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RAMZA

Name: RAMZA
Author: Out el Kouloub
ISBN: 0-8156-2618-5

by Out el Kouloub ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1994

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Out el Kouloub achieves a modest success by importing some of the feel of an 18th-century British novel into her rendering of harem life in traditional Egypt. Egypt's Out el Kouloub based Ramza, written and published in French in 1958, on her own harem experience, and she portrays these forbidden women's quarters in Middle Eastern households in all their paradox. Sequestered from the outside world, the harem women create their own exclusive world where oral culture thrives: They exchange stories to entertain, console, and bond with one another. Ramza, the novel's heroine, breaks both male and female norms by venturing into her father's study (in the men's part of the house) where she learns to read and write. Although time is unspecified, the novel is set in the era of British influence over Egypt (18821952), and Ramza's education is distinctly European. Influenced by John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Ramza, not surprisingly, grows into a young woman of surging independence who is constantly threatened by the undertow of her powerful emotions. After the death of her bridegroom on the eve of an arranged marriage, Ramza falls in love with Maher. Forbidden by her father from marrying Maher because of his social status, Ramza resolves to escape the harem and elope. Her pursuit of desire and fulfillment at all costs gives her an appealing intensity, but Out el Kouloub (Khul-Khaal, not reviewed) often mars the characterization with melodrama. During Maher and Ramza's assignation in a Bedouin tent one can almost hear ``Midnight at the Oasis'' wafting through the flaps: ``Maher pulled me into his arms and his lips touched mine. At that moment I felt I was committing the greatest folly of my life, but I could not stop myself.'' Unique by virtue of its subject and resourceful treatment, not the author's craft.

Pub Date: July 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8156-2618-5

Page Count: 222

Publisher: Syracuse Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.