thetravelingminstrel

Kaveh Akbar: Martyr!

First of all, how could I resist a novel whose author’s first name means “regal” in Iran and “coffee” in Turkey?

At least that’s the reason why I was sure I would get this book sooner or later. I think the author would be pleased. He probably would prefer that, than if I said I grabbed a copy because I wanted to read about death, life, and art.

That’s what the exclamation point in the title is for, he said. Humor. Silliness.

Sure enough, the feisty language that greeted me felt like I was reading a youthful Rushdie. Serendipitous, because I’m simultaneously reading a book of essays by Rushdie. Ironic, as Kaveh was born in the country whose ayatollah issued a fatwa calling for Salman’s assassination. I’d like to think that both would be entertained by the coincidence.

The parallels are there. The prose, self-evident of the delight they’ve had in writing it. The reimagining of old stories and reinventing of storytelling itself. The inevitable polyphony of language and overtones about identity that come with being migrant writers. The flawed central characters and mischievous profanities that make their novels not everyone’s cup of chai, or kaveh. (Conservative readers would not find this amusing.)

But the twist gutted me. Perhaps I was wrapped up in the silliness too much and enjoying the passages about art that I didn’t see it coming. Surprisingly, it is also heartwarming. Maybe that’s the real twist.

“And yet when you begin to delve into the story it seems almost inexhaustibly rich, for at its heart is a great triangular tension between the grandest matters of life: love, art, and death. You can turn and turn the story and the triangle tells you different things. It tells you that art, inspired by love, can have a greater power than death. It tells you, contrariwise, that death, in spite of art, can defeat the power of love. And it tells you that art alone can make possible the transaction between love and death that is at the center of all human life.” That’s a passage by Rushdie, from the essay “Wonder Tale,” and that is my review of Martyr! That’s what great writers do. They write things for you.

Sheesh Mahal (Mirror Palace) and a passage from Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”

“…Your project reminds me of all the great Persian mirror art… Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe—France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the Shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirrors, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches… I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how these mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred… it means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures.” — Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Currently reading Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and this passage reminded me of the 16th century Sheesh Mahal (“Mirror Palace”) in Rajasthan, and the photos I still have not uploaded from the India trip.

I have not read historical evidence, but I was told Sheesh Mahal’s mirrors were transported from Belgium by Elephants.

Hisham Matar: The Return

Part of this month’s reading agenda was to read Hisham Matar’s earlier books — which have been left untouched on my shelf for years — in preparation for his latest novel that made it to this year’s Booker Prize longlist. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, did not exceed my expectations, but after having just read The Return, and reeling from the force and the beauty of this work, I am hesitant to read anything else by him for the time being. This, right here, could be peak Hisham Matar.

I was in my late twenties when news of Qaddafi’s assassination hit the headlines, but even after that, and apart from a vague idea that it had been under Roman dominion in older times and under a dictatorship in recent times, I remained ignorant of Libya’s modern history.

“All the books on the modern history of the country could fit neatly on a couple of shelves. The best amongst them is slim enough to slide into my coat pocket and be read in a day or two,” writes Matar in The Return. “Libya has perfected the dark art of devaluing books.”

The Qaddafi censorships were culpable for the dearth of Libyan literature, and it comes as no surprise that our generation reads so little of Libya beyond occasional one-liner news tickers.

Matar changes that for his readers and lights up the void. The book is a formidable testament to a bleeding country and of the atrocities of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime and its complex aftermath, and it is also a moving account of the invisible and invincible bonds that tie fathers and sons.

The story of a son returning to Libya seeking answers to his father’s disappearance is poignant enough, but Matar writes beyond the journalistic and allows his background in art and architecture to seep into his prose. This adds a poetic aspect to an attention to detail that makes the writing engaging and lyrical.

For this book to have won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography and to have made it to NYT’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century was, I suppose, inevitable.

Hisham Matar & Colette Fellous

In the Country of Men & This Tilting World

The books I’ve read on two consecutive weekends; of Libya and Tunisia; and it so happens that they are neighbors on the world map.

In the Country of Men has been languishing on my shelf for over a decade, and Matar’s appearance on this year’s Booker Prize longlist reminded me of his silent presence in my library. On the other hand, This Tilting World was recently acquired after Fellous’s work caught my attention in an anthology.

Aside from the geographic proximity of their respective settings, these two books surprisingly have more in common: In the Country of Men often feels painfully autobiographical, while This Tilting World admits to being utterly personal. They are simultaneously love letter and farewell letter to their homelands; they explore questions of nationalism, and both present a character’s fraught, and yet loving, relationship with a father and a country; and the writing seems to be an attempt at making sense of the loss of innocence, of the violently shattered idyll of their childhood and hometowns.

However, these are books which, I feel, have unfulfilled potential: In the Country of Men left me wishing for characters with more integrity, This Tilting World left me in want of a more cohesive opus for Fellous’s luscious and elegant prose.

But both contain their own beauty and remain valuable records of Libya’s and Tunisia’s recent history. The books are, therefore, still worth reading.

In response to what the mother in In the Country of Men recounted, (…part of the punishment was to leave me with no books. “Don’t give her any more ammunition,” your grandfather had said…) we say: the more “ammunition” the better! It’s the only way we can make sense of this tilting world.

William Dalrymple: In Xanadu – A Quest

Trace Marco Polo’s 700-year-old passage from Jerusalem to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s summer palace in Xanadu? “Insane!” most people would say, as this journey runs along war-torn lands and the route bestudded with disputed territories.

But that is exactly what twenty-one-year-old William Dalrymple set out to do in 1986 under a travel scholarship. Thankfully, he lived to tell the tale and published this book, his first, in 1989.

The first several pages impressively encapsulates both the divisiveness and the beauty within Jerusalem: “If history repeats itself anywhere, it does so in Jerusalem. […] For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived here. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world. Sacred to three religions, the city has witnessed the worst intolerance and self-righteousness of all of them. […] It is only when you get here and have a moment to sit, and think, and look back, that you come to realize… how beautiful Jerusalem still is.” With a few hundred pages left after reading such lines, and a dreamy itinerary that includes Cyprus, Syria, Eastern Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kashgar — a city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Peking, and Xanadu in Inner Mongolia, a reader could only look forward to the adventure.

The Dalrymple of In Xanadu, however, is a far cry from the more perceptive and compassionate Dalrymple who affected me deeply in the pages of Nine Lives last June. It is understandable, considering the twenty-year publication gap between the two books. (In Xanadu, 1989; Nine Lives, 2009.)

The author admits, in the introduction of the 25th anniversary edition of In Xanadu, how he still feels “deeply ambiguous” about his first book. “For In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naïve and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate. Indeed my 21 year old self – bumptious, cocky and self-confident, quick to judge and embarrassingly slow to hesitate before stereotyping entire nations – is a person I now feel mildly disapproving of: like some smugly self-important but charming nephew who you can’t quite disown, but feel like giving a good tight slap to, or at least cutting down to size, for his own good.”

He was but a boy whose judgments were not too tolerant and whose remarks were yet impervious to today’s hyper political correctness. In spite of that, this is probably Dalrymple in his funniest and most candid. If Nine Lives found me crying inside a room of a Jaipur haveli, In Xanadu found me chuckling in public several times. For all his faults of youth, I think we can still count on him being a more reliable and entertaining narrator than Marco Polo.

As a fan, I find it encouraging to be able to track, through his books, how much his travels, his experiences, and his eagerness to learn and inform has transfigured him into the literary hero that he is today. It is comforting to be able to observe how our traveling intellectual icons grow. That way we are reminded that they are human and their writings are those we can grow with. Either that, or we’ll come to realize that we’ve somehow grown, too.

By reading In Xanadu, one is assured that the reading journey with Dalrymple can only get better from here. Who else is looking forward to getting their hands on The Golden Road?

Elif Shafak: There are Rivers in the Sky

After immersing myself in a variety of literature from the region, and after reading nine of her books, singing praises at the time I read them, then ultimately realizing that I prefer her two nonfiction works to the seven novels, it eventually felt like I had outgrown Elif Shafak.

Nawal el Saadawi, Sema Kaygusuz, Farnoosh Moshiri, Dunya Mikhail, Adania Shibli, and other lesser known women authors that I encountered through this reading project, made Shafak’s fiction feel diluted and elementary…

…until I learned that There are Rivers in the Sky involves Mesopotamia, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and one of the books that fueled my obsession with the Fertile Crescent, Sir Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and its Remains.

Needless to say, I purchased the e-edition of There are Rivers in the Sky on the day it launched, and veered away from this month’s plan to read Women in Translation. Apparently, Shafak still manages to lure me with her chosen topics and setting.

And I’m glad I read it. I’m glad I did not deceive myself into believing that my literary taste has become too sophisticated for Elif Shafak. Because after all, maybe she does not water it down. Maybe what she does is a deliberate simplification, so that her books become stepping stones to forgotten stories, accessible pathways to pressing matters that we don’t even stop to think about, and springboards that launch readers into deeper inquiry about issues that are not discussed enough.

In There are Rivers in the Sky, Shafak still transcends her pretty book covers and continues to be an activist for those who do not have a voice — in this case, buried history, looted artifacts, dying rivers, and the dwindling Yazidis and the continual decimation of their people and their stories.

Reading this has taught me many lessons, and it is not without its beautiful lines: “…the world is changing faster than minds can grasp… all these smartly turned out people with their polished boots and affected airs, you look at them and you think they must know everything, educated and cultured as they are, but… when times are confusing, everybody is a little lost. No one is inwardly confident as they present to be. Hence the reason we must read… books… provide us with light amidst the fog.”

Claudia Piñeiro: Time of the Flies

Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

**That’s why we need to read women.**
**What does that have to do with it?**
**It has everything to do with it.**

Give me a back cover blurb without telling me the book is by Piñeiro and I would not be very interested. The descriptions of her novels are unattractive to me, especially if they are about flies and women killing their husbands’ lovers.

But tell me a book is written by Piñeiro and I would read it without even asking what it’s about, even if it seems to be about flies.

Because if you just trust Piñeiro’s storytelling prowess and allow her to take you on a satisfying ride, you eventually learn that when it comes to the word “fly,” there is the noun, and there is the verb, and she’s ultimately writing about freedom.

Predictably unpredictable. She does it again. But this time, more heartwarming than one would expect, and more blatantly feminist.

We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers

*“That’s the thing about love, it likes to leave its mark.”* — Nathalie Handal

This collection of writings by Arab women turned out to have more erotic passages than I expected, and the conservative reader who cannot appreciate this as an act of defiance against authoritarian patriarchal societies might prefer to stay away.

I value this book as a reminder, as the introduction mentions, of how women were writing in Arabic centuries before women began writing in English; and as a reminder of the treasure troves of Arabic literature that hardly make it into our consciousness simply because they are not on the Western radar.

Poems by Arab women throughout the ages pepper this collection alongside contemporary essays and excerpts from novels, including those by Palestinian authors, Adania Shibli, Suad Amiry, and Naomi Shihab Nye. The translations are no less significant as it has works by Man Booker International Prize awardee, Marilyn Booth, and Ernaux translator, Sophie Lewis.

More than a treasury of sensuality, I see this book as a celebration of women who strive to steer the gaze away from centuries of male perspective, and a celebration of women in translation, but who are translating forceful statements beyond mere words.

What I think will stay with me, however, is a line from Tunisian-French author, Colette Fellous — an imagery of two lovers’ bodies, likened to a closing book.

Romina Paula: August

Translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft

Because it is August; because it is set in rural Patagonia; because it is translated by Jennifer Croft; because it is Women in Translation Month.

This was an uneasy read. It bares a twenty-one-year-old mind in that unsettling stage before growth. The whole book is an interior monologue addressed to a best friend lost to suicide. As Emilia returns to her hometown to scatter the ashes of Andrea, she has to confront loss, death, and living.

Given such weighty themes perused from a different perspective, this had the potential of being a great book. It had touching passages that hit the mark, but also too many that missed. But then again, we rarely hit the mark at twenty-one. My literary palate should be more forgiving.

Because it is August; because it is set in rural Patagonia; because it is translated by Jennifer Croft; because it is Women in Translation Month.

Narine Abgaryan: Three Apples Fell from the Sky

Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden

*“Literacy, Vaso-dzhan, has no place here,” said Satenik, tapping a finger on her cousin’s forehead.* *“It’s here in the heart,” she said, placing her palm against his chest.*

In a picturesque Armenian mountain village where its people have been scarred by time, and happiness is few and far between, a woman prepares for her imminent death.

And yet, I was not prepared for how much joy this book ushered! Yes, joy!

Despite its bleak opening, Three Apples Fell from the Sky is an unexpected playful balance of friendship, conflict, small-town superstition and traditions, finding refuge in reading, love found in a couple’s twilight years, communal and personal griefs, and healing — which all transmutes into a heart-warming embrace in literary form.

Whenever Armenia is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia that resulted in the deaths of between 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians. While it is important to keep the genocide in memory, it is noteworthy how this book only hints at it along with its suffering under Soviet rule — as if to remind the world that there is more to Armenia than its pain.

If you need a literary hug (and a lovely way to begin Women in Translation Month), consider this book.

Thank you, Anna, for recommending this gem!