Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars For the Man Who Has Every Creepy Thing Fifty-four-year-old dark rock star Judas “Jude” Coyne (real name Justin Cowzynski) hasn’t toured in three years and is on his umpteenth young Goth girlfriend he nicknames after their home states (the current one being a 23-year-old he calls Georgia) when he buys a ghost from a private online auction. Specifically, he buys the vintage “Sunday suit” the seller says her “spiritualist” stepfather Craddock James McDermott wanted to be buried in but wasn’t, leading him to haunt his bedroom. Jude’s extensive collection of “the grotesque and the bizarre,” much of it sent by his fans, ranges from the confession of a burned witch and a cookbook for cannibals to Aleister Crowley’s childhood chessboard and a “diseased” snuff film, but lacks a ghost, so he can’t resist buying one--without really believing in it. Joe Hill’s The Heart-Shaped Box (2007) being a horror novel, the ghost turns out to be real. When alive McDermott was a hypnotist/dowser, and his stepdaughter Jessica Price has ensnared Jude in an elaborate revenge plot because her little sister Anna-May McDermott (aka Florida) killed herself in depression after he dumped her. When the suit arrives in a heart-shaped box, the ghost starts haunting Jude, freaking out his beloved dogs Angus and Bon, giving Georgia an infected thumb wound, chilling the temperature of Jude’s sprawling Piecliff NY farmhouse, scaring off his personal assistant Danny, sending ominous emails, and malevolently manifesting himself to show off his pendulum hypnotizing razor and scribbled over eyes. Jude searches his occult books for solutions but can only find impractical things like washing in urine (and “he drew the line at water sports”). He doesn’t want to set the police on Jessica Price because he threatened her on the phone when she told him he’d die horribly and alone and because, being a self-made success, he doesn’t want to get help from anyone. At the start of the novel Jude is the prototypical self-centered isolated amoral rock star, but he comes to earn reader sympathy. He grew up in a household with a violently abusive father, Anna-May was subject to clinical depression before Jude met her, Craddock James McDermott is of a magnitude of evil far beyond Jude’s self-centered lazy morality, and Jude is capable of love and self-reflexion. Hill puts us convincingly in Jude’s head as he finds himself in a nightmarish trap, and we root for him to escape it while suspecting that he’s finally going to get his just deserts for, if nothing else, having “become a little too willing to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences.” Hill also develops Georgia and Anna-May into compelling characters in their own rights, which is one reason why the novel is a good, suspenseful, page-turningly creepy read; as the narrator says at one point, “horror was rooted in sympathy after all.” Hill writes original and evocative similes and is able to scare us and make us laugh at almost the same time. As in the following: --“The driver remained behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope.” --“It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb.” --“Bon, always the shy one, gave Jude a worried, sidelong look, then lowered her head to the thin gruel of his vomit and covertly began to gobble it up.” --“If hell was anything, it was talk radio and family.” The reader of the audiobook, Stephan Lang, is excellent, his narrator sounding a bit like Vincent Price and his Jude a bit like Bronson Pinchot doing a deep voice. Unfortunately, the audiobook suffers from inappropriate techno music that intrudes to end or start scenes or chapters now and then (perhaps timed to start and end CD sides of the audiobook). Hill’s novel falls prey to some of the pitfalls of other fantasy and horror in that he doesn’t always follow the ground rules he sets up. For instance, dogs have souls and can become protective familiars for their human masters, but then during the climax it appears that pigs cannot be familiars. Similarly, at one point we learn from a gay teen who committed suicide rather than reveal his sexuality that souls have no gender, but later during an out of body experience souls are gendered male or female. And despite references to the likes of Trent Reznor, AC/DC, and Ozzy Osbourne, as well as to some of Jude’s hits, and even to a new song he composes in a motel, and despite several hints that music and singing may help with a hostile ghost, Jude doesn’t really sing or play that much in key encounters with Craddock. Finally, although it seems that “the only power he [the ghost] has over you is what you give him,” and that ghosts haunt minds rather than places, Hill makes Craddock a bit too powerful during an excrescent (though entertaining) scene in a Denny’s restaurant where he speaks through an old timer’s electric larynx and all the many customers can hear him, not just Jude and Georgia. As a result, I sometimes got the feeling that Hill is Doing-Whatever-He-Wants-for-Suspense rather than developing an organically and consistently convincing story. Hill’s writing is vivid, though, and the novel becomes an appealing, painful, romantic Southern Gothic buddy road trip into the characters’ pasts. Despite a climax that’s almost too absurdly action oriented, the novel has strong moments of horror, rapture, and sadness. Fans of horror and ghost stories should enjoy it. View all my reviews
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The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Man in the Moon Goes to Town One hundred and seventy years ago thousands of Odonians (followers of a woman called Odo who promoted individual freedom and mutual aid) left the planet Urras to colonize its nearly barren moon Anarres, there to build what they hoped would be an anarchic utopia. Ever since, the much larger population of Urras (divided between capitalist or state-centered socialist societies) and the smaller population of Anarres have viewed each other with ignorant fear and hatred. Trade and communication are limited and travel verboten. In that context, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Nebula and Hugo award-winning novel The Dispossessed (1974) begins when the genius physicist Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras. Shevek is a man on a mission: to unbuild the wall separating his people from those of Urras and to enable the two worlds to engage in free intercultural communication and exchange. His leverage is his nearly completed Unified Temporal Theory that is expected to enable things like faster than light space travel and instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. His goal may be impossible, because on Urras he is hosted by a capitalist culture hoping to co-opt him or otherwise use him for his theory, and because many of his own people view him as a traitor for leaving their “utopia.” Given Shevek’s work on simultaneity, Le Guin fittingly tells his story in two time strands, alternating chapters between the present on Urras, in which he struggles to do his secret work (unbuilding walls) while delaying his public work (finishing his General Temporal Theory), and the past on Anarres, in which he grows from a spindly baby into a famous physicist increasingly at odds with his increasingly stagnant and conservative society. The chapters depicting Shevek on Urras in the uber-capitalist country of A-Io are rich with defamiliarization, as the man in the moon visits an exaggerated version of Cold War era America (with many interesting differences, like a tax on cars that prevents most people from driving) where everything is new and disorienting. Shevek hears bird song as “little sweet wild” voices and feels leather as “a non-woven brown stuff that felt like skin” (apart from fish Anarres has no animals or birds); he shops for clothes wrapped like everything in A-Io in multiple layers of paper and packaging (Anarres has no money or stores and people have few possessions); he works and lives at the top A-Io university, which has only male teachers and students (on Anarres there is no gender discrimination); he has his own servant (Anarresti are all equal and share unpleasant jobs by rotation); and so on. Le Guin wants to make us see our own cultural givens with alien eyes so as to question them, like the supposed courage and manliness of organized military hierarchy (to Shevek “a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency” good only for killing unarmed civilians), and or to laugh at them, like the fancy toilet in Shevek’s Urrasti university apartment (to Shevek a “magnificent gold and ivory temple of the shit stool”). Part of the texture of Le Guin’s world building is made of interesting language differences between the two cultures. The Anarresti, for example, don’t use personal pronouns (e.g., “the mother” instead of “my mother”), terms of respect (they call people by their names or “brother” or “sister”), or swear words (sex isn’t dirty for them and they have no organized religion). Similarly, their worst insults are “profiteering” or “properterian” or “egoizing,” and to denote superiority they use “more central” instead of “higher.” In the chapters set on Anarres, Le Guin explores how an anarchy might function and what it might be like to live in one. It is appealing in some ways when contrasted with capitalist or state-centered socialist cultures. For example, in principle, nobody eats while others go hungry, everyone can do some work and has some place to live, and there are no laws or prisons, nations or wars. But the Odonians have not made a eutopia (perfect place), for human nature (e.g., ambition, power hunger, jealousy, etc.) intrudes and Anarresti society has become hidebound, conservative, and group-dominated. As Le Guin is wont to do, she poses questions and explores answers without necessarily choosing one. Apart, perhaps, from what must be her basic principles (developed also in The Left Hand of Darkness): cultures thrive in mutual communication and interchange etc. with each other, individuals flourish when they are free to do the work they want to do, and “the essential function of life is change.” Like Shevek (and unlike Trump), Le Guin devoted her life to unbuilding walls rather than constructing them. The Dispossessed is an sf novel of ideas in all the best ways: thoughtfully exploring time, science, society, human nature, love, life, art, freedom, perspective, and so on. And in its alien cultures live authentic, compelling, human characters. And without relying on page turning action, it is suspenseful because we care about Shevek and his friends and family and want to find out what happened to them in the past and what will happen to them in the future. And Le Guin (as ever) writes fine lines of precise, poetic, philosophical prose, like “The light of his world filled his empty hands,” “The sunlights [of different planets] differ, but there is only one darkness,” and “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?” The audiobook reader Don Leslie is great—a bit like Stefan Rudneki but more flexible—but he is not a reader who changes his voice dramatically for different characters. There is a newer audiobook of the novel available with, I think a British reader. . . Anyone who likes Le Guin’s work but hasn’t read The Dispossessed or anyone who likes thought-provoking and well-written and adult sf, should find the novel an enriching experience. View all my reviews
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Do you want a clout on the ear?" George R. R. Martin’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015) collects three entertaining novellas about the odd knight and squire couple Dunk and Egg. The stories take place about 100 years prior to the events of The Game of Thrones and add texture and pleasure to the rich, long history of Martin’s famous secondary world. In the start of “The Hedge Knight” (1998) teenage Dunk, already closer to seven feet tall than to six, buries Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the man who rescued him from life as a street urchin in Flea Bottom and made him his squire, teaching him how to ride and fight and be an honorable hedge knight, loyally serving whatever lord he chooses to work for, protecting the weak, and keeping himself clean (which means bathing once per month). Before dying, Ser Arlan knighted Dunk. The new knight goes to participate in a tourney at Ashford Mead, where he gets a new suit of armor, a new name (Ser Duncan the Tall), a new sigil (shooting star over an elm tree), a new unattainable love interest (the Dornish puppetress Tanzel Too Tall), and best of all a new squire, a bald boy with violet eyes and the odd name Egg. “Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall” finally learns that his new squire is more than he seems. Egg is a superb companion: intelligent, knowledgeable about heraldry and history, loyal, and mouthy. Dunk is always warning him, “Do you want a clout on the ear,” a comical refrain because he (almost) never hits the boy. “The Sworn Sword” (2003) finds Dunk and Egg during a drought in the service of Ser Eustace Osgrey, a sad, lonely, aging, almost senile landed knight who, due to his having fought on the losing side in a Targaryen civil war between half-brothers (one legitimate, one bastard) about fifteen years earlier, has been reduced to living in a broken down tower fort while his neighbor, Lady Rohanne Webber, nicknamed the Red Widow because all four of her husbands have died, thrives in a castle with dozens of men-at-arms and knights and crossbowmen and a maester clever at building dams. Ser Eustace has only one other knight in his service besides Dunk, the sour-leaf chewing, insult spewing, bad-cheese smelling, peasant bullying Ser Bennis of the Brown Shield. The role Dunk and Egg play in the feud between Ser Eustace and Lady Rohanne is comical, cool, and moving. In “The Mystery Knight” (2010) Dunk ignores Egg’s advice to not participate in a wedding tourney at White Walls castle, an event attended by a handful of colorful hedge knights and lord knights, many of the latter veterans of the now sixteen-years-old failed rebellion. Just who is that Ser John the Fiddler, a handsome young hedge knight who seems too wealthy and cocky to belong to Dunk’s calling? The story shows Dunk learning lessons in drinking, jousting, betting, scheming, and wedding as well as Dunk and Egg’s relationship being suspensefully threatened and movingly affirmed. No one does the pageantry, paraphernalia, and violence of knights--costumes, sigils, armor, weapons, rituals, betrayals, triumphs, tournaments, melees, etc.--better than Martin. Each story features violent action, humorous conversation, and sensual pleasure (bath, feast, wine, etc.). Each story features vivid descriptions, of things like a warhorse charging (“Spatters of mud spraying back”), a burnt woods (“fiery islands in a sea of ashes”), a fight to the death in a river (“The fish flashed past his face”), and a giant wedding pie (“brown and crusty and immense and there were noises coming from inside it”). Each story has a turning point that hinges on honor, a temptation for Dunk to take an easy way (say, to become a lord’s knight in a castle instead of a hedge knight on the road) that he with varying degrees of regret and pride refuses. Each also features unsentimental life wisdom, like “Gods have a taste for cruel japes,” “They all look the same after a few days on a spike,” and “Some old dead king gave his sword to one son instead of the other, and that was the start of it. And now I’m standing here.” The audiobook reader Harry Lloyd has perfect pacing and an appealing manner, but whenever he reads Dunk’s internal thoughts, he makes his voice too low and soft, so if you don’t turn up the volume you might miss some cool self-deprecatory musings. The three novellas are unpredictable, suspenseful, funny, and neat. They are The Game of Thrones with a protagonist who has no interest in the game of thrones and prefers to wander about Westeros with his squire, trying to become a good knight. They are The Game of Thrones without supernatural elements (no white walkers, revenants, red priestesses, and dragons--apart from their eggs). Readers who like realistic medieval stories of knightly adventures from a modern perspective should like this collection. It ends with Martin saying that the adventures of Dunk and Egg continue in as yet unrecorded tales, and I am looking forward to going out on the road with them again. View all my reviews
The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Early SF Genre Post-Apocalypse Story The situation of Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955) is not unlike that in other post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki post-apocalypse sf novels: eighty years before the present of the novel a nuclear war called the Destruction wiped out cities and their populations, technology, infrastructures, and supply and demand systems (Brackett doesn’t concern herself or her people with fallout or radioactive zones, etc.). What Bracket does that’s original is envision fringe religious groups like the Amish who had never fully adopted modern technology and its convenient devices as having been in the best position to survive in the post-apocalypse world. The knowledge that science and technology lay behind the atomic warfare and the belief that high population density in cities led to self-destruction has combined with religion to produce a culture that outlaws anything beyond steam-engine and oil-lamp technology and strictly limits population growth in communities. The Thirtieth Amendment to the US Constitution forbids more than a thousand residents in one community or more than two hundred buildings per square mile. Although children learn basic mathematics, all their other education is Bible-based, and they are severely punished for showing any signs of intellectual curiosity about the world or science and technology and are encouraged to be content with their rural farm lives. (One does wonder if other countries in the world are similarly limiting their population growth and technological advancement). In that context, 14-year-old Len Coulter, the protagonist, lives on his family farm in the laid-back, small New Mennonite community of Piper’s Run in the Ohio area. As the novel begins, Len’s 15-year old cousin Esau convinces him to accompany him to an illicit preaching event in which non-Mennonites are said to entertainingly roll around on the ground in their extreme religious fervor. Instead of being entertained by impassioned preaching and extravagant contortions, however, the young boys are traumatized by the stoning of a young, friendly traveling trader because he was accused of being from the legendary and wicked Bartorstown, a place rumored to be full of Satanic forbidden knowledge. Another friendly trader named Ed Hostetter takes the boys home, where Len’s father counsels him to become content with his life on the farm. This is difficult because Len’s grandmother was a girl when the Destruction hit, so she remembers the colorful clothes and the big cities and many people and is wont to tell Len about them, and because cousin Esau is attracted to forbidden technology, stealing a radio hidden among the stoned trader’s possessions and then three books about physics and radios etc. from Piper’s Run’s teacher’s library. What will come of the boys’ quest for verboten scientific and technological things? Will they be able to find a place to live freely according to their naturally inquisitive spirits? Will they ever find Bartorstown? Will they be accepted by the secretive enclave if they do find it? Are we doomed to repeat our cycle of technological advancement and destruction? Brackett’s novel poses good questions about technology and science and religion, about the degree to which our innate curiosity may be stifled by conservative authoritarian traditions, and about the way in which we may live with nuclear power and atomic weapons if abandoning them is not an option. Her account of Len’s painful awakening in his pious culture, conflicted by guilt and resentment and rebellion and love and curiosity and longing, is compelling. Her depiction of fanatics like the New Ishmaelites (who wander the wilderness in rags to purge their flesh of pleasures) is scary, and the possibility that Bartorstown people are just as fanatical is neat. Audiobook reader Ben Rameka is OK. Despite being written by a woman, like most post-apocalypse fiction Bracket’s novel is quite the boy or young man’s story. The few female characters are not appealingly or deeply developed, and even Len’s love interest Joan Wepplo weakens by the end. Furthermore, works like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) explore similar themes and situations to Brackett’s, but are better written. However, Brackett wrote her novel before theirs, and she should be given credit for that—and for the hard questions she asks. Although the ending is abrupt, the lack of radioactive residue in America is suspect, and Len lacks charisma as a protagonist, the novel is kindly compact as genre novels once were, and I did enjoy reading it. Completists of early sf genre post-nuclear holocaust fiction should read it. View all my reviews
Shadows Linger by Glen Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Neat Sequel Glen Cook’s second Black Company novel, Shadows Linger (1984), shares many features with the first book, The Black Company (1984). Croaker the physician/annalist is still the narrator, now about 40, writing the deeds of his mercenary band of brothers as they’ve become weathered by a few years working for the bad guys. After the devastating trap-battle at Charm that climaxed the first novel, in which a quarter of a million soldiers died, mostly on the rebel side fighting, apparently, for freedom and right against the “wicked” Lady and her armies and Taken (enslaved) wizards, the Company has been sent running around the Lady’s expanding empire dealing with pockets of rebel resistance. To do this they employ any stratagem no matter how ruthless or low (“We never play fair if we can avoid it”) but stop short of committing atrocities. Croaker and a few of his closest colleagues fear being subjected to the Eye of the Lady, which would lay bare all their secrets, like the fact that they’ve known for some time that their comrade Raven deserted to protect his deaf and mute ward Darling, who in reality is the reincarnated White Rose, who 400 or so years ago led a rebellion that defeated the Lady and her even worse and more powerful husband the Dominator and left them imprisoned in the Barrowland. Another secret is that Raven came into possession of papers among which is presumably written the Lady’s secret name, the knowledge of which would give her enemies power over her. If the Lady were to discover any of the above, it would be the end of the Black Company. This novel then starts surprising a reader familiar with the first book, because whereas that one is comprised of seven novella-like chapters that cohere together as a composite novel and are all told in the first person by Croaker, this one is comprised of forty-nine short chapters that alternate between Croaker’s first person narration and his third person narration from the point of view of a cowardly, sneaky, self-serving guy called Marron Shed, who keeps an inn called the Iron Lily in the worst slum of the small provincial northern town of Juniper. Croaker’s chapters depict the progress of the Black Company from far away towards Juniper, while Shed’s chapters depict the doings of Raven and Darling in Juniper, as they’re living in Shed’s inn while Raven tries to organize enough money for another big escape. The nature of Raven’s money-making, its dangerous effects on the local community (and potentially the entire world), his co-option of Shed into his ventures, the connection of all that with Juniper’s cult of the Catacombs-buried dead and a mysterious and dread black castle whose alien architecture has been growing right across from the town, the way Croaker came to be able to narrate chapters from Shed’s point of view, the way Shed/Raven/Darling’s story strand and Croaker/Black Company’s strand come ever closer to meeting, the potential presence of the Dominator, the possibility of the Lady and or her Taken cottoning on to the truth about Croaker and Raven and Darling, all lead to funny, suspenseful, and memorable scenes. The two exciting climaxes of the absorbing novel occur in a big battle scene described obliquely and a small skirmish experienced directly. Cook works into his entertaining story moral conundrums and crises, both for Shed and for Croaker. Croaker and his closest mercenary brothers are growing weary of working for what they increasingly feel is the wrong side instead of doing something to leave the world a better place, but then a mercenary’s life and work consist of shutting off moral considerations and fulfilling his contract and doing his best to stay alive and to stay loyal to his brothers: “He dehumanizes the world outside the bounds of his outfit. Then anything he does, or witnesses, becomes of minor significance as long as its brunt is borne outside the Company.” Shed, “that frightened little man,” meanwhile, is a fine point of view character, perversely fun, almost sublime in his reprehensible ability to land on his feet and talk and fake and improvise his way out of pinches. He couldn’t finally find a spine, could he, in such a way that Croaker would go to the trouble of writing him into the annals of the Black Company? In such a way that he would become an example for Croaker to follow? Fans of hard boiled, humorous, violent, vivid military epic fantasy, of which Cook was a forerunner whose influence is evident in the work of, say, Steven Erikson, should like this book, but should start with the first in the series. Cook’s prose reads like terse, vivid, violent poetry, and he’s good at writing characters at sea in a morally ambiguous world, at times with an ironic wit. Here are some choice lines: --“The children’s heads popped from the weeds like groundhog heads.” --“It was a day ripped full-grown from the womb of despair.” --“There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.” --“I felt like a roach fleeing a man who hated cockroaches and had his stomping boots on.” --“Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.” View all my reviews
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Wit and Wisdom and Daily Life Who wouldn’t want to read a selection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most interesting blog entries? That’s what No Time to Spare (2017) is. After a fine introduction by Karen Jay Fowler that explains how Le Guin got into blogging late in her life, the book presents the entries, which range thematically rather than chronologically from 2010 to 2016, in the following sections: Going Over 80 (on aging), The Lit Biz (on fan letters, awards, the great American novel, utopia/dystopia, Homer, etc.), Trying to Make Sense of It (on gender, politics, economics, uniforms, exorcism, childhood, anger, belief, etc.), and Rewards (on opera, theater, her recently deceased fan-letter-answering-assistant and friend, soft-boiled eggs, her Christmas tree, the Portland foodbank, a rattlesnake, a lynx, and the Oregon high desert), and—in three different interludes—The Annals of Pard (on the antics of her last cat). Le Guin’s wise and witty mind and pleasurable and precise use of language are on display in her blog entries. She likes to take some perceived conventional wisdom and then skewer it or correct it, as she does with sayings like, “You’re only as old as you think you are,” or “the Great American Novel,” or “fantasy is escape.” Even when she’s talking about something like aging, she is liable at any moment to insert a tart opinion or keen perspective on things like the American Dream, gender, or writing. And in her blog entries she prefers asking questions to answering them, as with her suggestion that we find a better metaphor for economics than constant unrestrained growth (which sounds to her like cancer) or as with her wondering whether it’s possible to find a constructive use for anger or to join a male institution like the military as a woman without being coopted by it. Anyone who has read and loved Le Guin’s great work like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or the Earthsea series would get a great, warm, provocative kick out of her blog entries (though I suppose you could also just go to her official website and read them there!). The audiobook reader Barbara Caruso is pretty much just right, a seasoned woman with the intellect and emotion to enhance Le Guin’s experiences and opinions and insights, though her voice gets a bit high when she’s emphasizing key words, a quality that at times rubbed me the wrong way (it may be a matter of taste). This collection is some of the last writing that Le Guin did near the end of her long career, and it reveals some details of her daily life and many examples of her independent mind and heart. It ends on a sublime note, as with fine poetic and vivid nature writing Le Guin describes the high Oregon desert and its flora and fauna, like when she describes some vultures in flight, “quiet lords of the warm towers of the air,” and then a flock of black birds, “flowing down and away . . . and into the reeds and across the air in a single flickering particulate wave. What is entity?” View all my reviews
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk / Palace of Desire / Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Egyptian Culture, Human Nature, Comedy and Tragedy, Politics and Art, and Great Writing My husband took A second wife When wedding henna still Was fresh Upon my hands. The day he brought Her home, her Presence Seared my Flesh. Characters in Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy (1956-58) sometimes sing popular songs like that. The Egyptian Nobel Prize winning author’s work is a semi-autobiographical look at vivid and intense moments in the lives of the members of a Cairene family living in the old part of the city in the first half of the 20th century, when Egypt was struggling for independence from England. The middle-aged patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawad is a terrifying tyrant at home. He makes his sons wait to eat till he leaves the table, refuses to let his wife Amina leave the house, and decides who his children marry: “I’m a man. I’m the one who commands and forbids. I will not accept any criticism of my behavior. All I ask of you is to obey me. Don’t force me to discipline you.” Although Al-Sayyid is a humorless, pious Muslim man at home, when out partying with his cronies he is a pleasure seeking, joke telling, tambourine playing, song singing, alcohol abusing, womanizing playboy. Amina, who when not cooking and cleaning and supporting her children stands in her rooftop garden gazing longingly at the minarets of the mosques she can never visit, is the heart of the family. Eldest son Yasin has inherited his father’s sensual appetites without any of his self-control; middle son Fahmy is a naive law student devoted to Egyptian nationalist-independence; youngest son Kamal (based partly on Mahfouz) is a lively, loving, imaginative boy. Eldest daughter Khadija has an acerbic tongue that often makes fun of people. Youngest daughter Aisha is fair, beautiful, and unworldly. The trilogy depicts the family aging as their country changes. In the first book, Palace Walk (1956), which covers the years 1917-19, Al-Sayyid rules at home and plays outside, Amina takes care of her family while trying to visit the mosque of Al-Husayn, Yasin fails to control his lusts and discovers his father’s dual nature, Aisha and Khadija get involved in matrimony, Fahmy gets involved in revolution, and Kamal tries to understand his changing family. The second book, Palace of Desire (1957), taking place from 1924 to 1927, focuses on the now teenaged Kamal, particularly on his quest to find truth, goodness, and beauty by studying world philosophy while doubting everything in life and on his one-sided idealized love for Aida, an older girl from a wealthy family. “It seemed he had fallen in love in order to master the dictionary of pain.” Acting as a foil to Kamal’s love are the comical sexual misadventures of Yasin, who marries the wrong women for the wrong reasons, and of Al-Sayyid, who gets back in the adultery game after a five-year hiatus. Though just as funny as the first two, the third novel, Sugar Street (1958), covering 1935-44, is sadder than the first two. Here the family is really aging, especially the once vigorous patriarch and his long-suffering wife, and there is much death. “It was sad to watch a family age.” The story centers on Kamal’s “infernal vacillation” as to whether or not to marry, on his new friendship with a kindred-spirit writer, and on his his nephews, Abd, who joins the new Muslim Brotherhood, grows a beard, and becomes quite the fundamentalist, and Ahmad, who joins a Marxist magazine and becomes quite the atheist. Throughout the trilogy Mahfouz writes interesting details about Egyptian family life in the big city in the first half of the 20th century, as well as about the education and class systems, wedding, marriage, divorce, death, funeral, and religious customs, café and brothel culture, gender roles, and politics. He relishes the Egyptian tendency to spice up life and defuse stress with irony. “If our houses are destroyed [in an air raid], they’ll have the honor of being demolished by the most advanced inventions of modern science.” And the Egyptian (or Arabic?) tendency whenever too happy or proud or sad etc. to say something like, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” (The translation of the trilogy is fine, though I sometimes wished the translator would have rendered “God” and “Lord” as Allah.) In addition to particular details of Egyptian culture, Mahfouz writes about universal aspects of human nature, as in the following quotable lines: “Patriotism’s a virtue, if it’s not tainted by xenophobia”; and “People need confidential advice, consolation, joy, guidance, light, and journeys to all regions of the inhabited world and of the soul. That’s what art is.” He leads us into the heads and hearts of his characters, as in the following emotional lines: “In this manner he was afforded an opportunity to feel what a dead man might if still conscious,” “His secret flowed out of him like blood from a wound,” and “Watching her eat pastries was even sweeter than eating them himself.” He also writes wonderful similes with original, surprising, and perfectly apt vehicles, like: “His eyes ran over her body as quickly and greedily as a mouse on a sack of rice looking for a place to get in,” “There were pure white billows resembling pools of light over the Qala’un and Barquq minarets,” and “She was nothing but a symbol, like a deserted ruin that evokes exalted historic memories.” He also writes many humorously cynical lines, like “Ridwan was so proud they were there that his pride almost obscured his grief,” and “But life is full of prostitutes of various types. Some are cabinet ministers and others authors.” The Cairo Trilogy is 1323 pages long. Sometimes my attention waned. But it is full of great scenes, fine writing, authentic people, Cairene culture, human nature, ironic humor, devastating tragedy, and all sorts of interesting ideas about love, families, religion, politics, philosophy, life, and death. Readers fond of classic world literature should like it. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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