revolutions in the third world it calls itself socialist and carries out some nationalizations, mainly of foreign enterprises (the Suez Canal Company, most famously) but essentially it is limited to the bourgeois tasks of the French Revolution, land reform in the countryside and some educational and health activity among the peasantry; and even these are not carried out consistently. The Revolution is basically top-down and undemocratic; after the disastrous war with Israel (shortly after the book was written) it was replaced by the more explicitly bourgeois regime of Anwar al-Sadat and many of the reforms were reversed.
May 2749. The Arabian Nights (Translated by Husain Haddawy) [tr. 1990] 518 pages
Haddawy has translated the edition edited by Mahdi, which is based on the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, the oldest surviving manuscript; he maintains (although not all scholars agree) that this Syrian tradition represents the original and stylisticly homogenous core of the work, and that the more recent Egyptian manuscripts on which the other editions and translations have all been based have combined it with originally independent (and inferior) stories. Other scholars consider that this sort of accretion is the essence of the work. (In any case, even the Syrian tradition is obviously based on a much earlier, now lost, Persian collection with the same frame story of King Shahrayer and his wife Shahrazad, going back to the beginning of the Middle Ages, which in turn incorporated stories from India and elsewhere.)
This version does not contain many of the works which we think of when we think of the Arabian nights -- for example the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin and the lamp, or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I will be following it up over the next month with the first, very adapted (French) translation of Galland, selections from the classic ten volume English translation of Richard Burton, and perhaps some other versions, to get as much of the material as I can.
In any version, this is a book which everyone should read and enjoy (except "woke" liberals -- the treatment of women, Blacks, and disabled persons would undoubtedly offend; and for that reason and the sexual content I would not recommend it to readers below high school age. It's not the Disney version.)
May 3050. Sinan Antoon, The Book of Collateral Damage [2016, tr. 2019] 303 pages [Kindle]
Sinan Antoon's fourth novel, The Book of Collateral Damage is written in a modernist experimental style. It has a first-person frame story, narrated, with memories and dreams and so largely not in chronological order, by Nameer al-Baghdadi, an expatriate Iraqi academic who (like Antoon himself) left Baghdad after the Gulf War, obtained a doctorate in Arabic literature from Harvard, and ends up teaching at New York University. Also like Antoon, he returns to Baghdad after the American invasion to help film a documentary; this is the beginning of the book. While in Baghdad, he visits al-Mutannabi Street, a street of bookstores, and meets Wadood, a strange bookseller who is writing a catalog of "the first minute" of the invasion, told mainly from the perspectives of animals and inanimate objects. Wadood gives him a manuscript of what he has written, and excerpts from Wadood's writing alternate with the frame story about Nameer's own life in America. Wadood's short vignettes illustrate the personal costs of the war, the "collateral damage" to ordinary people and things in Baghdad, while the frame story keeps it from being too intense to read for long stretches. (As one can see from the Notes at the end, there are a number of quotations from Walther Benjamin; for the past ten years I have been commenting at least once a year that I need to read Benjamin and maybe now I'm retired I will get to him.) This is the June book for the World Literature group on Goodreads and I think it is one of the best books we have read in this year of reading Arabic literature.
Jun 151. Naguib Mahfouz, and Seif Wanli, Mirrors [1971, tr. 1999] 186 pages
Originally serialized in the Egyptian equivalent of TV Guide, this novel consists of a little over fifty short (mostly one to three page) descriptions of fictional characters by Mahfouz, most accompanied by original portraits by the artist Seif Wanli. The characters are in alphabetical order according to the Arabic alphabet, so they seem random, although obviously Mahfouz had a plan in mind. Together, they represent all the political, social and economic layers and age groups from the 1919 revolution to the time it was written. The politics of the characters range from pro-British, pro-monarchy, Wafdists, and supporters of Nasser's revolution, to Communists and one example of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the apolitical and especially the opportunist. The characters interact in various ways as friends, enemies, lovers, coworkers and fellow students, neighbors etc. Of course with so many characters it is sometimes difficult to remember who is who, and it helps to have some knowledge of modern Egyptian history (although I have gotten that from his earlier novels.) A brilliantly original work commenting on the whole of urban "middle-class" Egyptian life (while there are some rich people and some lower class criminals, there are no peasants and few if any factory workers, as is true of most literature since the end of the 1930's.)
I'm going to try upping my 2021 goals to 132, 24 nE, and 35000 pages. Last time I tried that was a total failure, but I will retire on May 1 so should have lots more time to read this year.