Showing posts with label egypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label egypt. Show all posts

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Time is undoubtedly linear, but our perception of it is not. And for Claudia Hampton, the principal character of Penelope Lively’s novel, Moon Tiger, time, manifest as her life, is a veritable jumble of memories, unfulfilled ambition, probabilities and denied possibilities. She is confused, at least on the outside, and lying infirm in a nursing home bed. But her mind is alive with a life lived, a life she distils to share with us. Claudia´s confusion, however, is only an external phenomenon. Internally her memory is sharp, if not ordered. She reminisces on childhood, eager sexual awakening in adolescence, a career as a war correspondent, historian and writer, an affair or two, one very special but doomed, an eventual marriage, maturity, parenthood and old age, but not necessarily in that order.

Events are assembled and revisited. Along the way there has been death, birth, a miscarriage, disappointment, fulfilment and ambition, seasoned with shakings of passion, hatred, pride and not a little incest. It has been an interesting life, especially remarkable for the way that Claudia relives it for us. Claudia’s memories are often intense. There is an attention to detail that renders her character completely three dimensional, four if you include time. She has struggled – and continues to do so – with what seems to be a fundamental lack of love for her daughter, Lisa, and a deep impatience with her grandchildren.

Jasper, her partner, was something of a disappointment, but at least a reassuring one, after war had dealt cruelly with what she herself had wanted. Claudia not only recalls but also relives her passion. She has often been free with her affections, but she has only once given herself completely. Her recollections of the horrors of war are both raw and stark. There is no heroism here: heroic deeds maybe, but only when the protagonists effect them by default. But in many ways Claudia’s life stopped those years ago in the nineteen forties.

What life promised would never be realised and what it had generated died before it truly came to life. Living has thus been a compromise that Claudia herself was only partially willing to make. It is into the gaps left by compromise that occasional views of her from another’s perspective add real spice to the narrative. Moon Tiger is a complex, challenging read. It is so rewarding, however, that time stands still while you read, but then, at the end, seems to have flashed by in an instant. The instant, of course, was Claudia’s life. Moon Tiger was a brand of mosquito repellent that Claudia and her lover burned during their brief time together in Egypt. What was left was just a little ash.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Like father, like son… This could be the motto that underpins Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. This might be a rather flippant way of summarising a novel approaching 250,000 words, and yes, there is much more than this in the Egyptian Nobel Prize Winner’s book. But it should be said at the outset that it is family relationships that dominate the book. 

The work has a broad canvas, but its substance is generally writ small, often within the walls of the family home. Palace Walk is the first of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, a series that spans that spans Egypt’s twentieth century. It features the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al Jawad, a shopkeeper. Strangely, there seems to be little that is seen from his point of view, except of course that which he demands. Throughout he remains somewhat aloof, even inscrutable. I would not want to claim this to be a deliberate portrayal of paternal power. But whatever the case, planned or implied, these sketches of family relations are wonderfully credible as well as enlightening.

By contrast, we see much through the eyes of Amina, Ahmad’s long-suffering wife, who appears to tolerate her husband’s nightly excesses without either question or judgment. She even acts independently, just once, and is made to pay for it. There are two daughters, Khadija and Aisha. Khadija, the elder, has unfortunately inherited her father’s looks. Aisha, by contrast, is known for her beauty, and there is much discussion of potential husbands, associated with much anguish on the subject of who should marry first.

The sons are very different characters, but perhaps they each display different aspects of their father. The older ones of course develop an eye for the local talent and this leads to unexpected encounters with their father in unfamiliar surroundings in which he displays talents that no-one in the family suspected he had. The other talents on show are very much anticipated. When the youngest son befriends members of the British garrison in Cairo at the end of World War One, he is treated very much as a clown, a figure of fun, a role he seems to enjoy. This is clearly not dissimilar to the way the British appear to want to treat the country, not to mention the hated Australians.

Later, when this particular generation marches to demand political representation and power, it is British bullets that deny all rights. Like father, like son, the issues go round and round. Does anything change? If the reader approaches palace Walk as if it were a nineteenth century novel, its style, length and content will provide great enjoyment and insight. But don’t expect in this great work overt philosophy, analysis or comment. Egypt as described, especially within this family, was just not that sort of place.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Arabia by Jonathan Raban

At the end of the seventies Jonathan Raban wandered across the Middle East. Arabia was the book he wrote after impressionistic visits to Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and, briefly, Lebanon. Paradoxically, the book starts and finishes in London, because it was there that questions about Arab identity and culture arose in the author’s mind. 

 In Earls Court the author muses on the question, “Who are the Arabs?” At the time in common prejudice they had a reputation for association with terrorism, being fundamentally religious and having uncountable wealth. So it seems that times have not changed that much… So Jonathan Raban resolved to find out for himself. Unlike most authors of travelogues, however, Jonathan Raban saw his first task as learning the language and, as a result of this laudable approach, Arabia is perhaps more of an achievement than it otherwise might have been. 

In a nutshell, he found Bahrain seedy and Qatar rich but built in a scrap-yard. Abu Dhabi was new and squeaky clean, eager to impress, while Dubai seemed to be populated by business sharks, opportunistic, pragmatic but obsessively driven and eager to excel. All Yemenis appeared to be overactive dwarves on a spending spree. Egypt was big and scruffy, and Jordan was like Switzerland with parties.

You will gather immediately that Arabia is not an in-depth study of Arab culture, society or indeed anything else. Its pages are heavily populated with stories of expatriates, the sort of people who might be eager to talk over a drink in a bar. Though he quotes Thesiger, Jonathan Raban seems to have neither the inclination nor the means to follow the explorer into the desert. This is not a criticism. He also quotes Alice, but does not venture into wonderland. But there again, perhaps he does precisely that, especially in Abu Dhabi. 

Thirty years later, a casual visitor to the places Jonathan Raban frequented might have similar impressions, except the places and the associated reactions would all be much bigger. Bahrain’s planned causeway was built and at weekends there are even more Saudis doing what Saudis do at weekends. Abu Dhabi is vastly more splendid, and Dubai is still trying to be the tallest, biggest, the best in something measurable and sellable.

Jordan may well be significantly poorer than the country Jonathan Raban found. It seems he may have found it difficult to escape the swish diplomatic and international resident areas, and he never made it to Wadi Rum or Petra, so didn’t even have a tourist experience to relate. I have never been to Yemen or Egypt, so I cannot comment on them. One thing that always comes across in Jonathan Raban’s work is a willingness to engage with people, very often over a whisky! And, though Arabia might only make a very light scratch across the surface of its subject, its focus on individual vignettes makes it a highly entertaining and engaging read. The region is no doubt still host to many others like them. 

The book is also mildly informative. And, on a weekend where debates rage on the proposed construction of a mosque in New York, it is interesting to reflect how little attitudes towards the book’s subject seem to have changed.