Former AP Middle East correspondent Hamilton writes with striking clarity, using words as carefully as the Bedouin use water...
First novel, set in 1967, about a young Arab girl who dreams of the past—and foretells the future.
Jammana is 11, but her memories are much older. She’s not the first in her family to be both blessed and cursed with second sight. Her great-great-grandfather foretold a lifetime of troubles for her beloved grandfather Harif. First, his mother, Alula, a spirited and lovely woman, was struck by lightning during a freak storm. The shattered stump of the tree where she died was revered by the local women, but the bereaved boy soon became an outcast in the village of Ein Fadr, shunned by resentful neighbors who thought he now possessed knowledge of their secret sins and desires. Harif became a shepherd, wandering the hills of Samaria with his flock. His secret love was a near-outcast herself, although Alula was one of the few who showed her any kindness: Faridah, the midwife, who was married at 12 and divorced by her husband at 18 for her childlessness. Independent by circumstance and by nature, the young woman is also essentially fearless—qualities that arouse the suspicions of the village men. Although it is customary for a barren woman, or a woman past childbearing age, to become a midwife, it is whispered that Faridah is a ghouleh, an evil spirit, because of her knowledge of healing herbs and oils. She ignores it all and lives life on her own terms, becoming pregnant by Harif, by now betrothed to another. She miscarries, telling no one, and continues her work. Almost every soul in Ein Fadr was brought into the world by her skillful hands; and, years later, Jammana is devoted to her, following her everywhere and helping when she can. Still, there are those who hate Faridah: eventually, she’s found dead in a dry riverbed, her throat cut. But by whom?
Former AP Middle East correspondent Hamilton writes with striking clarity, using words as carefully as the Bedouin use water to bring a disappearing world to vibrant life. Here, in a luminous debut, are the voices, real and rarely heard, of traditional Arab women.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14725-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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