In Hindu cosmology, world time is divided into four great epochs called the Yuga Cycle: Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dwapara Yuga, and the Kali Yuga. As the cycle progresses through the four stages, the length of each yuga decreases, but social and moral decay multiplies. We are believed to be in the Kali Yuga, the age of conflict, sin, and disintegration.
This sets the tone for the book, so that a few pages in, I felt relieved that I did not read this before, or during, my trip to India.
“This book covers so many sensitive areas that it is bound to raise a few cries of protest and dissent, particularly from Indians understandably touchy about criticism from abroad; but it is a work of love. Its subject is an area of the world I revere like no other, and in which I have chosen to spend most of my time since I was free to make that choice,” writes Dalrymple in the introduction.
But as I read on, I began to regret not reading this before, or during, my trip to India! Unlike the three other Dalrymple books in the Vintage Departures edition, this is less travelogue than a compilation of articles and essays about the Indian subcontinent, from north to south and east to west, which are more political in nature.
Published in 1998, it includes interviews with Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto and Imran Khan, and figures from opposing sides of caste wars and political parties. It is, therefore, a crash course on a part of the world that, despite its significant advances, is still reeling from the British Raj, the Partition, and religious discrimination. As an outsider and common reader, I have yet to encounter a more readable and insightful work that encapsulates caste and gender prejudice, corruption in government, the justice system and the economic obstacles of the subcontinent in a single book.
Dalrymple rarely waxes poetic here, but this book stamps his authority in the field of journalism. As I read this amidst horrifying world events and the filing of certificates of candidacies by movie stars, social media influencers, and crooks here in the Philippines, I can easily believe that we are, indeed, in the Age of Kali.
“Today the West often views Islam as a civilization very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realize how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s modern incarnation… Certainly if John Moschos were to come back today it is likely that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with those of, say, a contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonization of Islam in the West, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West’s repeated humiliation of the muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.” — William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain
Hagia Sophia, followed by mosaics, lots of them: These are the things that initially come to mind whenever I encounter the word “Byzantine,” and I suspect I am not alone in this. And because it is art that outlives the rise and fall of empires, there is almost nothing else we can clearly visualize about Byzantine beyond its art, architecture, and its leading players in history.
“The sacred and aristocratic nature of Byzantine art means that we have very little idea of what the early Byzantine peasant or shopkeeper looked like; we have even less idea of what he thought, what he longed for, what he loved or what he hated,” writes William Dalrymple.
But once upon a time, circa 580 AD, a monk called John Moschos traveled with Sophronius the Sophist across the empire including the three greatest Byzantine metropolises — Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria — and wrote about it. In a book called Spiritual Meadow, Moschos detailed what he saw, whom he met, the heresies he witnessed, and stories about common folk, “the sort who normally slip through the net cast by the historian.”
It was this book that Dalrymple used as a guide to travel through the eastern Mediterranean world in 1994, a world that is now predominantly Islamic, but a world that once was predominantly Christian (not in deed, of course, but by religious affiliation) for hundreds of years, from the age of Constantine to the dawn of Islam in the 7th century.
This journey among the dwindling population of Eastern Christians begins in the Monastery of Iviron in Mount Athos, an autonomous region in Greece that is under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. To this day, women are prohibited from entering the monastic community. It is, therefore, a place I cannot travel to even if I wanted to.
And this is the service Dalrymple does for his readers: To visit places inaccessible to us, to experience cultures and traditions unheard of and never to be seen again, “to do what no future generation of travelers would be able to do: to see wherever possible what Moschos and Sophronius had seen, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray under the same frescoes and mosaics, to discover what was left, and to witness what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium,” and then tell the tale. (A sad validation of this slightly conceited claim is the wistful realization that most of the Syrian Byzantine sites mentioned in this book became casualties of war several years after its publication.)
The stunning architecture that William Dalrymple describes with an eye for detail and a penchant for lyricism; the coming across of endangered languages such as Turoyo, the modern Aramaic spoken in the Tur Abdin region in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, “where Jesus could expect to be understood if he came back tomorrow”; the discovery of a musical mystery, an ancient form of plainsong in Syria that could possibly be the direct antecedent of the Gregorian chant; the Eastern roots of Celtic illuminating art and how the trajectory of Renaissance art owes it to John of Damascus, an Arab Christian monk; the author’s observation that “Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice” and that “Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early convention; it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition”; perspectives on the Armenian genocide, the Kurdish conflict, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Israeli–Palestinian situation at the time; the realization that Byzantine Palestine was dominated by Christians and for eight hundred years the Jewish community was a minority; accounts of Muslims praying in Eastern churches, “the Eastern Christians and the Muslims have lived side by side for nearly one and a half millennia, and have been able to do so due to a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customs unimaginable in the solidly Christian West”; and most remarkably, the awareness that, oftentimes, people are not as hostile and as divided as governments and ideologies want us to believe; these are a few of the things that will have readers brimming by the time they get to the last page.
This is essential Dalrymple right here — a book that will leave one richer for having read it.
Thank you, dear Anna, for this most wonderful recommendation! 🤍
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.
“…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.
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.
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.
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?
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.”
“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.
Without meaning to, I read Paolo Maurensig’s three chess novels in chronological order of publishing dates. The Lüneburg Variation, Theory of Shadows, and Game of the Gods. The sequence in which I read these books were, admittedly, influenced by Goodreads ratings. Maurensig is quite obscure in my part of the world, so I had to consult Goodreads despite my distrust of its stars. Game of the Gods has the lowest rating among the three.
But I enjoyed it! It’s not exactly a literary masterpiece, but I found it to be an easy and entertaining read that has its gems. I think the low ratings come from readers who have particular expectations. Those who read this for chess will soon realize that it’s not wholly about chess. Those who read this for its biographical aspect might be disappointed because the story is mostly imagined from the little that the media knows about Indian chess grandmaster, Malik Mir Sultan Khan, who enthralled the chess world in the 1930s by defeating world champions but soon faded into the night sky like a shooting star.
The passages that describe the incorporation of Indian philosophy and thought in Sultan Khan’s games was what I appreciated the most. The book also introduces the reader to chaturanga, the precursor of chess, that had a more sacred aspect to the game, and wherein its player had to transform himself in order to succeed.
And from what this reader can conclude from the third of Paolo Maurensig’s chess novels, the “game of the gods” is not chess. It is fate.
The Book-Butterfly 