Tunisian author Habib Selmi, who has criticized the Arab novel in general because it “overwhelmingly emphasizes the social aspect,”* takes the opposite tack in his own novel, creating an intimate portrait of a years-long relationship between a French woman and a Tunisian man, seven years her senior. Selmi believes that “the novel should be a novel of the self as it intersects with its surroundings….[It] is not a sack full of occurrences and changes.”* Not surprisingly, then, his own novel deals almost exclusively with the thoughts of one of the partners in the relationship–Mahfouth, who has a doctorate in Arabic literature and who is currently working in a Parisian hotel and working part-time as a university lecturer. His lover, Marie-Claire, is a devoted but somewhat more free-wheeling partner who loved college but now works at the post office. Everything we learn of Marie-Claire, we discover through Mahfouth’s point of view, and when, after the initial bloom of love wears off, he becomes annoyed with her for doing or saying something he does not like, readers will have no problem understanding why she becomes annoyed with him in turn.
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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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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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Last week, if someone had told me that I’d be able to take only one book of short stories with me on a long trip to a desert island, I’d have looked first at all the powerful and intriguing stories by Andre Dubus II. Then I’d have thought about the stories of John Updike, another favorite story writer, pausing for a long time over the volume which contains “Pigeon Feathers,” one of my favorite stories. Today, however, I’d be gravitating toward this book, completely different from any collection of stories I’ve ever read, a volume containing so much variety and color in its subject matter, so many overlapping themes, such strange and ultimately intriguing characters (who peek in at various points throughout the book and revisit us in new stories throughout), and so much fascinating discussion about the nature of stories and story-writing that ultimately, I’d probably choose this one for the island trip. The Dubus and Updike collections are among the best in the world, but on my desert island I think I’d want the stimulation, excitement, humor, uniqueness, and, especially, the sense of wonder that are all contained in this one volume.
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