Our ecological crisis is also a ‘crisis of forgetfulness’… we have forgotten how sacred the nature of creation is,” Iraqi-British writer, Dalia Al-Dujaili, reminds us in Babylon, Albion.
Although I read this in a perfect setting on a weekend getaway — amidst soothing sounds of nature, enveloped by clean air, and surrounded by mountains blanketed by mist — this ‘crisis of forgetfulness’ where the greed of many has replaced the sanctity of nature manifests in international and national news, and in the floodwaters that lap on my own doorstep back home.
Readers who find the lyrical wisdom of Aimee Nezhukumatathil refreshing will surely love this wholesome rumination into identity, migration, land, rivers, borders, national and personal myths, familial and arboreal roots, and humanity’s natural heritage. While these somber topics usually weigh down on the reader, Al-Dujaili imparts a hopeful outlook while encouraging us to make our very own existence into a form of praise, and challenging us to scrutinize how we carry identity. Needless to say, Babylon, Albion was a profoundly beautiful way to end August.
August is Women in Translation Month and Buwan ng Wika (National Language Month). To celebrate the latter: Munting Aklat ng Baybayin by Ian Alfonso. No better way than through learning more about our pre-colonial script! To celebrate the former: Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat and Lydia Sandgren’s Collected Works.
“The best investigative reporting is storytelling,” says journalist Jane Mayer. Traces of Enayat is proof of this as Iman Mersal takes the reader on a quest to find traces of Enayat, an Egyptian writer who took her own life in 1963. Mersal affectingly expresses the attachment and resonance we find in the authors we encounter and whose works derail us from an otherwise uneventful trajectory. It also begs the question: How many Enayats has the world lost into oblivion?
As for Collected Works, seven pages shy of six hundred, this novel quietly draws you into its world. It acquaints you with its setting and its characters without haste. It knows how to linger. It lingers on one’s thoughts on literature and art, on a character’s indecision to call someone or not, whether to read a book or not. It often lingers on everyday scenes where words turn into still life paintings and everyday portraits. But these scenes and characters exist in the shadow of Cecilia’s disappearance. Almost fifteen years after she vanished without a trace, her daughter, Rakel, believes it is her missing mother she is reading about in a novel, and measured suspense and mystery begin to replace the monotony of their lives. I would recommend this to the unhurried reader. Ultimately, Collected Works is a meditation on what one’s life amounts to.
As for reading life in August? This is what it amounted to. It felt very much like a defiance of my country’s frustrating political climate.
“I’m sitting in the restaurant reading. Some books take me to worlds far greater and more tender than real life.”
Amidst a stream of surreal disclosures from a woman grappling with mental illness and electroshock therapy, bursts of beauty in the prose.
“I want to wander down these streets and avenues, drinking everything I see, making new discoveries, watching these people who remain strangers to me, all around me, this unquenchable life that I so long to take into my heart. Could it be that there are others who find whole worlds in a single moment, who marvel in the miracle of existence, whose thoughts can purge into the depths of unfettered time and rapture? I don’t know. A single moment can hold an eternity.”
But it is ultimately a sad and disturbing portrait of a particular societal context and its effect on the psyche, framed affectionately by Aysegul Savas’ introduction and Maureen Freely’s translator’s note.
Reading this brought to mind Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, and reading this reminded me that sometimes the point of literature is not to read only about women’s lives that appeal to the reader, but to have one’s eyes opened to different kinds of suffering if only to achieve a better understanding of the world we live in.
It’s a book I can only recommend to a select few, but I know the Turkish section of my shelf is richer for compassionately clasping it to its bosom.
“What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?”
This is the line that greets the reader on its French flap. Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, one would think that the question, and the novel, are a response to the Gaza War. Although uncannily timely, it was written in 2014.
In this story, all Palestinians disappear. There is fear, relief, and even joy. “This problem disappeared on its own. It is a divine miracle,” remarked one Israeli. Ariel, a journalist and liberal Zionist, tries to figure out what really happened and looks for traces by reading his missing friend Alaa’s letters to a dead grandmother.
The book is semi-epistolary as it alternates between Ariel’s articles and Alaa’s letters. In a clever contrast, Ariel’s articles look toward the uncertain future, while Alaa’s letters look into the past. “Perhaps I am writing out of fear. Against forgetfulness. I write to remember and to remind, so memories are not erased. Memory is my last lifeline.”
The articles and the poignant letters reveal the disparity of their personal histories: One looks at the same city as the Jaffa his people had lost; while one looks at it as Tel Aviv, with its Bauhaus architecture, the dream that came true.
In another Palestinian masterpiece, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, the entire book is a bullet in motion that hits you with a staggering force on the very last page. There is an abrupt and brutal finality.
There is no closure in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. It ends without a concluding cadence and leaves the reader suspended in an unsettling limbo. But that does not imply that this book pales in comparison. Perhaps we are given a nanoscopic glimpse of what it feels like to be Palestinian.
There has been a significant increase of Maghrebi literature in my reading repertoire, and the recent discovery of Malika Moustadraf is yet another strong force that pulls my literary compass in that direction.
She is Morocco’s answer to Egypt’s Nawal el Saadawi whose depictions of how women are viewed and treated are unflinching. But Malika has a distinct style that draws the reader right into a scene, into the midst and into the cracks of such a society, sometimes forcing us to look through the eyes of the scoundrels themselves. I daresay she is the more masterful fiction writer.
But fiction, as we know, is just a tool to reveal the rawest of truths, and Malika has succeeded in this. The tragedy is that she will no longer be writing. The few works that she leaves in her wake are glimpses of the undeniable literary powerhouse she would have become had she not passed away from a chronic illness at the age of thirty-seven in 2006.
One thing I’ve noticed in Maghrebi authors is the sensitivity and the softness of the men and the forcefulness of the women. Their literature can teach us many things, but among these is the truth that softness can be extremely masculine, and forcefulness immensely feminine.
This book was, indeed, a fitting way to start this reading month. Wishing you a rewarding Women’s Month!
“Only love and art can do this: only inside a book or in front of a painting can one truly be let into another’s perspective. It has always struck me as a paradox how in the solitary arts there is something intimately communal.”
An understated book that is a meditation and an education in art and life.
“I hope that when there is laughter, it’s laughter made wise by having known real grief — and when there is grief, it is made wise by having known real joy,” Kaveh Akbar writes in Martyr! Whether writing about art, architecture, Libya, or politics, Hisham Matar’s books are often so heartfelt — wholly made wise by having known sorrow and loss.
Fires, Marguerite Yourcenar
…because maybe, subconsciously, this month’s reading theme is about finding solace in the works of authors whose masterpieces have already left an impression on me, that I immediately dove into Yourcenar’s Fires without hesitation, having been incredibly moved by Memoirs of Hadrian in 2022.
She does admit, and warn, in the Preface that this book is, “the product of a love crisis” and that writing this was, in a way, “exorcising a very concrete love”; and yet it still surprised me that the elegance I encountered in Hadrian was replaced in Fires by a certain violence and ferociousness in the prose.
Antigone, Sappho, Clymenestra, and Achilles are just some of the main characters of the nine lyrical prose pieces, or stories, that Yourcenar amalgamates with her own experiences. I was left wondering if I understood the allusions correctly, or whether I understood anything at all.
One thing is certain, Fires is a masterclass on opening lines:
Phaedra’s piece begins with, “I hope this book will never be read.”
The Patroclus opening, “A heart is perhaps something unsavory. It’s on the order of anatomy tables and butcher’s stalls. I prefer your body.”
Lena’s? “Loving eyes closed is to love blindly. Loving eyes open is perhaps to love madly.”
“Love is a penalty. We are punished for not having been able to stay alone.” Clymenestra’s.
Face Shield Nation, Gideon Lasco
Articles that I looked forward to during the pandemic compiled in a book. Lasco was the voice of calm and reason at a time of confusion; evoking through his column the architectural definition of a column as a sturdy pillar of support. An essential time capsule of an era that we cannot afford to forget if we intend to learn from it. Read full entry here.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a re-reading)
Growing up is realizing that Gabo is the real Melquiades who brought us magnets, magnifying lenses, astronomical observations, and mercurial storytelling. It was he who made imagination and literary possibilities flourish in the fertile and pristine Macondos of our minds, and who never really died. Read full entry here.
Nothing but the Night, John Williams
Maybe the first disappointment that assails the reader is the realization that, despite the slenderness of this volume, there is a heaviness in each page that restrains forward motion.
“Boring,” the lazy might judge hastily somewhere within the first three chapters. But one should not be too quick to criticize even though I myself could only read a couple of pages per sitting. For if one looks closer, and feels deeper, isn’t this genius, how John Williams conveys exactly what depression feels like?
“…there came to him that peculiar loneliness which is felt only in the monstrous impersonality of a multitude…”“What was the senseless circumstance which led him on and on, deeper and deeper into what seemed to him a maze labyrinth, devoid of pattern or meaning? …some unnameable power pushed him from one place to another, down paths he had no wish to travel, through doors he did not know and had no wish to know. All was dark and nameless and he walked in darkness.”
But then the reader is momentarily allowed to come up for air. I’m referring to the fourth chapter that is briefly set alight with a Proustian beauty! “That is the very best time of life, he thought: lost time.” And then John Williams proceeds to craft this fleeting tribute to the master searcher of lost time before he relinquishes the ethereal chapter to the fading light.
As the novel finally builds suspense, it spirals into a nihilistic darkness that ends with a violent and repulsive slap in the face.
Written in Burma when he was only twenty-two while recovering from injuries brought about by a plane crash over the Himalayas during WWII, he wrote this first novel at a particularly dark time when there was nothing else but the night.
The John Williams here is not the John Williams that gave us Stoner and Augustus. The John Williams here is the John Williams that would eventually give us Stoner and Augustus.
The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
This reader has been through Pamuk’s longest novels and still felt the density of the mystery and prose in this book’s mere four hundred pages.
It explores the writing process and the precariousness of identity. It is also about how much the books we read, the stories we hear, the movies we watch, the everyday objects in our lives, and our city’s history shape the multiplicities of our being.
I enjoyed that twist at the end and relished the familiarity of Istanbul as a breathing character in a Pamuk novel. But maybe, just maybe, The Black Book is not for the Pamuk newbie, and not for those who are in a hurry.
The Golden Road, Willliam Dalrymple
It is not only the Silk Roads that are rising again, as Peter Frankopan proclaims in a forceful last line that gave me goosebumps. Rising, too, are buried or forgotten histories that have now resurfaced to challenge centuries of unquestioned narratives.
Frankopan’s The Silk Roads was an eye-opener, but The Golden Road takes this non-Eurocentric view of ancient and early medieval history to an intriguing direction by revealing India as a catalyst that transformed the world. Read full review here.
It is not only the Silk Roads that are rising again, as Peter Frankopan proclaims in a forceful last line that gave me goosebumps. Rising, too, are buried or forgotten histories that have now resurfaced to challenge centuries of unquestioned narratives.
Frankopan’s The Silk Roads was an eye-opener, but The Golden Road takes this non-Eurocentric view of ancient and early medieval history to an intriguing direction by revealing India as a catalyst that transformed the world.
The evidence lies in the art discovered in Afghanistan’s mountains and caves; in the archaeological treasures of an ancient Egyptian seaport; in Baghdad where the knowledge of ancient India converged with that of ancient Greece and Abbasid viziers were Sanskrit-literate; in Spain where Sa’id Al-Andalus championed Indian contribution to mathematics and astronomy; in Pisa where Fibonacci popularized what we call “Arabic numerals” but which are actually Indian; in Roman texts, some written by Pliny; in the jungles of India, or in its museums that appear to hold more Roman coins than any other country outside the Roman Empire; in China’s overlooked history where once upon a time it looked to India for enlightenment; in Sri Lanka and Central Java where Indian Buddhist literature achieved peak expression in architecture; in Cambodia’s Angkor Wat which Dalrymple refers to as the most spectacular of all Indic temples, and where one can find the oldest inscription that represents the number zero; in Brahmagupta’s 7th century writings that made him the first mathematician to record his exploration of the properties of zero, defining it as a number akin to the other nine rather than a void; in the numbers that dictate our most advanced technology to those we use in simple day-to-day calculations, “arguably the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language…”
[…and also in, if I may add, the Philippines where currently displayed in the Ayala Museum as part of the Gold of Our Ancestors exhibit is an intricately crafted, four-kilo gold sash from 10th to 13th century Mindanao that massively echoes the sacred thread, or upavita, in Hindu culture. (Dear William Dalrymple, or your cute son, Sam, please come to the Philippines to look into this? Haha)]
To engage in this book is also to question why India’s extraordinary role in world history has been subdued. The pulsating arteries of India’s influence that crossed continents and oceans, “spread not by the sword but by the sheer power of ideas,” has been brushed aside. It has never even been given a name. William Dalrymple calls it The Golden Road.
Although I prefer the William Dalrymple who does not make the “I” completely disappear in his travelogues, thereby giving his text a more endearing and personal touch, I like how this history book is not tediously academic and does not promise to be all-encompassing. Its readability serves as an introduction for those who would like to have a general idea of these trade, cultural, and intellectual routes that seem to have a life of their own apart from — although intersecting at times — the often romanticized Silk Roads.
The prolific stream of fascinating history from Dalrymple’s writings makes this reader feel fortunate to be alive in this age of rediscovery and information. The generosity of his work is encapsulated in my favorite line from this book: “The possession of knowledge is not weakened when shared with others but made more fruitful and more enduring.”
A friend sent me a signed copy of Dalrymple’s The Golden Road from overseas a few months ago, and it still hasn’t arrived thanks to our lousy postal system. But as I wait, another friend lends me her copy of City of Djinns. It’s comforting to know that I won’t run out of Dalrymples (and kind, reading friends).
City of Djinns is Dalrymple’s second book after his debut, In Xanadu. Published only four years apart and yet the Dalrymple of Djinns is already so much wiser and more thoughtful than the one in Xanadu. It is one of his best books. City of Djinns is a precious gem in a brilliant bibliography that is a testament to how a series of meaningful travels can profoundly ripen a person and a writer.
And Delhi, this book’s chosen city, is one such city that seems like a heaving anarchy on the surface; but as this book’s adept writer shows us, if one dares to steep oneself in its murky river of humanity, one comes out of it acquiring a thousand and one lessons about the layers of its incredible history, about different faiths and cultures, and about the rise and fall of empires.
“The civilization I belong to — the civilization of Delhi — came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim. That civilization flourished for one thousand years undisturbed until certain people came along and denied that that great mingling had taken place,” laments Twilight in Delhi author, Ahmed Ali.
India was where the sun finally set on the British Empire, and this book is another witness to how much the Partition — the British Empire’s parting gift to the Indian sub-continent — wreaked havoc on this particular city, whose towers, ironically, used to be, “The resting place of the sun”.
Delhi is not a destination and subject for the faint-hearted. It takes a Dalrymple to deftly paint the interplay of light and dark, of myth and truth, of what was and what is.
Serenade for Nadia brings to light seldom-discussed tragedies of Turkish history: The 1942 Struma disaster, wherein hundreds of Jews fleeing the Axis nations in Europe perished when their refugee ship was torpedoed in the Black Sea; the Armenian Genocide; and the plight of the Crimean Turks who were oppressed and slaughtered by the Soviet government for being seen as Nazi collaborators.
This novel, however, is set in modern-day Istanbul where Maya Duran works at Istanbul University while single-handedly raising a teenage son. Her life is turned upside down when she is assigned to assist a visiting octogenarian, Maximillian Wagner, a German-born professor from Harvard. Little by little, the untold stories of her family and her nation come back to haunt her and beg to be uncovered and told. If a reader pays close attention, it will not be difficult to see that Maya’s character is also an accusing finger pointed at prevailing misogynistic attitudes in Turkey.
Aside from music playing a big role, this reader is extremely impressed by the number of intricate social issues that appear organically in this novel. Because Turkish history and culture are so rich, and its government and society are often paradoxical, it takes a good writer to pack all of this in a novel without making it feel contrived. Zulfu Livaneli succeeds in this, and one can understand why Orhan Pamuk himself hailed him as, “An essential force in Turkey’s musical, cultural, and political scene.”
Having read Disquiet in 2023, this is my second Livaneli. Although I admired Disquiet for its eye-opening qualities, I had qualms with the translation. If I have any qualms with Serenade For Nadia, it is only that this book should come with tissues. Tears are guaranteed.
“Does one truly forget with time, as they say? It’s not true. Time polishes memory…”
For an era and a place teeming with history, there isn’t enough literary fiction set in Al-Andalus.
Prior to Hoopoe Fiction’s republication of Radwa Ashour’s Granada: The Complete Trilogy, I had only read Tariq Ali’s Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, and I remember being immensely affected by it but finding it too short.
Ashour’s trilogy, now available in a single volume, answers that yearning and enables readers to linger a little bit longer, with its 465 pages, in the tragic century following the defeat of the last Muslim state in Iberia; the fall of Granada that extinguished seven hundred years of Muslim rule in Spain.
The story traces five generations of one family and those they loved while giving the reader a glimpse of how an entire people navigated betrayal, subjugation, persecution, and the undoing of their culture and traditions. Abu Jaafar, the patriarch, a learned man in the bookbinding trade who dies of sorrow after witnessing the burnings of Arabic books and texts at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition, and Salima, the granddaughter who reminds me of Hypatia, are some of this novel’s most enduring characters.
Some plot lines are slightly itinerant, and this reader wonders whether what seems like inadequacies are merely little black holes of translation. Reading this is rewarding, nonetheless, and it is a step closer to that ultimate novel set in Al-Andalus that I hope to read in this lifetime. Although heartbreaking, this book contains lovely imagery and questions that cling and will not easily let go — just like the question of why these historical episodes from the 1500s feel awfully recent and familiar.
But we need books like this to polish our memory of history and to make our worldview flourish. As Marina Warner points out in the foreword, “In Arabic, the root of the verb for watering, rawa, happens to be the same for storytelling: a storyteller is a rawi. As the comparative literature scholar and Arabist Philip Kennedy comments, ‘Rawwii is well-watered; there are lots of versions of the root, including riwaaya which now means a story (or novel).’ Narration is irrigation, irrigation is narration.”
What a lovely thought, that to be well-watered and nourished is to be well-read, or well-storied.
What makes me buy a book for its cover design? My favorite city’s unparalleled skyline!
That is why I read Eric Ambler even though thrillers and spy novels are not my usual genre of choice… especially those written circa 1939.
It was the lure of Istanbul that pulled me into the orbit of Charles Latimer, a detective novelist vacationing in Turkey in the 1930s. There he meets a Turkish colonel who broaches the subject of Dimitrios, a murdered criminal whose body was found floating in the Bosphorus. Intrigued by the dead man’s notoriety, Latimer does his own investigating. What he uncovers is a web of international intrigue that leads him to Smyrna, Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally, Paris.
But I began to suspect that this book was not a regular thriller when Charles Latimer inspected the body of Dimitrios in the morgue and saw him, “Not as a corpse in a mortuary, but as a man, not as an isolate, a phenomenon, but as a unit in a disintegrating social system.” It is also worthy of note how Dimitrios, who had become the epitome of evil in Latimer’s mind, turned out to be, “A picture of distinguished respectability,” when he was alive.
“But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
The Mask of Dimitrios does not read like a thriller. It is unlike those formulaic bestsellers that cater to superficial and momentary sensations. Those who seek such will be disappointed. It is rather a perceptive insight into that rapidly splintering era sandwiched between two World Wars.
What makes it terrifying is the way he seemed to be describing the world today.
The Book-Butterfly 