Tag: Literature

Simon Winchester: The Professor and the Madman

February 2, 2021

What book comes to mind when you read the lines, “One of the greatest romances of English literature?” or “One of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters”? This masterpiece of twelve volumes on its initial edition took almost eighty years to create — the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the British Empire was approaching its pinnacle and English was on the verge of becoming a global language, there was an urgency to “chart the life of each word, to offer its biography… to have a record of the register of its birth,” when it was first written down. “And at the heart of such a dictionary, should be the history of the life span of each and every word. Some words are ancient and exist still. Others are new and vanish like mayflies.  Still others emerge in one lifetime, continue to exist through the next and the next, and look set to endure forever… There should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings — the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance itself, and then perhaps shedding them as the public mood dictates…”

This book unravels the remarkable men behind such a momentous and historic undertaking: “Their scholarship sheer genius, their contributions to literary history profound. But who remembers them and who today makes use of all that they achieved?”

And yet the most astonishing question of all; what if we were told (the way this book exquisitely does) that the making of the Oxford English Dictionary is a tale of murder and insanity?

This story, at times tragic, at times disturbing but with slivers of hope and redemption, most of the time incredible, has the sort of narrative that I usually find in fiction; and it is written in such an absorbing manner that I had to check many times if it was really a work of non-fiction!

At the core of the story are the two learned men to whom we owe the success of the OED: Professor James Murray, the distinguished editor, and a surgeon whose contributions were vital, Dr. William Chester Minor.  The two men maintained a correspondence for years but had never met, the latter constantly refusing invitations for a meeting in person.  It was only after two decades when Prof. Murray discovered that Dr. Minor was the longest-staying resident at the Broadmoor, England’s harshest asylums for criminal lunatics.

I think this is essential reading for those who love history and words, and the history of words!

“I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are daughters of earth…”

P.S. Just as I thought I veered away from the East and Iran, there is apparently a movie based on this book starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, and the movie is directed by Farhad Safinia, an Iranian.

Elif Shafak: The Bastard of Istanbul

Reading this is like walking into the vibrance of the color spectrum and ending up enveloped in its deepest and darkest hues.

But which caused the author to be put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. By lending voice to the Armenian characters in the novel, Elif Shafak risked being sentenced to prison. The charges were eventually dropped, but the incident highlights the fearlessness of a Turkish woman brave enough to write about something which, until now, the Turkish government denies — the Armenian Genocide during World War I. 

The dialogues between the descendants of the oppressed Armenians and modern-day Turks are moving and revealing on equal sides; the characters are relatable and human; historical facts and astonishing twists leave the reader no choice but to gasp; magic realism effectively subtle; all these, interlaced into the breathtaking and bewitching chaos that is Istanbul make it a triumph of unforgettable and disquieting beauty.

And because the two main characters are readers, there are ruminations on the power of the written word: “Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous.  The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert… Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced.”

Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis

March 2021

“The regime had understood that one person leaving her house asking herself: Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my make-up be seen? Are they going to whip me?

No longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What’s going on in the political prisons?”

“In every religion, you find the same extremists.”

The title takes after the capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, but it is an autobiography presented as a graphic novel written and drawn by the author! The two volumes of Persepolis chronicles the life of Marjane Satrapi growing up in Tehran witnessing the downfall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution, living through the Iran-Iraq War, her high school years in Vienna, and her university life back in Tehran under the Islamic regime.

Persepolis is a memoir, a historical record, a political statement, but also an extraordinarily creative reading experience. Being a newbie to the genre, I had not realized that graphic novels could be this powerful! It is an honest account of a life and a nation, and I admire how it sends out a strong message of how crucial it is to educate oneself to attain freedom, especially the freedom of the mind.

She expounds these thoughts in a later interview with Emma Watson, “I have lived in a dictatorship. There was a ban on everything! Was I less free in my mind? No, I wasn’t. Did I become a stupid person? No, I didn’t. Because no matter how much they looked at me, they could not get into my mind. That belongs to me. And that is under my control if I decide it is. And I can only decide that if I train it. If you don’t use it, it shrinks, and if you use it, it grows. So it is up to us.”

In Volume I, published in 2000, we see a very young Satrapi wishing to be an educated and liberated woman like Marie Curie; and in Volume II, she promises to make her ancestors proud. Remarkably enough, her 2007 animated movie adaptation of Persepolis premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Award. In 2019 she directed the biopic Radioactive starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie. Full circle. Watching both films over the weekend turned out to be yet another excellent toast to Women’s Month!

Rabih Alameddine: The Hakawati

February 18, 2021

This book is on fire! A dizzying magic carpet ride. A jealous book. It requires your full attention. Look away and you will lose track and get lost, look closer and you will get lost in the stories within stories within stories. It is a matter of choosing your definition of “lost.”

“No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling,” says the hakawati. The evidence is the book itself, a contemporary retelling of the Arabian Nights through the approach of Lebanese writer, Rabih Alameddine; but this is the Arabian Nights (uncensored, the author warns), deeper and more relevant, and suffused with rich Lebanese culture and history.  It is wondrous, bizarre, sometimes even vulgar and repulsive — but only when you take things literally and only until you realize they are metaphors and then it becomes disturbing, and then these parts become ingenious!

One does not have to read the Arabian Nights in order to enjoy this, but I believe it will be better appreciated with an ample background. Many references would have been lost to me and some sections would have seemed absurd had I bypassed the Arabian Nights. The writing style does not have a tinge of mediocrity, and yet I am aware that it cannot be everyone’s cup of coffee; but I will remember this book for the beautiful words it gave me:

Hakawati — “A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables (hekayat).  A story-teller, and entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns… ‘hakawati’ is derived from the Lebanese word ‘haki,’ which means ‘talk’ or ‘conversation’. This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling.”

Zajal — a poetry duel practiced in Lebanon until today.

Bakhshi — an oud player, a singer, and a storyteller.

Maqam — In the Arabic language it means place, location, situation, position, a shrine, but in Arabic music it is a scale and a mood. “Teardrops descending along cheeks, a cascade of grace,” as the protagonist puts it lyrically.

Tarab — “A musical enchantment. It is when both musician and listener are bewitched by the music.” An entrancement achieved between performer and listener while engaged in music.

This whole book is a cacophony of stories. How fitting that its last word is “listen”.

Rabih Alameddine: The Hakawati

February 18, 2021

This book is on fire! A dizzying magic carpet ride. A jealous book. It requires your full attention. Look away and you will lose track and get lost, look closer and you will get lost in the stories within stories within stories. It is a matter of choosing your definition of “lost.”

“No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling,” says the hakawati. The evidence is the book itself, a contemporary retelling of the Arabian Nights through the approach of Lebanese writer, Rabih Alameddine; but this is the Arabian Nights (uncensored, the author warns), deeper and more relevant, and suffused with rich Lebanese culture and history.  It is wondrous, bizarre, sometimes even vulgar and repulsive — but only when you take things literally and only until you realize they are metaphors and then it becomes disturbing, and then these parts become ingenious!

One does not have to read the Arabian Nights in order to enjoy this, but I believe it will be better appreciated with an ample background. Many references would have been lost to me and some sections would have seemed absurd had I bypassed the Arabian Nights. The writing style does not have a tinge of mediocrity, and yet I am aware that it cannot be everyone’s cup of coffee; but I will remember this book for the beautiful words it gave me:

Hakawati — “A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables (hekayat).  A story-teller, and entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns… ‘hakawati’ is derived from the Lebanese word ‘haki,’ which means ‘talk’ or ‘conversation’. This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling.”

Zajal — a poetry duel practiced in Lebanon until today.

Bakhshi — an oud player, a singer, and a storyteller.

Maqam — In the Arabic language it means place, location, situation, position, a shrine, but in Arabic music it is a scale and a mood. “Teardrops descending along cheeks, a cascade of grace,” as the protagonist puts it lyrically.

Tarab — “A musical enchantment. It is when both musician and listener are bewitched by the music.” An entrancement achieved between performer and listener while engaged in music.

This whole book is a cacophony of stories. How fitting that its last word is “listen”.

Naguib Mahfouz: Arabian Days and Nights

February 22, 2021

Aladdin asked, “Who are the associates of devils?”
“A prince without learning, a scholar without virtue… the corruption of the world lies in their corruption.”

Twenty pages into this book and it already felt like I was reading Crime and Punishment instead of another variation of the Arabian Nights. Apparently, it is not a retelling of the Arabian Nights but a grim sequel drained of the amusement and is, instead, a disquieting political message and social commentary. It weighs heavily.

Right at the beginning it exposes the false piety and corruption of those who are in power when a man of good social standing commits a heinous crime and the poor are arrested, questioned, and accused, whilst the authorities “believe in mercy even when we are chopping necks and cropping heads.”

Characters of the Arabian Nights appear throughout the book, their lives intertwined, but the genies are not the type that fulfill wishes. Some play fateful pranks and some act like consciences, testing the human capacity for good and evil, or calling out the faults of those in power, “If you are called upon to do good, you claim you are incapable; and if you are called upon to do evil, you set about it in the name of duty.” And those in power justify their deeds by saying, “He who’s too decent goes hungry in this city.”

As Scheherazade intimates to Sultan Shahryar, “The fact that stories repeat themselves is an indication of their truth, Your Majesty.” True enough. We see these stories repeated outside of fiction and right smack in the middle of our lives. 

This novel is, indeed, a ratification of Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize.

“Wisdom is a difficult requirement — it is not inherited as a throne is.”

Naguib Mahfouz: Akhenaten

February 13, 2021

For its size, this book is surprisingly so many things at once! It is a subtle commentary on religion and faith aside from being an inquiry into the life of Egypt’s most controversial pharaoh who was persecuted and known as the “heretic pharaoh” for his monotheistic beliefs.

There is something so simple and elegant in the way Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz allows Akhenaten’s story to unfold through the fictional narrator’s quest for the truth as he interviews the pharaoh’s contemporaries. Each chapter is named after these characters and it is through them that the reader is shown conflicting opinions and theories about the pharaoh and his powerful and beautiful queen, Nefertiti.

“…to set off along the path of history in search of truth, a path that has no beginning and no end, for it will always be extended by those who have a passion for eternal truth.”

What gave me goosebumps after reading it was when I learned that, out of all the days, The Metropolitan Opera was also streaming the premiere staging of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten! It became a mesmerizing continuation to what I had just read.

Arabian Nights Sir Richard Burton Translation

February 11, 2021

For this reading venture, I chose the controversial translation by Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890). I had to wade through hundreds of pages of old-fashioned language, terminology that are deemed politically incorrect nowadays, some unusual words that Burton coined himself, and content that was considered pornography in Burton’s time. (On a side note, Burton also translated the Kama Sutra and its Tunisian counterpart, The Perfumed Garden. Given those inclinations, this was not one of the watered-down versions we used to find lying around our grandparents’ living rooms.)

This edition has fine and tastefully-colored illustrations that are oases from the antiquated writing style that 21st Century eyes are no longer accustomed to.  A collection of Eastern folk tales and stories compiled during the Islamic Golden Age, I enjoyed coming across real historical figures from that era that were woven alongside the fictional characters.

Haroun al-Rashid, the fifth Abbasid Caliph who ruled from 786-809 appears in many of the stories along with his Persian vizier Jafar who, by the way, was not a villain.  The Islamic Empire was said to be at its most powerful under this caliph’s reign. They traded and maintained diplomatic ties with China, and because stories were also traded along the Silk Roads, it may not be too surprising that in the Arabian Nights, Aladdin is actually Chinese.

On the year Al-Rashid became caliph, his son Al-Mamun was born, and it would be Al-Mamun’s obsession for knowledge and a large-scale commissioning of translations of ancient texts from Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and India that would result into the Translation Movement — and perhaps, in addition, this compilation.

As one who finds this region of the world and that period of history intriguing, I still find this worthy of any book-lover’s shelf space. However, I now understand why later writers feel compelled to refashion the stories into something more relatable, or make adaptations for younger audiences without the sexual imagery, or modify the individual stories with a more discernible moral aim.

But whether we like it or not, the Arabian Nights in its entirety has revolutionized and influenced storytelling for centuries. After having read it myself, I realized that there is an aspect that is not emphasized enough: Hers was an unselfish act. Scheherazade volunteered herself at the risk of death to prove King Sharyar’s stereotypes wrong. By so doing, she saved not only her life, but other women’s lives as well — and through an unlikely medium!

After all, isn’t there inside each of us a Scheherazade, a being who depends on the magic of stories to survive?

Orhan Pamuk: A Strangeness in My Mind

February 5, 2021

The first page of this book quotes a passage from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude:
“I had melancholy thoughts…
A strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.”

For someone who has felt like an anachronism all her life, I felt like I owned these lines. It was as if I was meant to read the book just for this, and having come across it right at the start, the rest of the book was an additional literary present.

Ever since I read My Name is Red, I have been looking for the Orhan Pamuk I encountered there in each of his books. (I even looked for the actual Pamuk in Istanbul, persuading the whole family to visit his Museum of Innocence on the European side of the city in the hope of bumping into him.) I never seemed to find that Pamuk again.

But there is something in common with this book and My Name is Red. It is the way he allows different characters to gain control over the narration, thereby lending the reader a fuller grasp.

There are things Pamuk writes that make me uncomfortable, but these simultaneously compel me to admire a straightforwardness about life that only the most courageous writers can execute.

It is only through this book that I have seen for myself what all his works have in common — aside from providing details that escape the average consciousness, perhaps a result of having gone to architecture school — every book is a love story, no matter the plot or the characters: A love story between a writer and a place; between a writer and Istanbul, or Kars; between a writer and Turkey; a love story about the effects of the bittersweet passing of time on a place; about someone who recognizes a nation profoundly inside out, from its complicated politics to its inner conflicts and issues, its customs and traditions, from its spectacular buildings to its impoverished slums, from its most magnificent cities to its humble villages, from its splendid past to what it is now; a love story with a viewpoint only a lasting lover can deliver who, after having seen its glories and deepest flaws and undesirable secrets, remains and continues to love.

Stephen Kinzer: All the Shah’s Men

“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

This quote by Harry Truman launches the book into previously confidential details about the 1953 Iranian coup d’état that had me gasping in shock from beginning to end!

It reads like espionage fiction but it is disquieting for the fact that it is nonfiction. It is by far the most comprehensive book I have read on Iran’s modern history. My notes and thoughts will remain private because I wish for my social media accounts to remain zones of peace haha, but I have to say that reading this reinforced my thoughts on Iran’s significance. It made me realize that many major circumstances around the world are ripples of a pivotal event that occurred in Iran more than half a century ago and that this nation continues to be a crucial piece on the chessboard of world history.