The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Necessary and Potent, but too Rich Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Map of Salt and Stars (2018) is a moving, harrowing, beautiful novel framing a folktale, the frame story occurring in 2011 during the chaos of the Arab Spring, the folktale in the 12th century during the conflict between the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, the Sunni Turkish ruler Nur ad-Din, and the Shia Fatimid caliphs. After the death to cancer of her father (“Baba”), eleven-year-old Syrian-American Nour moved with her mother and two big sisters, sweet Huda and prickly Zahra, from Manhattan to Homs in Syria--just in time for the start of the Syrian civil war. As the novel opens, Nour is still grieving the loss of her beloved Baba, and so she begins telling her favorite story that he used to tell her, about 16-year-old Rawiya running away from home, disguising herself as a boy, and becoming the apprentice of the map-maker al-Idrisi as the old man is about to embark on a journey to make the most accurate and complete (and beautiful) map of the known world for King Roger of Sicily. Nour, then, recounts two stories: her own in the present as she and her family embark on their refugees’ journey west through Syria, Lebannon, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, and Rawiya’s adventures with al-Idrisi visiting the same locations 800 years or so earlier. How the two tales mirror each other is one of the pleasures of the novel. Both Nour and Rawiya are spunky, sensitive, capable, intelligent, likeable girls, and while Nour’s mother is a professional map maker, so is Rawiya’s mentor. Nour’s story is realistic and features no supernatural creatures, whereas Rawiya’s is a historical adventure peopled by real figures like King Roger and by fantastical figures like the roc. I was quite moved by Nour’s 2011 story, which depicts things that many Americans (like me) should be more aware of: living in a city being destroyed by civil war (kids trying to hear the shelling as distant thunder), becoming a homeless refugee, making deals with human smugglers, crossing deserts on foot, boarding rickety ferries vulnerable to fires and missiles, stowing away in a refrigerated fruit truck, and encountering young men bent on rape. All such scenes are depicted with an intense, sensual, and emotional detail that render them suspenseful and terrifying. And Nour’s relationships with her father’s best friend Abu Sayeed and her two big sisters, Zahra and Huda, are fine. The folk tale about Rawiya was less compelling and a bit too long. One problem I had with the novel concerns Joukhadar’s impressive style, scintillating with striking similes and descriptions, because often I wondered, “Could an eleven-year-old girl say that?” For example: --“A truck disappears under the shimmer of heat in front of us. Mountains loom. Cliffs of red sandstone rise up, wind carved, pockmarked like sheets of termite-eaten wood.” --“Arabic fills the air like a flock of startled birds.” --“an oblong pastry armored with almond slivers.” Sometimes I was pulled out of my immersion in the story to marvel at Joukhadar’s poetic language and or to question whether Nour could use it, especially for details that don’t seem relevant or important enough to warrant the attention, e.g., “al-Idrisi’s beard was tinged with dust, and the wind lifted stray camel hairs from his turban.” Sometimes Nour’s distinctive descriptions were too much of a good thing. The occasional misuse of lay/lie in the novel (e.g., “My stomach hurts and I want to lay down”) makes me wonder if they’re Nour or Joukhadar’s mistakes. . . I also found myself wondering why Joukhadar made Nour prone to synesthesia, so she sees sounds and letters as colors, like this: “’Nour.’ It’s Mama’s voice, warm cedar brown, its edges curled up into red. She’s annoyed.” The novel would have been moving, beautiful, terrible, and poetic enough without the synesthesia, which seems to serve mainly to make Nour more special, which, in her curiosity, intelligence, sweetness, courage, love of stories, and so on, she already is enough. YA overkill. Speaking of YA fiction, first person present tense narration is so common these days (e.g., Hunger Games, Divergent, Dread Nation) that it almost ruined my reading. If Joukhadar had used third person for the frame narration (as he does for her folk tale), I could have more easily accepted the vivid poetic writing. Or if he had had Nour use the past tense for her frame narration (as he does for her folk tale), I wouldn’t have kept thinking, “When is she telling her stories?” Joukhadar avoids detailed contemporary political commentary, as Nour knows little of what’s going on in Syria and doesn’t explain the different sides fighting the civil war or criticize the western world’s lack of sympathy for the plight of refugees like her family. The main good the novel does is to make us imagine through the eyes of a precocious girl what it’s like to have one’s world and home and family upended (“How many times can you lose everything before you become nothing?”) and then to have to go on a series of refugee journeys with ever dwindling resources (“Is pain poisonous?”). Despite my criticisms, I was moved, impressed, and enriched by the novel and recommend it. I usually prefer rich writing to plain. And we need more YA novels about Arab protagonists. The reader Lara Sawalha talks like a typical American girl for Nour’s narration and dons a Middle-Eastern Arabic type accent for the characters in Rawiya’s story. She does a good job both ways (though she does for some reason pronounce coyote as kay-otee and turquoise as tur-kwise). If you like fantasy and reality and YA fiction and are curious about Syrian/Arabic/refugee culture and plights, you should read this book. It answers the following question in the affirmative: “Is there still room in the world for extraordinary things?” View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
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 ...
|
My Fukuoka University