Racy delivery and breathless cliffhangers scarcely conceal the author’s pessimism about democracy’s future in Egypt—or, for...
In Al Aswany’s follow-up to The Yacoubian Building (2005), Egyptian students and professors find scant refuge in post-9/11 Chicago.
Originally published in Egypt in 2007, and a bestseller in France, the novel was inspired by the author’s student days in the Windy City. His grad-student characters are in the United States to study histology on scholarships sponsored by the Egyptian government. Shaymaa Muhammadi is a modest, veiled, devout Muslim who, at 30-plus, has almost despaired of finding a husband. Top student Tariq Haseeb is given to boorish behavior, especially around women he likes. Ahmad Danana is an arrogant slacker whose scholarship is safe only if he spies on fellow students for the Egyptian secret police. Nagi Abd al-Samad, a dissident poet blackballed from Cairo’s university system, seeks a safe harbor in science. Most of their professors are long-term Egyptian exiles. Muhammad Salah married for a green card but has never forgotten his activist Egyptian girlfriend Zeinab; he’s still stung by her long-ago accusations of cowardice. Cardiac surgeon Karam Doss, a Coptic Christian, fled Egypt’s regime-sanctioned religious intolerance. Ra’fat Thabit is undone when his daughter Sarah becomes a drug addict. American John Graham is a ’60s holdover who still cherishes the radical ideals long forsaken by his fellow baby boomers. Rounding out the cast are wives, lovers and an arch-villain, General Safwat Shakir, who rose through the ranks of Egypt’s totalitarian state by “improving” torture methods. Now, as an envoy in Washington, he extends his government’s oppressive reach to Egyptian expatriates. Sexual obsessions (acted upon in lurid detail) intertwine with polemics: Characters mouth Al Aswany’s many pet peeves, among them America’s support of repressive Middle Eastern regimes like Egypt’s and the pernicious influence of Saudi Arabia’s repressive culture on Islam. The story lines converge when Egypt’s dictator visits Chicago, testing the mettle of dissidents and loyalists alike.
Racy delivery and breathless cliffhangers scarcely conceal the author’s pessimism about democracy’s future in Egypt—or, for that matter, in the United States.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-145256-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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