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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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