Egyptology, bitches

The Other Guy's Bride - Connie Brockway (Montlake, 2011)


So I'm reading capsule reviews and I see something about turn of the (last) century Egypt. And my ears perk up. And then I see a comparison to Amelia Peabody, and I am sold. Huzzah.

I read very few period romances, so I can't really compare this to other works in the genre, so I ended up comparing it to Elizabeth Peters all the time. And it's not really fair, because no one is going to be Radcliffe Emerson. And NO ONE is going to be Ramses. But I digress. This is cute. Ginny comes from a family renowned in archaeological circles, but she's sorta the black sheep. Until now. She has a plan to make her name, but this means figuring out how to get to the middle of nowhere in the Egyptian desert. Fortunately, this is exactly where another lady on her ship is headed, more or less, to meet her military fiance. So Ginny manages to take her place and get escorted out to wherever, except along the way she has to fall in love with her escort and face a bunch of dangerous situations. And then everyone comes together, and secret identities are revealed and ... etc etc etc.

But it was so fun! Yay. :)

A different look at Egypt

In the Eye of the Sun - Ahdaf Soueif (Anchor Books, 1992, 2000)


Several years ago, I received a notebook titled "Books to Check Out" and ever since, I've made a valiant effort to keep my list of books to read in one place. (With mixed results.) Anyway, from time to time, I go back to the early entries that are yet to be crossed off, and wonder why I haven't gotten to them yet. Usually, it's because I can't find them in a local library. But now I have access to oodles of libraries in California, so I'm going back through.

My friend Mariam recommended Soueif to me early early on. This must have been shortly after we graduated, or maybe soon after she arrived in Cairo. And now, years and years later, I have finally read it. This was a challenge, with my work and life schedule being what it is. 785 pages.... thank goodness for a one-day business trip that gave me uninterrupted hours and hours to read. (I probably read 1/3 of the book that day.) But this is in some ways actually quite a quick read; the pages generally turn in a hurry.

Asya is a young member of the Cairene middle-class, I guess you'd call it. The daughter of two professors, her future in academia was never in doubt. She is romantic and headstrong, and eagerly falls in love at 17, and less eagerly waits until graduation before marrying Saif.

Thanks to the structure of the novel, which starts with 39 pages at the end of the 1970s and then doubles back to the beginning... to 1967, we know that things go wrong. And in some ways, the novel is just the path of how they get there. Asya and Saif made me a little crazy -- it's one of those love stories open to all sorts of interpretation. They met too young, perhaps. They never really knew one another, not really, and they just grew apart. A skeptic could quickly point out all the warning signs before their marriage. And yet, in another light, their love shines more brightly, and their troubles stem more from their failure to communicate. They misread one another again and again. And I longed for them to bridge that gap.

It comes out early on that Asya has an affair, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything. But to say too much more may bring on spoilers. Suffice it to say that at one point I grew sufficiently frustrated that I told my boyfriend that I wanted to punch the book. Some characters...... argh.

Oh, and the first half of the book laces Asya's life with the historical events unfolding around her, these latter reported in terse, journalistic style. Once she leaves for England, though, her internal world grows larger and larger, and we learn less about not only outside events, but even the lives of those she loves.

And lastly, a quote: "This [poetry] has to be what matters. Or a large part of what matters. How can people read it and just go on as though they'd been reading the newspaper or some geography lesson[...]?"

Regularly scheduled reading interrupted for Ramses

A River in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters (William Morrow, 2010)

One of my favorite things about my volunteer job is that I often see brand new books the day before they are officially released. And since I don't particularly follow such things, it's often particularly exciting. Such was the case last week, when a cart appeared with 9 or 10 copies of a brand new Elizabeth Peters book. And sure enough, it was an Amelia Peabody one. (Yay!)

I had previously mentioned that I thought the series was probably through. I couldn't figure out how she could move forward. And it turns out she moved forward by going backward. To 1910. To young Ramses. And I can't resist young Ramses.

So I had to drop everything (sorry Orhan Pamuk!) and read this before doing anything else. I'll spare you the plot and all. It's during the lead-up to World War I, and the Emersons aren't allowed to go to Egypt. So somehow they end up in Palestine instead, where Ramses is already working and allowing trouble to find him. It's short, and genial. And again has me ready to one day go back to the beginning.

Egypt & mystery

Tomb of the Golden Bird - Elizabeth Peters (Harper, 2006)

I've mentioned before how much I've loved this series, which I think may have come to a close with this book. I didn't blog this when I finished it (2 weeks ago, maybe?) because I had a nagging feeling the whole time that I had already read it. Maybe I have, I'm still not sure. If I haven't, that sense of it not being new is troubling (like the first chapter of The Babysitters Club, which I'm pretty sure I had memorized for at least a decade after I stopped reading those).

Anyhow. I love this series. I love the characters. Peters brings so much humor to play, and the characters are way more interesting than the action. But it does sort of feel like it's time to wrap things up. It's become too modern for one - this novel involves the opening of King Tut's tomb - and I don't think there's much more to be done with the characters. When Peabody and Emerson fell into a bit of a rut, Ramses and Nefret were old enough to take up much of the dramatic slack. But now, unless Peters wants to move forward another several years to focus on Sennia and the twins (which would consign P & E to undeniably old age) it's got to be over.

(I am not going to go look on message boards, because I imagine people who don't wait four years to read new books have probably already had this discussion, and Peters may have already addressed the question, and I'm just going to be solipsistic and ignore all those possibilities.)

This isn't the strongest book in the series. But. It made me want to go back to the beginning and re-read them all. So at some point, I'll be doing that. I read the first when I was probably 12 or so. I'm ready to go back.

Light & serious reading = Egypt & Afghanistan

I've been trying to trade off between lighter fare and actual literary fiction. So this week I started out with an Elizabeth Peters mystery - Serpent on the Crown - and then moved on to The Kite Runner, the rather well-known book by Khaled Hosseini. I know there was a movie at the end of 2007, but I don't remember the source of the hype before. Was it a big book club selection?

Anyway, I knew what to expect with the Peters, although really I miss having Ramses as a more interesting character. I'm not sure she knows what to do with him as a full-fledged adult. Somehow I managed to not know much about The Kite Runner, except vaguely about one of the climactic scenes. And I think that Hosseini is a doctor, like Chekhov. (Yep.) But this novel seriously wore me down. Every time you think, okay, enough tragedy, something else goes wrong. Yet I think that Hosseini managed to avoid melodrama, which is impressive. The book is famous enough that I don't really feel like I'll have anything to add to the conversation, esp not today, when I am worn out from hiking in Griffith Park and very ready to go to bed. Perhaps next time I read a book, I'll manage to blog about it when I'm more awake...

Re-discoveries, mad romantic

The English Patient has pulled off the accomplishment of being among my all-time favorites in both novel and movie form. (The film's soundtrack, for one, is stunning.) Michael Ondaatje is amazing - when I read the novel at age 17, I had never come across anything quite like it.

While the film has two main narratives (present and past), each goes in roughly chronological order. The novel goes into the past of more characters, and completely mixes up the chronology in favor of an unveiling, piece by piece, of the characters and their tales. And the descriptions - they are lyrical and haunting. Ondaatje has also published collections of poetry, and it shows in his prose.

God, I love this book. It's been so long since I've read it, I can't give specific details. But reading it is like stepping into a whole other world, and putting yourself into Ondaatje's very sure hands.

Adieu Mahfouz

It turns out that I read Palace Walk at a relevant time. Nobel Prize-winner (the first to write in Arabic) Naguib Mahfouz has passed away. He was 94 and had been ailing since a fall earlier in the summer. His death is a reminder to me that we may be losing a generation of authors that create sweeping, epic views of a place and time. The Latin American magical realist authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez are aging. Young English-language writers like Jonathan Safran Foer maintain the magic and sympathetic voice, but are often gimmickly; other novels, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, show society through a family's life but are harsher and more sarcastic in tone. I personally like empathy.

But back to Mahfouz. He essentially popularized the novel for Arabic audiences and brought Egypt to life at the same time. Some excerpts from the NY Times obit:

Mr. Mahfouz’s city was teeming Cairo, and his characters were its most ordinary people: civil servants and bureaucrats, grocers, shopkeepers, poor retirees, petty thieves and prostitutes, peasants and women brutalized by tradition, a people caught in the upheavals of a nation struggling through the 20th century.

[He] was often called the Egyptian Balzac for his vivid frescoes of Cairenes and their social, political and religious dilemmas. Critics compared his richly detailed Cairo with the London of Charles Dickens, the Paris of Émile Zola and the St. Petersburg of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Peter Theroux, the American translator of several major Arab novelists, wrote about completing a new version of “Children of the Alley” in 1996: “Readers of Mahfouz in any language are in thrall to his magic. The warmth of Mahfouz’s characters, the velocity of his storytelling, his gift for fluent dialogue and telling details are unique in modern Arabic literature.”

update: Here is the LA Times' obit. It's very prettily written.