Soueif, born in Egypt and living in Britain, makes her American debut with a novel that details a young Egyptian woman's exasperatingly drawn-out journey to autonomy amidst the turmoil of contemporary Middle East politics. Opening the story with the cancer operation on her beloved uncle Hamid in London in 1979, protagonist Asya drops a few names, hints at old griefs, then returns to 1967 Cairo. The Arab-Israeli war has just begun—an event that's much debated in the adolescent Asya's family, since both her father and uncle Hamid were once imprisoned for their politics. Political quotes abound and, though adding authenticity, are heavy-handed reminders not only that Asya holds passive sympathies for Egyptian nationalism and the PLO, but that this is a serious novel with admirably serious themes—like the role of women in Islamic society, and the enduring ties to family and tradition. Asya, the daughter of two professors, has more freedom than her contemporaries, but even her educated parents insist on a long formal courtship before she can marry handsome Saif Madi—a four-year delay that, Asya claims, ruins their sex life. Saif is a generous but manipulative cipher, and the couple have zip communication, yet Asya insists she loves him. Meanwhile, she goes to graduate school; attends a bleak northern British university where she has impulsively decided to do her Ph.D.; and Saif makes his infrequent visits. Time will pass slowly as her marriage slowly disintegrates; her dissertation is slowly completed; and Asya slowly decides to end her affair with uncouth Gerald. But Asya is also slowly growing: home in Cairo, with a doctorate but no Saif, she realizes she's ``back into the sunlight still in complete possession of herself.'' Within this mass of often ill-assorted detail—every note for the dissertation seems to be included—lurks a story that's worth telling, but finding it is not always easy.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40948-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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