“What happens to days that disappear? The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held— a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worries and triumphs and regrets— all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room. When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to to do was open those gates.

At least, that was how it started.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 18, 2014)

The idea for writing a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph came apparently from the author’s husband. It is a brilliant one, even more brilliantly executed. First, because she uses it for resonance rather than prediction; you recognize the biblical parallels after they have occurred, but you never know when she is going to depart from the Genesis version, so her novel remains surprising to the end. Second, because the Egyptian setting grounds the book in aspects of Jewish history that are perhaps less well-known, but obviously relevant to the eternal geopolitical situation in the Middle East. And third, because the Torah reference provides the perfect opening to explore many issues in Jewish teaching and philosophy, most notably those concerning divine providence, accident, and free will. The title of her novel, actually, is borrowed from a treatise on these very questions written in Cairo by the twelfth century doctor and philosopher Maimonides. The result, in Horn’s hands, is a richly layered novel that is humane, exciting, informative, and thought-provoking, all at the same time.

Josephine (Josie) Ashkenazi is a software developer and CEO of a company called Genizah, which enables its customers to record, index, cross-reference, and recall even the most trivial aspects of their lives, linking them to everything around them in both historical and geographical dimensions. She is asked to go to Egypt as consultant on a vast new library in Alexandria, and accepts the challenge, leaving behind her Israeli-born husband Itamar, her six-year-old daughter Tali, and her elder sister Judith, who has a subsidiary position with the firm. I must admit that there was something a little science-fictiony about the premise (or magical realist, if you will); although the ideas are all conceivable, it requires some suspension of disbelief to accept the degree to which they had been developed. But two things happen to anchor the book almost immediately. The first is that the action suddenly shifts back to 1896 in Cambridge, England, where two formidable Scottish sisters confront the University Reader in Rabbinics, Solomon Schechter, with a fragment of manuscript they have recently brought back from Cairo. Despite the slightly comic tone of this episode, it is also feels entirely true, and indeed one discovers that Schechter was a real person. And when Josie goes to Egypt, she falls victim to a more contemporary reality: she is kidnapped and held for ransom. The suspension of disbelief quality never goes away completely from Josie’s story, but from now on her role as CEO fades behind those as absent wife, missing mother, and beaten woman.

Genizah, the name of Josie’s firm, is the Hebrew word for the store-room in a synagogue where Torah scrolls and similar documents were placed after they had become unusable, for the name of God could not be erased. The real Schechter unearthed in the Genizah of a Cairo synagogue a chaotic hoard of documents, secular as well as sacred, a discovery which made his name. Among them were letters from Maimonides and a draft of his Guide for the Perplexed. This opens the door to scenes in Cairo of the 12th century, to interweave with those in the 19th and 21st. It also introduces some of the philosophical themes of the book.

Horn is a Jewish writer (and winner of two National Jewish Book Awards), not just because she writes about Jewish characters and subjects, but because she shares the Jewish fascination with philosophical debate. There is a chapter, for instance, in which Maimonides outlines five theories of divine providence, ranging from total predestination to utter chance, and another in which he classifies three different kinds of evil. Other readers might consider these dry diversions, but they fascinated me both as ideas and for how they linked to the moral implications of the story of Josie and her family at home. They formed a serious core to the novel that amply balanced its more fantastic aspects. And indeed balance is all; the more I look, the more I see parallels and linkages that bind this complex novel together. Perhaps some of its characters could be developed a little further, but as a theme-based novel it could hardly be bettered.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (September 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dara Horn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on the biblical Joseph
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Bibliography:

• In the Image (2002)
• The World to Come (2006)
• All Other Nights (2009)
• A Guide for the Perplexed (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Rescuer (DATE)

“The call came late on May 2, the first day of what should have been the last ten days of Jason’s fifth tour. First, last, fourth, fifth: everything in military life involved numbers — or letters.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 11, 2014)

In a blog that she wrote for the Huffington Post, Lea Carpenter notes that eleven days was the period of truce negotiated between King Priam and Achilles in the Iliad after the death of Hector — an encounter movingly narrated by David Malouf in his novel Ransom. It is an appropriate reference for many reasons, not least the almost classical values that Carpenter both celebrates and espouses in her storytelling; this gripping debut novel is immediate in content, ample in moral perspective, rich and thoughtful in its human values.

Yet its modernity makes Carpenter’s work quite different from Homer or Malouf. Jason, her male protagonist (yes, the reference to the Argonauts is deliberate), is a Naval SEAL officer on his fifth deployment overseas — pretty clearly somewhere in the Middle East. His mother Sara, a young single mother living at Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, is told that he has been missing for two days. The rest of the book follows her for the remainder of the eleven-day period until he is located. It also follows Jason in flashback over some eleven years, as he swaps the idea of Harvard for Annapolis after 9/11, graduates, and undergoes the extraordinarily demanding SEAL training in Coronado, California.

It is significant that this is a war novel written by a woman. You might expect authenticity in the portrait of a mother waiting at home for news of her only son, but her ability to provide empathy without a trace of sentiment is quite remarkable. Even more remarkable is her portrayal of Jason’s life, with enough military detail to rival Tom Clancy, and yet always focusing on his inner life; to call it spiritual would not be far from the mark.

In the same Huffington Post blog, Carpenter says that one inspiration for her novel was an old photograph of her father, who was some sort of special forces agent in Vietnam. Another was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, just as she was beginning to write. It is an impressive attempt to imagine what her father must have gone through then and what those young men in the Middle East were going through now. Something of the lost father figure comes through in the novel in the person of Jason’s father, David — an older man probably connected with the CIA, who loved Sara and continued to support her from a distance until his death in the 1990s. Jason’s attempt to live up to his idealized image of his father is a large part of his motivation; we eventually come to realize that he has greatly exceeded it. Carpenter cannot really fill David out, though, and she is wise not to try. Her main focus is on these two younger people, mother and son, and her empathy with both is extraordinary.

As a pacifist, with little patience for the jingoistic flag-waving of the past decade, I am amazed by how much I liked this book. Yet Carpenter’s achievement is to make politics vanish in the light of simple humanity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 48 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 18, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lea Carpenter
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Soldier’s Wife by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• Eleven Days (June 2013)

“Mohammed was afraid. Afraid of having to climb mountains, pyramids of stones. Afraid of tumbling into the ravine of the absurd, of having to face each of his children, over whom he had lost every scrap of authority.  Afraid of accepting a life in which he no longer controlled much of anything.  He lived through his routine, the long straight line that carried on regardless.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (FEB 26, 2011)

In a palace in the old village Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the elegiac and moving story of a simple man from a small village in Morocco, who feels completely lost in the fast moving, modern world. Mohammed had to change “from one time to another, one life to another” when back in 1962, this young peasant was persuaded to leave his remote village in Morocco and join the immigrant labour force in France. Now forty years later, he is about to start his retirement and this new situation preoccupies and worries him deeply. From one moment to the next, it will end the years of daily routines which have made him feel safe, secure and needed. They have also protected him from reflecting on his life and its challenges: “Everything seemed difficult to him, complicated, and he knew he was not made for conflicts.” Why does he have to retire at all? It is “a trap,” a strange, “diabolical” invention! In this gently and simply told story, Tahar Ben Jelloun explores themes of home, immigration, faith, the social and cultural discrepancies between immigrants and their French surroundings, and last, but not least, the resultant mounting estrangement between parents and their children.

In his musings, much of it conveyed in direct voice, Mohammed recalls images of different stages in his life: his childhood, his marriage, the first ever sighting of the sea… all memories that he cherishes and contrasts with his life in France. It is his firm grounding in Islam, however, that has always guided his thinking and behaviour: “His touchstone for everything was Islam: My religion is my identity. I am Muslim before being a Moroccan, before being an immigrant.” Tahar Ben Jelloun delicately elucidates the intricate correlation between faith and reality in Mohammed’s life and, interestingly, he links it to the concept of “time.” When Mohammed was young, time was structured around the five daily prayers and the year around major festivals throughout the seasons. We, as readers, can easily perceive why, after decades of time-keeping through his work at an automobile plant, he feels completely lost in these early days of “tirement,” as he calls it. How can he fill time now and in France – “a place where he does not belong at all?”  Time stretches without structure, unless – Mohammed realizes – he takes on a new project and sets out planning it: he will build a house for the whole family in the old village… Surely, that will bring his children back to him and the traditional life, as it was before, can be rekindled.

A man like Mohammed, barely literate, who only speaks his Berber language, has never felt the need to make an effort to learn French beyond the basics. He can cite the Koran in Arabic, but cannot express an independent thought in this holy language. He has come to France to work, get paid and to return home to his village every summer and eventually for good; his emotional centre is only there. His five children, on the other hand, are growing up in the French environment and speak only French to him. The author, while seeing the world primarily through Mohammed’s eyes, such when he describes his hero’s attitude towards his wife and inability and unwillingness to comprehend his children, nevertheless encourages us as readers to see beyond Mohammed’s narrow and naïve interpretation of his surroundings and place his perspective into a broader context. And we, in turn, feel growing sympathy both for Mohammed’s efforts to rebuild his life and for his taciturn, acquiescent and submissive wife. Will he, once ensconced in his new project, convince the now grown children and their children to follow his plans?

Tahar Ben Jelloun, who also emigrated as a young man to France in 1971, is intimately familiar with the issues that face North African immigrants in France. Son of a village shopkeeper, he was fortunate to do well in school and was able to pursue his studies in Paris after his release from prison in Morocco. He is a prolific and much revered author of many novels and other writings. Despite his own education in Arabic, he writes exclusively in French – a language he feels is better suited to the social topics he wants to address in his fiction. As for his hero, Arabic for him is a sacred language which commands reverence and humility from those who use it. While completely at ease in the French environment, he stated in an interview with the Paris Review in 1989: “When I tell a story, I feel Moroccan and tell it like a Moroccan storyteller, with imagery and a construction that is not always realistic, but where poetry can reside.” His language in this novel fully reflects his intentions: his affection for the Moroccan landscape and life in the village shines through in rich and poetic imagery. The fine line between reality and mysticism becomes opaque. For me, these passages are add some of the most precious aspects in this touching account. “I tell a story in the hope that it will incite reflection, provoke thought.” That indeed he does with this insightful novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin; Original edition (January 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Tahar Ben Jelloun (In French)
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Friend The Blinding Absence of Light

Bibliography:

• Solitaire (1976)
• The Sand Child (1985)
• The Sacred Night (1987)
• Silent Day in Tangiers (1990)
• With Downcast Eyes (1991)
• Corruption (1995)
• This Blinding Absence of Light (2001)
• The Last Friend (2003; February 2006 in US)
• Leaving Tangier (March 2009 in US)
• Rising of the Ashes (February 2010 in US)
• A Palace in the Old Village (January 2011 in US)

Nonfiction:

• Racism Explained to My Daughter (1998)
• French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants (December 1999)
• Islam Explained (2002)

“Sometimes when a false self cracks, we find there’s nothing inside. One of the sad things you learn in therapy is that there are some people who are beyond help, I mean direct help. They’re like black holes. They can suck the life out of anyone who tries to help them. So you need to take care of yourself, yes?”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (FEB 13, 2011)

The amazingly versatile Gruber has done it again, filling us armchair adventurers with knowledge as well as thrills and making the outlandish plausible.

This time he leaves behind themes of previous books – the diabolical intricacies of the art world (The Forgery of Venus), Shakespearean intrigue (The Book of Air and Shadows), Cuban Santeria (The Jimmy Paz trilogy) – to take on the intrigues of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Before you start groaning, let me say that those who find the whole muddle a hopeless quagmire will gain greater understanding and those who prefer their political thrillers in black and white should look elsewhere.

The narrator is Theo Laghari, a Pakistani-American U.S. Special Forces soldier with a back-story any boy would envy. Born to a prominent Lahore family, he enjoys a privileged upbringing, a bit marred by the storms his Polish-American former circus magician mother creates by her outrageous behavior, like going on the Haj disguised as a boy then writing a book about it.

A sudden tragedy ends this comfortable if insecure boyhood, inculcating the young Theo into the code of the Pashtuns (the tribe of his best friend and his grandfather’s best friend, Theo’s foster father) and spiriting him off to Afghanistan where he joins jihad against the Russians, training that well prepares him for his third incarnation in the U.S. military.

The present-day kidnapping of Theo’s mother, Sonia, along with the international group she has gathered together in Pakistan for a peace conference, kick starts the plot. Point of view alternates between Theo and Sonia, with detours to Cynthia Lam, an ambitious Vietnamese-American NSA officer whose facility for languages leads her to believe that intel concerning a Pakistani nuclear bomb plot is a hoax.

Sonia is appropriately larger than life, manipulating her unsophisticated captors with Sufi dream interpretations and Jungian psychology. She can discuss all aspects of jihad, Islam and hypocrisy, and arouses brutal anger as well as doubt.

Religious observance – her native Catholicism in the West and her adopted Islam in the East – grounds her, but she is a Sufi at heart. “They believe that everything written about God is in some sense wrong….He’s always a surprise and trying to chain Him to a human religion is folly.”

This is a talky novel, but the ideas are well put, thought provoking and go some distance toward making sense of Islamic and Pashtun honor, tradition and history, though no easy solution to the mess is on offer. The kidnap situation is highly unstable, including videotaped beheadings, and Theo’s rescue plans unfold in classic thriller style.

There are a number of twists and surprises at the end as well as some unanswered questions and at least one gratifying thread-tying development.

Gruber is a fine writer and researcher (who has in his past life been a chef, a marine biologist, a traveling hippie and rock group roadie, a civil servant at the highest Washington echelons, an environmental expert, a speechwriter and more) who puts his eclectic talents to excellent use in his wide-ranging fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 91 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Griffin; Reprint edition (February 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Gruber
EXTRAS:	Michael Gruber discusses The Good Son Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Valley of Bones

Bibliography:

Jimmy La Paz Series

• Tropic of Night (2004)
• Valley of Bones (2005)
• Night of the Jaguar (2006)

Stand-alone thrillers:

• The Book of Air and Shadows (2007)
• The Forgery of Venus (2008)
• The Good Son (2010)
• The Return (September 2013)

Young Adult:

• The Witch’s Boy (2005)

“He trained his eye on the barren land below, thinking of the concentration of human history here, in such a small corner of the globe—and yet how clean and innocent the desert looked from the air. After a lifetime spent in the urban landscapes of California, he liked this easy legibility of form, the broad and simple sweep of it, and played with the notion that his life here could reflect the same spacious characteristics.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JAN 27, 2011)

In the period right after the first Gulf War, an uneasiness hung all over Kuwait—its residents forever waiting for Saddam Hussein to strike again. As an American expat in the country for five years around that same time period, author Anastasia Hobbet witnessed this unease first hand. It forms a perfect backdrop for her novel, Small Kingdoms, which tells the story of an assorted set of Kuwaiti and American characters.

One upper-class Kuwaiti family includes Mufeeda, the wife, and her doctor husband, Saaleh. They live in a huge mansion with their kids (who, they worry, are fast becoming too Americanized), Saaleh’s domineering mother and a whole assortment of maids and help. Across the street lives an American expat family—Kit who is a wide-eyed American who is trying to go beyond her humble Oklahoma roots; husband, Jack, who works at the Kuwait branch of an American company and their two children.

At the hospital where Saaleh works is an American doctor—Theo, a recent transplant to the country. Theo takes lessons in Arabic from a Palestinian woman in the country—Hanaan. The two are rebels from their individual cultures in many ways and it is perhaps inevitable that they soon fall in love.

The story that moves this novel forward revolves around the help, usually provided by South Asians. There have already been three cases of severe abuse and death of South Asian maids recently but nobody is paying attention. “…They’re mistreated and yet that fails to move us because we consider them so far beneath us,” says a local of the South Asian workers, “They’re cheap and expendable.”

But then, a similar situation arises close to home. Mufeeda’s cook, Emmanuela, a young immigrant from Goa, India, has been sneaking food and trying to get it through to a severely abused woman who is working next door. Deprived of food and fresh air, this woman is enduring the worst abuse and it is only slowly that word about her situation leaks out. Soon most of the primary characters—especially the women—will play a part in saving this woman from what would be an assuredly miserable fate.

Small Kingdoms succeeds in large part because of the tremendous observational powers of its author. Hobbet’s unerring rendition of even the smallest of details works to create a fascinating portrait of the Kuwaitis for sure, but also of the relationships they have with people outside their immediate circle. Very few authors are able to weave these kinds of precisely observed details effectively into stories (Jhumpa Lahiri is one who readily comes to mind) but Hobbet does so beautifully. In one instance Theo thinks back to his interactions with South Asians in his native California, when he meets an Indian doctor. He notices “the same blunt style he’d noted among newly-arrived Indians in the U.S.: Where do you live? What is your salary?” Hobbet writes. Even this seemingly insignificant detail is a precise capture of the community.

Class and status are important considerations in the society—Hanaan, native to Palestine, is considered a “bidoon” (a person without a state) and Hobbet writes about the class system that exists not just between the rich Kuwaitis and their help but also within the help itself. The driver for example, complains when his task is handed over to the gardener. “But he is just a gardener,” he says.

Especially interesting is the nuance Hobbet paints even the Americans with. To the Kuwaitis, Americans all seem like one big homogenous group: “Perhaps this was the essence of Americans. They could be fine people: sincere, well-educated, and yet very raw,” Mufeeda thinks. Yet, it is obvious that class plays out even internally within the expat community. Kit, who comes from a small community in Oklahoma, finds it difficult to get used to the idea of having someone else do the cooking or the dishes. She also doesn’t readily identify with other American women expats who come from presumably more urban backgrounds. “Everything’s alien to me, even other Americans,” she says.

As the book moves along, Hobbet also shows how many characters must face compromises that pit their cultural values against what they believe is right. The final choice might not always be what the reader (or the character) wants but it’s certainly understandable.

In a final sequence of events, the women in Small Kingdoms act in concert to save the starving Indian maid. In banding together they prove capable of uniting despite their cultural differences. What’s more it’s apparent that these bold acts are as much of a challenge for Kit as they are for Mufeeda. This is the only part of the novel, which I thought strained credulity a bit. Some readers might find it hard to believe that the ever-diffident, conformist Mufeeda would ultimately suddenly garner so much inner strength as to do what she does in the end.

The increasing tension surrounding the maid’s condition and the women’s attempts to free her is tied to a separate accelerating set of events—another strike from Saddam is imminent and the American families are ordered to evacuate. So essentially Kit must take part in this heroic effort as she races against the clock, trying to wrap it all up before she boards a plane for England with her children. This pacing too seems a little forced and eventually a little melodramatic.

In the end though, Small Kingdoms will be treasured for its contribution to literature about a place that is little understood. Hobbet’s enormous powers of observation allow her to weave a tale that is an insightful peek into daily life in Kuwait. The picture she paints with a varied and interesting set of characters is vivid and vibrant. You can almost taste the sand in your mouth.

What’s especially interesting is how much Kit and Mufeeda—women from two radically different cultures—have in common. It is Hobbet’s ability to shine light on their shared humanity that ultimately makes Small Kingdoms a moving read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (January 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anastasia Hobbet
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel with insight into a Middle East country: In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz

Bibliography:

• Pleasure of Believing (1997)
• Small Kingdoms (January 2010)

“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 7, 2010)

I don’t know why I resisted Orhan Pamuk all of these years, but one thing’s for sure – I now can’t live without him. I remember the critical acclaim that followed Pamuk in 2005 after the release of Snow, but even with a Nobel Prize under his belt, I was hardly swayed. That may have had something to do with my obsessive relationship with Philip Roth during that time – after all, I’m a loyal gal. And this Pamuk guy was not going to take me away from the legendary Zuckermans and Kepeshes of modern Jewish fiction.

This was all before a few months ago when I stumbled across a review of Pamuk’s literary masterpiece, The Museum of Innocence. The premise of the novel immediately had me fixated: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy spends the next eight years of his life…sitting in a living room with girl, her husband, and her parents, watching Turkish serials and the evening news, night after night. Now that’s what hooked me: the utter devotion and sacrifice that boy made just to see his beloved, day after day, for eight torturous years, with hardly any affirmation from his object of affection.

Speaking of objects, what Kemal, our love-struck narrator of this brilliant, 560-page novel does manage to do, is become a collector of sorts. Unable to recapture the love of his beautiful, distant-relation, Fusun, (who incidentally marries another man after severing ties with our narrator), Kemal begins to secretly collect items from Fusun, ranging from an earring, to a cigarette butt. And this collection begins to grow into a private, perpetual museum which Kemal cherishes and worships like a Marian shrine.

If I seem evasive, it’s because I don’t wish to give away too much of this melancholy tale of love and obsession in Turkey, circa 1970s. And how could I, anyway? This novel is a grand accomplishment for Pamuk, who allegedly worked on this project for ten years. Filled with images of modern Istanbul, with references to Turkish film, fashion, and soda pop, each page is a tender, nostalgic homage to a city now utterly transformed. Pamuk’s desire to seize these memories go well beyond the confines of his novel: this year, at some undisclosed date, the official Museum of Innocence will open to the Turkish public in the town of Cukurcuma, where much of the story unfolds. Fans of his novel will have an opportunity to visit the museum, and see first-hand, the very objects that Pamuk meticulously records throughout the book. For a sneak peak of these objects, see this slideshow.

As this review comes to an end, I have a confession to make. I can’t get over The Museum of Innocence. I think about it…all the time. It haunts me – like Wong Kar Wai’s similar magnum opus, the movie In the Mood for Love. Filled with lingering reminiscence, clandestine love, and most importantly, an era now vanished, the two works are almost companion pieces. There is something cinematic about Pamuk’s novel that begins on the front dust jacket and ends on the final page. I remember holding this giant of a book for the first time and being completely enthralled by the image before me: a group of young, Turkish adults, in a 1950s convertible car, all smiling. And I knew at that moment that this image was akin to a Lynchian smoke-screen – these were not happy people on a joyride. As you soon discover within the first chapter, the main characters of this novel are tormented but hopeful, destitute but euphoric, all because of a few moments of bliss that forever mark their lives.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 64 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Orphan PamukWikipedia page on Orhan Pamuk
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and ExcerptMore on the physical  Museum of Innocence
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Snow Our 2009 review of The Museum of Innocence And our review of: The Naive and Sentimental Novelist

Bibliography:

• Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982)
• The Silent House (1983; October 2012)
• The White Castle (1985; 1991)
• The Black Book (1990; 1995)
• The New Life (1995; 1997)
• My Name is Red (August 2001)
• Snow (August 2004)
• The Museum of Innocence (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005)
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (2007)
• The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010)
• The Innocence of Objects (October 2012)

“As she talks, she distractedly quickens her pace, pulled along by the living memory — Ofer on the beach, a bold puppy bristling with the future, she behind him, hiding at times, although there was no need because he never turned to look back. She wondered how far he would go, and he answered her with his steps: forever. She saw […] how the day would come when he would leave her, just get up and go, as they always do, and she guessed a little of what she would feel on that day, a little of what now, without any warning, digs its predatory teeth into her.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 21, 2010)

This is Ora, a fiftyish Israeli woman, thinking about her younger son, Ofer, who has not merely left home, but done so in a way that fills her with fear. On the day of his discharge from military service, when he is already on leave at home, he volunteers to join the forces fighting some unspecified action in Southern Lebanon, signing up for a further month. Terrified that at any moment a notification team will turn up at her house to inform her of Ofer’s death, Ora flees to the Galilee mountains, beyond the reach of any news. As her husband Ilan has left her several months before, taking with him their eldest son, Ora is all alone. On impulse, she calls on Avram, a former lover who has fallen on hard times, seeking his company, his listening ear, and perhaps his restoration to mental and physical health, along with her own. The whole novel is essentially her “Month of Magical Thinking,” in which the past combines with the present, folding her personal history and that of her country into an almost mystical union.

It would be magnificent if the book were not so confoundedly long; even so, there is a lot in it I can praise. I was impressed, for instance, by the phantasmagorical prologue, in which Ora, Avram, and Ilan, sick with high fever in the wake of some epidemic, meet each other in night-time visits to each other’s wards in a darkened Jerusalem hospital that has been almost evacuated in anticipation of casualties from the 1967 Six Day War. The bonds forged between the three of them will last a lifetime. I was impressed at first, too, by the immediacy and tension of the story when it jumps ahead to 2000. As Ora has lost her license, she is forced to ask their Palestinian driver Sami take her and Ofer to the army rendezvous point, a strangely insensitive mission to ask an Arab to undertake. But Grossman himself is not insensitive, balancing this extraordinary event against a long background of apparent friendship between Ora’s family and Sami, who in turn exacts his own price, leading to a fascinating glimpse of Palestinian culture in the Israeli underbelly, a scene that directly reflects the nightmare mood of the novel’s prelude. After so much polemical writing set in the Middle East, this political frankness was heartening; Grossman is clearly a writer whom one can trust.

But this too is only prelude. It is not until page 116 that the main part of the novel begins, when Ora and Avram arrive in the Galilee. Now we begin to look back as much as forward. Avram’s connections with Ilan, Ora and her children will be explained gradually over the course of the next 460 pages, if the reader can be persuaded to ignore the many other reviews that will certainly give the key facts away. In a narrative that seemingly occupies three or four different time-frames at once, we will learn of Avram’s traumatic experiences during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the testing of the close bonds between him and Ilan, and the strains in Ora’s marriage, caused in part by his presence offstage. We will also learn — at length — of Ofer’s childhood; it seems that Ora’s prime motive in this hike is to talk about her son (even at one point digging a pit and screaming into the belly of the earth), in the shadow of her fear for his death. Even as we follow Ora and Avram in their hike through wild and beautiful country, their trail is dotted with memorials to Israeli soldiers killed in defence of their land, exactly the kind of memento mori that Ora is hoping to avoid.

Were these elements in better balance, the book might be superb. But Ora’s magical thinking dominates all; it is almost though she is exorcising a premature grief. Imagine a mother going through every picture in every family album, and telling you exactly what her child was doing when it was taken, the clever things he said, the phases he went through, the small worries he caused. The obsessive detail is excruciating. When Grossman describes the actual hike, he can be superb; there are marvelous incidents such as a meeting with a peripatetic messiah of mirth, or a terrifying encounter with a pack of wild dogs, but these are too few and far between. My interest picked up towards the end, which describes the desperate fighting in Sinai just before the change of fortunes in the Yom Kippur War. And on an almost metaphorical level, Grossman offers an insight into Israeli psychology that strikes me as being deeply authentic. But when everything has to be filtered through the mind of a warm but obsessive and often hallucinating woman, it can be hard going to get there — though the very ending is grace itself. (Translated by Jessica Cohen.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 129 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 21, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Grossman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Israeli woman tells her story: My Michael by Amos Oz

Bibliography:

• Duel (1982; 1998 in English)
• The Smile of the Lamb (1983; 1990 in English)
• See Under: Love (1986; 1989 in English)
• The Book of Initmate Grammar (1991; 1994 in English)
• The ZigZag Kid (1994; 1997 in English)
• Be My Knife (1998; 2001 in English)
• Someone to Run With (2000; 2003 in English)
• Her Body Knows: Two Novellas (2003; 2005 in English)
• To the End of the Land (2010)
• Falling Out of Time (March 2014)

Nonfiction:

• The Yellow Wind (1987; 1988 in English)
• Sleeping on a Wire: Conversation with Palestinians in Israel (1992; 1993 in English)
• Death as Way of Life: From Oslo to the Geneva Agreement (2003)
• Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson (2005; 2006 in English)
• Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics (2008 in English)

“One of the things about seeing Katya was that afterward, he felt plagued by indecision. Should he go to the mosque or pray at home? Was it all right to watch an hour of satellite TV? With Katya, he was confronted with an obvious, nagging inconsistency: it was immodest and wrong to be in the company of an unmarried woman.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (AUG 9, 2010)

There have been many literary mysteries written and many books about the plight of women in repressive Saudi Arabia, but I have never read an author who is able to so seamlessly weave these threads together to create a potboiler thriller that sizzles with knowledge.

Set in Jeddah – seemingly one of the more liberal cities of Saudi Arabia – the core of the story focuses on a burqa-clad and tortured body of a young woman on a beach. Three stories are interwoven: a whodunit story of how she got there and who perpetrated such violence on her…the story of forensic scientist Katya and her would-be suitor Nayir, a Bedouin guide, who is crippled emotionally by the yokes of his religion…and a vanished American expat Eric Walker, whose wife Miriam finds herself bereft in an alien culture where women truly have no face.

What makes City of Veils stand out is its nuanced and highly intimate portrayal of a woman’s life in a repressive and paranoid country…where women’s faces are shielded, voices are silenced, and lifestyles are infantilized.

Ms. Ferraris – who herself moved to Saudi Arabia with her now ex-husband and his extended family of Saudi-Palestinian Bedouins – has a voice that rings with authority. Some of it is unwittingly humorous: the husband Eric, for example, has a name that translates to a part of the male anatomy, and therefore is renamed Abullah while at work. But most of it is frustrating and heartbreaking. We read, for example, about women’s mini-rebellions, as they hide Bluetooth devices inside their burquas, which send the message, “Do you want to see my face?” Or the quagmire of lingerie stories: women cannot interact with the male proprietors of the stores; therefore, the government allowed women to work in these lingerie shops. Only one problem: the religious police are convinced women should be tending to their homes and babies, not working or shopping.

Ferraris shows that this repression is not just a woman’s problem; it’s a man’s as well. Osama Ibrahim – the fair and liberal police investigator – believes his marriage is a strong one until he discovers his wife has been surreptitiously taking birth control pills. And Nayir, who was featured in Finding Nouf, is numbed down by the love he feels for Katya, all the while knowing she may not be such a “good Muslim woman,” and how can he possibly marry an infidel? Being in a car with a woman who is not his wife is excruciating for him: “This was the worst kind of weakness because there was nothing he could do about it…short of kicking her out of the car.”

On one level, City of Veils has all the dimensions of a first-rate crime story; its eventual denouement in the scorching and unforgiving desert would make a stunning and crowd-pleasing movie. Yet on a deeper level, the book shines its laser-eye on woman who must be resourceful to even feel human while simmering inside, and the men who are raised to fear them and place a lid on their own human desires and compassion. City of Veils does what sometimes seems to be impossible – lifts the cultural veils off and looks gender segregation right in the eye.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from54 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (August 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Zoe Ferraris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another author who sets mysteries in the Middle East: Matt Benyon Rees

Bibliography:

• Finding Nouf (2008)
• City of Veils (August 2010)

“Pat Tillman understood that outside the wire, bad things happen. But he was an optimist. Archetypically American, he was confident that right would prevail over wrong. When he swore the oath of enlistment in the summer of 2002, he trusted that those responsible for sending him into battle would do so in good faith. At the time, he didn’t envisage that any of them would trifle with his life, or misrepresent the facts of his death, in order to farther careers or advance a political agenda.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUL 27, 2010)

Where Men Win Glory, by Jon Krakauer, is a book about several things – Pat Tillman, the NFL, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. army and its role in Pat Tilman’s death, friendly fire during wars, and the history of our involvement in the Middle East. Each of these topics is covered in a wonderfully page-turning manner, with the reader not wanting to put the book down. At the same time, Krakauer provides a huge amount of information that may be new, surprising or downright horrific.

Pat Tilllman was raised in Almaden, California to a family of free thinkers who encouraged their children to be individualists and speak their minds. Pat always had an opinion about something and was never shy in sharing it. He had a lot of faith in himself and his ability to perform well in whatever he chose to do. As a youth and a young man, he chose to excel in athletics, first baseball and later, football. Pat was not built like the typical football player. He was smaller but he was fast, agile, and had an uncanny ability to predict his opponents’ next moves. This made him a good football player, so good in fact that he played college football and moved on to the major NFL leagues where several teams competed to have him play for them.

Pat was a rather wild young man in his youth who liked to drink, carouse and occasionally fight. He was taught that honor and revenge were both admirable. At one point in his young life he got into a misguided fight that changed his life. He ended up in prison for a very short time and realized that he wanted to spend his days more productively. He started to read a lot, choosing from classics such as Emerson, Homer and Chomsky. He was rarely seen without a book in his hands. He also was an avid journaler, perspicaciously looking inward and outward in a very philosophical way.

After 9/11, Pat felt the call of patriotism and enlisted in the U.S. army, walking away from a 3.6 million dollar NFL contract in order to serve his country. He ended up in the Rangers, an elite group of army special operatives. Pat was unusual for a soldier in that he ended up not being in favor of the war he was fighting. He felt that the invasion of Iraq was a political ploy and that the U.S. should be focusing more on Afghanistan. He also understood the power of “spin” and public relations. When the army was busy using Jessica Lynch as a poster girl, Pat knew in his gut that the story behind her heroism and her rescue was skewed and that Bush was using her for P.R. to save his election from going down the tubes. Despite Pat’s personal feelings about the war, he remained a patriot and felt that he should do his utmost best all the time to defend and protect the United States. He himself would never grant interviews nor would he let the military use him in any way for public relations.

Krakauer does an excellent job in explaining the background of the war that Pat Tilman was fighting. Initially, the U.S. provided guns, ammunition, bombs and bomb-making instructions to the Taliban. This was done by the CIA during the time that the U.S. was involved in the cold war with Russia and Russia was in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. After Russia left Afghanistan in defeat, the Taliban then used the weapons and instructions the U.S. had given them for terrorist acts against the U.S. A similar story took place in Iraq, where the U.S. gave political insurgents weapons and ammunitions only to have these same insurgents turn against them.

Pat and his family were very close and Krakauer does a fine job of examining the roles that his parents, his wife, his friends and his siblings played in Pat’s development and life as a man. Interestingly, Pat’s brother Kevin enlisted in the army at the same time as Pat and they ended up serving along side each other until the day that Pat was shot at and killed by his own troop members.

Pat’s death by friendly fire and the U.S. government’s cover-up of the details and circumstances surrounding his death, make up for a large part of this book. With painstaking detail, Krakauer takes the reader through every step of Pat’s mission until the time of his death by friendly fire. Krakauer also investigates the investigators, showing how the army misled, lied, delayed and mishandled most every aspect of reporting the true circumstances of Pat’s death. Ultimately, Pat’s mother made such a tenacious case for the truth that congress became involved.

Ironically, Pat Tillman was used as a public relations vehicle in much the same way that Jessica Lynch was. Pat would have hated this. He didn’t want special treatment in the army and he certainly didn’t want the army to invoke his name as a hero for a war he didn’t support.

Krakauer does a brilliant job of utilizing Pat’s journals, interviewing his friends, family and members of the military. He provides maps, documents and has done extensive research for this book. Despite all the details, this book is accessible to any reader, even one like me who had little knowledge of many of the historical aspects of the war prior to reading this book. Pat Tillman was an amazing human being, one that I ended up admiring immensely. I thank Mr. Krakauer for bringing Mr. Tillman to life and for delivering the truth that Mr. Tillman and his family so deserved.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 470 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jon Krakauer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short review of: Into Thin Air

Bibliography:

• Eiger Dreams: Ventures among Men and Mountains (1990)
• Into the Wild (1996)
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (1997)
• Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (2003)
• Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009)

Movies from books:

• Into the Wild (2008)

“It was as if growth had been the country’s vengeful response to Saddam. Spanking new three-story cement mansions sat on lots only meters bigger than their outer walls; all the freeways had been rebuilt; and the Cornice along the Gulf had been redesigned in its entirety, stripped bare of its immediate history as a battleground of the war. And everywhere, litter. It blew with the sand and grit of the city, tracing the fence-lines and thoroughfares, and cluttering the flat, dismal beaches. Children, standing on car seats, always unbelted, threw paper cups and candy wrappers from car windows like confetti, opening their little fists into the hot wind.”

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (MAR 7, 2010)

Anastasia Hobbet’s novel about life in Kuwait between Saddam’s invasion of that country and the American invasion of Iraq is both gorgeous in its prose and compelling in its varied perspectives. Kuwait here is a real country, not a geographical footnote to a war, populated by people, both Kuwaiti and not, who navigate the difficult terrain of fear, loyalty, and social conventions. The story follows its characters to the brink of the second war where they, like the country they inhabit, face the changes ahead.

Theo, an American doctor who arrives in Kuwait following the death of his poet father, confounds the Kuwaitis and the Indian doctor for whom he works. Why would he want to work there if he did not have to? Even to the Kuwaitis, the country is a desolate choice for an American. The son of the Indian doctor, Theo’s friend Rajesh, warns that “there’s no more calamitous place on earth than the Middle East,” yet Theo yearns to erase his easy Californian identity for something more poetic: falling in love with a country not his own. When he meets his Arabic tutor, Hanaan, a Palestinian denied Kuwaiti citizenship despite having been spent her entire life there, he is faced with cultural barriers that seem impossible to bridge.

The other American protagonist, Kit, is the wife of an executive assigned to a temporary stint in Kuwait. Like Theo, Kit has recently lost a parent, but, for her, the geographical separation causes her more pain than comfort. Kit finds herself uneasy with the country and its social constructs, and she fears for the safety of her two children as rumors circulate of another attack from Saddam Hussein. At first, Kit is isolated, left mostly alone by her workaholic husband. She finds herself unable to identify with the other wives, who all seem more worldly and adept than she. When she meets her neighbor Mufeeda by accident, she finally glimpses the culture of her host country. Many traditions seem unfathomable to her, while others she finds exhilarating; however, what she learns about the underside of Kuwaiti society shocks her into action.

Kit’s neighbor Mufeeda, a true Kuwait in social standing unlike most of the other characters, is a devout Muslim married to the agnostic Saleh, a doctor and Theo’s colleague. Mufeeda runs her household staff as generously as she can facing the tantrums of her grim mother-in-law. Of all the characters, Mufeeda is the most traditional, a woman of her upbringing and station in life. As much as she hates it at times, she submits to the hierarchy of authority, both within her family and outside. For comfort, she turns to her religion. In one memorable scene, she runs into Kit and the other American women at the market where she finds herself caught between obligatory hospitality and horror at the brash manner of the Americans. Fittingly, she becomes transformed only because, out of an inability to rebel, she is dragged into a situation that confronts her with an ugly truth.

Emmanuella, a maid from India whose entire family depends on her meager salary, works for Mufeeda and, eventually, part-time for Kit. Emmanuella is the most vulnerable of the main characters, as her employers have her passport and can deport her at any moment. She risks everything to help the abused maid next door, and, in the process, finds herself at the mercy of a higher-ranking male servant and Mufeeda’s mother-in-law.

The paths of the characters intersect as the novel progresses, each story touching upon the others. Love, friendship, loyalty, and safety are tested. Theo, especially, makes an excellent guide through the intricacies of Kuwait from an outsider’s perspective, and both Mufeeda and Emmanuella offer what the jacket copy refers to an “Upstairs/Downstairs of the Arab word.” Ironically, given that she seems most modeled on Hobbet’s personal experience, Kit’s character is the least interesting, as her actions and motives are never as complex as the others’. Her naiveté often seems a device used to explain Kuwait to American readers, unnecessary since Hobbet’s descriptive language and other characterizations advance that understanding with ease. By the end, however, Kit is a pivotal character, as her actions propel the resolution for all the others.

Although the individual stories unfold with their own conflicts and outcomes, they share a common theme: challenging the societal norms. Each character faces a point at which he or she risks ostracism or physical danger by following his/her conscience instead of convention. This makes the author’s sensibilities seem typically American, but the novel does not suffer from this perspective; on the contrary, it gets its power from the courage of its characters and its critical dissection of cultural mores.

Perhaps most astonishing in this accomplished novel, Kuwait becomes a place so definite, so well-described that it comes alive on the page. Hobbet’s characters make worthy guides through this country of natives and internationals. Most Americans know Kuwait through images broadcast by CNN during the Gulf War, a country rich in oil but incapable of defending itself. Anastasia Hobbet offers a much more intimate portrait of a country struggling to come to terms with itself.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (January 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anastasia Hobbet
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel with insight into a Middle East country: In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz

Bibliography:

• Pleasure of Believing (1997)
• Small Kingdoms (January 2010)