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DON’T MOVE

Name: DON’T MOVE
Author: Margaret Mazzantini
ISBN: 0-385-51074-8

by Margaret Mazzantini & translated by John Cullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2004

The pull of the darkly irrational: it’s a fascinating theme, but Mazzantini doesn’t do it justice.

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Can you imagine a love affair beginning with a rape? That’s the challenge an Italian actress/second-novelist sets herself in her American debut.

Timoteo is the top surgeon at his hospital in an unidentified Italian city. His teenaged daughter Angela is brought in after a traffic accident. Her desperate condition frames his confession of an affair he had 16 years earlier. It begins as the 40-year-old surgeon is traveling to join his beautiful, elegant wife Elsa at their beach house. His car breaks down in a squalid working-class neighborhood. A woman lets him phone for help from her house. She’s the wrong side of 30, somewhere between trashy and ugly, yet Timoteo, suddenly inflamed, moves into her “like a raptor in a captured nest.” When he returns later to apologize, she doesn’t seem angry, and he takes her again. Italia, a hotel chambermaid, has no surviving family. Her father abused her sexually when she was 11. She is filled with self-loathing: “Weeds are hard to kill,” she says of herself. Italia becomes an unlikely love object for Timoteo, whose father has recently died, leaving him an “orphan.” He never liked his father, who was also attracted to solitary, unattractive women. Is Timoteo simply repeating the pattern? Or is it slumming that’s the thrill? Mazzantini leaves us guessing. Italia becomes pregnant and goes to the gypsies for an abortion. Then Elsa becomes pregnant with Angela. Split down the middle, Timoteo joyously attends the birth of his daughter but then returns to Italia, who’s hemorrhaging from the botched abortion. After her drawn-out death and funeral, Timoteo goes back to Elsa, although his feelings for her have always blown hot and cold. She doesn’t remark on his absence, which is strange, but after the rape nothing in this novel has seemed altogether believable.

The pull of the darkly irrational: it’s a fascinating theme, but Mazzantini doesn’t do it justice.

Pub Date: May 25, 2004

ISBN: 0-385-51074-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MORNING SEA
by Margaret Mazzantini

- BOOK REVIEW
TWICE BORN
by Margaret Mazzantini

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HOPE AND OTHER DANGEROUS PURSUITS

by Laila Lalami ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2005

Flawed but impressive: This could well be the preamble to an important body of work.

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Ambitious debut about a group of young Moroccans looking for jobs and a better life.

Lalami sets the stage for her interlinked tales with the section “The Trip,” which introduces Murad, Faten, Aziz and Halima (and her children), all packed together on an inflatable boat illegally crossing the Strait Gibraltar into Spain. Part I: Before explains what made these people risk everything to leave Morocco. Twentysomething Murad was an under-employed tour guide; Faten flunked her college exams; Aziz wanted to make more money and shut up his censorious in-laws; Halima needed to escape an abusive husband. Part II: After revisits the characters, revealing their fates and their transformations following their plunge into the waters 250 meters off the Spanish coast. In the final story, sensitive, educated, English-speaking Murad gets a job as a salesman in a Tangier gift shop. There, he relates a magical, ancient tale to two tourists. First told to Murad by his father, it is a love story of beauty and revenge, providing the author an opportunity to sing her feelings for Islam, its people and its ancient culture. This intense portrait of a gorgeous, once-powerful civilization stands in stark relief to the modern society Lalami skillfully depicts with gritty realism in an omniscient narration. As her characters debate hot-button issues—How much Western culture is too much? Should women wear headscarves?—their individual points of view are presented so evenhandedly that readers are left to wonder which of these opinions are actually held by the Moroccan-born writer, who now lives in Oregon.

Flawed but impressive: This could well be the preamble to an important body of work.

Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2005

ISBN: 1-56512-493-6

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DREAM HOTEL
by Laila Lalami

- BOOK REVIEW
CONDITIONAL CITIZENS
by Laila Lalami

- BOOK REVIEW
THE OTHER AMERICANS
by Laila Lalami

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DANCING ARABS

by Sayed Kashua & translated by Miriam Shlesinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2004

Gloomy indeed. And yet this Arab-Israeli newcomer is never once self-indulgent or sentimental, with the result that his...

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A quick, readable, highly engaging—and bluntly pessimistic—debut tale of an Arab-Israeli whose life is one of anger, fear, and broken spirit.

“I was the best student in the class,” announces Kashua’s narrator, “the best in the whole fourth grade.” So it’s possible—isn’t it?—that he’ll go far, escape his family’s drab, broken village, be a great success? He does take the very tough exam for admission to a competitive Israeli school, does pass, does get admitted, and does attend—but not successfully. There’s too much shame for him in a boarding school full of Israeli Jews, shame at simple things like not knowing how to use silverware, what music to listen to, not having the right kind of pants, not pronouncing Hebrew correctly, and shame at bigger things, like the scorn, derision, and threat both in school and on the busses that take back home at the end of the week. Kashua offers nothing new so far—mightn’t this be another tale of schoolboy alienation overcome, true merit being demonstrated, acceptance, comradeship, and success following thereby? No, the conflicts, wounds, and humiliations are too many and too deep. The boy’s grandfather died in the war against Zionism, and even his father was a hero in his own college days, imprisoned on suspicion of complicity in blowing up a school cafeteria. And so, for all his brains, the boy, torn between cultures and histories, begins to fail in school, suffer health problems, lose morale. He never does finish college, but ends up as bartender in a seedy club, despising the Arabs who come in to dance, despising even his own wife, the birth of a baby daughter notwithstanding. Life, at novel’s end, remains seedy, undirected, filled with sorrow, failure, and regret.

Gloomy indeed. And yet this Arab-Israeli newcomer is never once self-indulgent or sentimental, with the result that his story rings out on every page with a compelling sense of human truth.