Saudi author Yousef al-Mohaimeed, whose book, according to Scott Wilson of the Washington Post, sold five hundred copies in just three days at one bookshop in Riyadh, is certain to gain western readers with his intense and often moving story of a love gone wrong. Munira al-Sahi, a beautiful thirty-year-old woman, has been studying for her graduate degree and working at a counseling center for abused girls and women in Riyadh. She also writes a once-a-week column for a local newspaper. Though she has heard all manner of terrible life stories from the women she counsels, she never suspects she herself will become another sad statistic: the man who has been courting her is an impostor, someone who is using her to gain revenge on one of her brothers by ruining her life and making her his legal and emotional prisoner forever. Through his focus on Munira, Yousef al-Mohaimeed reveals a much larger purpose than just a sad love story. Here he recreates the lives of many seemingly typical Saudi women in 1990, a time in which American Patriot missiles and Russian Scuds are streaking through the sky in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
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In the third novel in this outstanding mystery series to be released in the US, alcoholic police inspector Harry Hole, “the lone wolf, the drunk, the [Oslo Police] department’s enfant terrible…and the best detective on the sixth floor” has been AWOL from his job for a month, on a bender which he seems unable to end. His life is a disaster from which he seeks temporary solace by drinking himself into oblivion. Norwegian author Jo Nesbo begins this novel with the best three introductory paragraphs that I have read in years. Ostensibly a description of a water leak which works its way from a fifth floor apartment into the apartment below, it is, in reality a menace-filled mood-setter which presages real horror. And when the ceiling in the fourth floor apartment starts to leak on the young couple preparing a pot of potatoes on the stove, Nesbo’s truly wicked sense of humor kicks in, to re-emerge at other critical points in the novel. (A terrific mystery.)
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I can honestly say that I have never sat down before with a new book of poetry and found myself so engrossed that I have read the entire book in one leisurely sitting. Sure, as a student, I may have come close to imitating that experience during an all-nighter with a paper due the next morning, but then I didn’t experience the poems’ pleasure, and probably didn’t read the whole collection, preferring instead to pan for nuggets I could quote for credit. This collection by Andrea Cohen is different—special—so fresh, so accessible, and so exciting in its imagery, irony, humor, and honest sentiment, that time became irrelevant for me when I was reading. In the course of three hours, I was laughing, smiling in knowing agreement at new insights, loving the “a-ha” moments when I finally “got” what the poet’s image was all about, weeping at the unvarnished treatment of death in some poems which evoked sorrows of my own, and loving the intimacy of sharing so many events with a woman I had never met but now know better than some of my “closest” friends. (On my list of Favorites for 2009)
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A sanitorium set in Suvanto in rural Finland, sometime in the late 1920s, has drawn female patients from all Europe and America. The “up-patients,” primarily wealthy women who enjoy the specialized spa treatments and the chance to escape from their everyday lives for periods of up to six months, live on the top floor above those who are physically ill. The arrival of Julia Dey, a woman with a gynecological infection, changes the atmosphere from what it has been in the past. Julia is often mean-spirited and sometimes deliberately cruel. Julia sees this group as fair game and zeroes in on them. The novel is dark, almost claustrophobic in its intensity. The nauseating descriptions and language which the chaotic Julia Dey employs in her relationships stand in stark contrast to the author’s often beautifully lyrical descriptions of the weather as it changes with the seasons. Overall, the author’s purpose is not clear to me, however, and the novel is sometimes frustrating.
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John Banville, in his first “literary” novel since his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, presents a most unusual novel which takes place in Arden, a large family home somewhere in Ireland or England, as the family gathers to pay homage to the dying patriarch, Adam Godley. Godley, who has had a stroke and is thought to be unconscious, is a mathematician renowned for having posited an “exquisite concept, time’s primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation…the infinities.” Hermes, the son of Zeus, is the primary narrator, commenting on what is happening in the house and among the characters, while, at the same time, keeping an eye on his father, the randy Zeus, who is found asleep and sucking his thumb following one amorous encounter. The novel often resembles a farce, but it lacks the spontaneity that makes that genre so much fun. Instead, it feels as if every aspect of the novel has been composed and organized to the nth degree. At times it also feels like a novel of ideas, but those ideas are often murky, and there were times in which I wondered what Banville’s purpose was in writing the book.
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