A flawed but valuable fictional reckoning with a failed revolution.
A reimagining of Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square protests and the hypocrisies underlying the state’s response.
Al Aswany, Egypt’s best-known living novelist, loves cross sections of his home country: Chicago (2008) and The Automobile Club of Egypt (2015) both feature sizable casts of characters who symbolize elements of Egyptian society. His strategy is the same in this ambitious and hard-hitting, if sometimes stiff, novel. As protests of Hosni Mubarak’s decadeslong dictatorial regime intensify, multiple characters support or resist the revolution. Danya, a protester and medical student, openly defies her father, a prominent general, Ahmad. Ashraf, a hash-smoking failed actor conducting an affair with his maid, is stoked out of his passivity by the nearby crowds. Asmaa, a teacher at a corrupt school, falls for Mazen, a labor organizer at a cement factory. Nourhan, the wife of the factory’s manager, becomes a prominent TV host, spouting falsehoods that the protesters are paid-off agents of the United States and Israel. Al Aswany means to skewer the hypocrisy that infuses much of the national psyche, how Islamic prohibitions are casually sidestepped to rationalize everything from infidelity to state-sanctioned rape and murder. (As one character puts it: "We're in Egypt. Injustice is the rule.") Because Al Aswany is trying to deliver a political portrait as much as a social novel, many of the characters hew to simplistic archetypes: Mazen is a clenched-fist pro-revolution sloganeer, Ahmad a coldblooded torturer. But the characters the author clearly has more affection for, like Ashraf and Asmaa, are richer and more flawed, and their experiences reveal how their acts of protest have social and personal consequences. And as a whole, the novel shows how the early promise of the protests fizzled, leading the country to lapse back into authoritarianism. Any successful revolution, Al Aswany suggests, will demand a wholesale cultural reckoning and tolerance for violent push back.
A flawed but valuable fictional reckoning with a failed revolution.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-307-95722-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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