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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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