โI know of no other book in which the complex realities of life โ and death โ in contemporary Afghanistan are so starkly and intimately portrayed,โ says Jason Elliot, a favorite travel writer who has written about Iran and Afghanistan, of this autobiography by Qais Akbar Omar.
I wholeheartedly agree. It is the first published memoir about growing up in Afghanistan. So beautifully written, it describes an extraordinary life and country, its marvels, its fascinating ethnic groups, the history of its conflicts, and the horrors of three tempestuous decades. โPain was our way of life now,โ Omar writes. The book brims with pain and loss, but it is also full of life. To have been written by someone who found solace in literature during the darkest times, and who suffered but endured the cruelty and futility of wars, makes โextraordinaryโ an understatement.
I read from and about these places of conflict to learn, but I have been asking myself why I have also grown to love and seek out their literature. This book illuminates one of the answers: I am drawn to how their sensitivity to beauty is commensurate with their heightened awareness of the fragility of life.
And if it is this that their lives and words constantly teach me, among a hundred other things, then I will continue to read from this part of the world.
She is known in the West as the Sylvia Plath of Iran. As if the name Forugh Farrokhzad is not enough.
Although I understand the comparison because of the early and tragic deaths, of troubled lives we wouldnโt hope to emulate but whose courage to immortalize raw emotion we secretly envy, the turbulent relationships, also their notoriety of speaking against the constraints that society imposed on women and paving the way for other women in literature โ but Forugh Farrokhzad is Forugh Farrokhzad to me. The rebel poet of Iran.
Hers is one of the strongest female voices in Iranian literature. I first came across her poems in an anthology featuring a thousand years of Persian poetry by women and in a film by Abbas Kiarostami, and subsequently the haunting poetry that she extended to filmmaking in ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฐ๐ถ๐ด๐ฆ ๐ช๐ด ๐๐ญ๐ข๐ค๐ฌ. It is an extremely moving and artistic documentary about a leper colony in Azerbaijan, from where she afterwards adopted a son of the colonyโs two inhabitants.
When I learned that Jasmin Darznik had written a well-researched book on her life, I was intrigued. Written in the first person in a most lyrical and revealing voice with generous layers of pain and art, this is that book.
As soon as my eyes traced the first line, the words held my face in its hands, implored me to keep looking it in the eye, made me reread and reread sentences and paragraphs for the sheer texture and the lushness of its polyphony; even when it became too brutal, even when it felt too much, it would not let me look away.
I have not experienced a novel this heartbreakingly breathtaking since Ondaatje and de Berniรจres โ for its beauty, for its pain, for its music, for its truths.
This is a poetic education on the conflict in Afghanistan with an intricately wrought storyline and a web of characters that could only have been written so painstakingly.
Set in a time when its people were still in a daze, trying to assess who, what, and how much was left or if there was anything left at all, it was that period after the fall of the Twin Towers in New York, and as retribution, the collapse of the Taliban.
But for many days now, I have been waking up to updates of the Talibanโs resurgence in Afghanistan; and here I am reading a book published in 2008 that carries this ominous line: โThe Americans should not exult: the war hasnโt ended. The real war is about to begin.โ
A Nobel laureate and a Pulitzer winner. Two books with their fair share of advocates and detractors. But a discerning reader will understand both the praise and the criticism.
Naipaul traveled to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia for six months to examine the heightening Islamic fundamentalism in countries with a pre-Islamic history but have become theocratic states.
Brooks, stationed in Cairo for six years as a journalist, explored Egypt, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, to ask a specific question: โ๐๐ด๐ญ๐ข๐ฎ ๐ฅ๐ช๐ฅ ๐ฏ๐ฐ๐ต ๐ฉ๐ข๐ท๐ฆ ๐ต๐ฐ ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ข๐ฏ ๐ฐ๐ฑ๐ฑ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ด๐ด๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ธ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ฏ. ๐๐ฐ ๐ธ๐ฉ๐บ ๐ธ๐ฆ๐ณ๐ฆ ๐ด๐ฐ ๐ฎ๐ข๐ฏ๐บ ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ญ๐ช๐ฎ ๐ธ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ฏ ๐ฐ๐ฑ๐ฑ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐ฅ?โ โ๐๐ฏ๐บ ๐ต๐ช๐ฎ๐ฆ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ๐ด ๐ด๐ต๐ข๐ณ๐ต๐ฆ๐ฅ ๐ต๐ฐ ๐จ๐ฐ ๐ธ๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฏ๐จ ๐ช๐ฏ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ช๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ญ๐ฆ ๐๐ข๐ด๐ต, ๐ธ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ฏ ๐ด๐ถ๐ง๐ง๐ฆ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ฅ ๐ง๐ฐ๐ณ ๐ช๐ต ๐ง๐ช๐ณ๐ด๐ต,โ she observed. And this is what the world especially fears in the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
I read the Naipaul earlier in August but wasnโt quite sure what to say about it openly. Naipaulโs disregard for political correctness is sometimes shocking, but his directness can also be refreshing. Brooksโ courage is admirable and her accounts overwhelming; and made more fascinating by personal interviews with Salman Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz, the Ayatollah Khomeiniโs daughter Zahra, King Hussein and Queen Noor of Jordan. Whether the reader ends up appreciating the scrutiny or not, one has to admit that both authors have written only the truth derived from their interaction with the people.
One was published in 1981, the other in 1995. Some information is dated because much has changed in the world since then, but much hasnโt either. What remains unchanged in the matters discussed is the reason why these two books are still valuable and pertinent.
There are books, and then there are literary giants. The thing about the latter is that they do not announce their importance, their work speaks for them and you simply know you are in the presence of one.
This does not fall in the beautiful category. This one takes its place alongside Orwellโs ๐ญ๐ต๐ด๐ฐ and Bradburyโs ๐๐ข๐ฉ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ฉ๐ฆ๐ช๐ต ๐ฐ๐ฑ๐ญ.
Someone told me in jest that maybe I should take a break from my reading repertoire because what is happening in certain parts of the world of late uncannily intersects with it. Veering westward only found a disquieting relevance in this Ismail Kadare dystopian masterpiece.
๐๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ข๐ญ๐ข๐ค๐ฆ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐๐ณ๐ฆ๐ข๐ฎ๐ด is not what the title might immediately imply, but at the same time, it is exactly what the name implies: โThe task of our Palace of Dreams, which was created directly by the reigning Sultan, is to classify and examine not the isolated dreams of certain individualsโฆ but the โTabirโ as a whole: in other words, all the dreams of all citizens without exceptionโฆ
โฆthe Padishah decreed that no dream, not even one dreamed in the remotest part of the empire on the most ordinary day by the most godforsaken creature, must fail to be examined by the Tabir Sarrail.โ
Beware the authorities and the institutions that take away even the freedom of your dreams. They exist in the real world.
Imagine my delight when I opened this recently acquired secondhand book and discovered that it was a signed copy!
_ _ _
Nagasaki just before the bomb dropped in 1945, Delhi at the cusp of the partition that created Pakistan in 1947, Istanbul briefly, life in Pakistan in the early 1980s where Islamic fundamentalism began to be felt, post-9/11 New York, Afghanistan amid the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Iran much more briefly than Istanbul, and back to North America โ this is where the book takes you.
Now I understand why Salman Rushdie described Kamila Shamsie as a โwriter of immense ambition and strength.โ The scope of this novel is ambitious, and to succeed in carrying it out is where her strength manifests.
Although admittedly, this will not be one of the books I would immediately recommend if asked to suggest a Pakistani work, I have to say that it also gave me much. Through the characters the reader encounters the nuances of what it felt to be an ordinary German or Japanese after the Second World War, to be English in India during the last days of the British Empire, to be Muslim in India before the partition, to be a member of the mujahideen that would drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, to be an American in the midst of all these, and simply to be human in the face of war and conflict.
To humanize what we tend to generalize is what this novel does best. This one is certainly not bereft of poetry and pain.
Out of all the post-Iranian Revolution books I have encountered, this one is rather unusual. Here, the revolution takes a backseat. Or does it?
Published in 2020, perhaps it is heralding the era of significant literature on the revolutionโs longterm effects.
Named after the prophet Jonah, Yunus is a bus driver arrested during a strike, and sent to Tehranโs most notorious prison where his descent into absurdity deepens.
At first glance, the physical belly of the whale is Evin prison. But given a closer look, the psychological belly of the whale is madness and totalitarian politics from which there is no reprieve for this Yunus; and its haunting effects on the psyche, lasting.
The novel is unnerving, but even more so when the reader remembers scripture and realizesโฆ Wasnโt the prophet Jonah sent to warn the people?
โ โA contemporary dictator wishing to establish power would not need to do anything so obviously sinister as banning the news: he or she would only have to see to it that the news organizations broadcast a flow of random-sounding bulletins, in great numbers but with little explanation of context, within an agenda that kept changing, without giving any sense of ongoing relevance of an issue that had seemed pressing only a short while before, the whole interspersed with constant updates about the colorful antics of murderers and film stars. This would be quite enough to undermine most peopleโs capacity to grasp political reality โ as well as any resolve they might otherwise have summoned to alter it. The status quo could confidently remain forever undisturbed by a flood of, rather than a ban on, news.โ
โ โThe opposite of facts is bias.โ
โ โThe news may present itself as the authoritative portraitist of reality. It may claim to have an answer to the impossible question of what has really been going on, but it has no overarching ability to transcribe reality. It merely selectively fashions reality through the choices it makes about which stories to cast its spotlight on and which ones to leave out.โ
โ โFor all their talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by far the most influential means by which their populations are educated. Whatever happens in our classrooms, the more potent and ongoing kind of education takes place on the airwaves and on our screens.โ
โ โTo consult the news is to raise a seashell to our ears and to be overpowered by the roar of humanity.โ
โ โโฆwithout regular contact with poetry, we may lose our vitality, cease to understand ourselves, neglect our powers of empathy or become unimaginative, brittle and sterile. Literatureโฆ is the medium that can reawaken us to the world.โ
A manual on how to approach and handle the news whether you are at the giving or receiving end; a challenge for โjournalists in a hurryโ to turn to art; a masterclass in journalism and photojournalism, and of course โ because this is Alain de Botton โ life.
Our โUnnecessary Womanโ is a Beiruti who spends a life reading and translating the works of non-Arabic literary giants into Arabic. What I find remarkable here is that her whole life and character is unfurled through the literary criticism of other works.
By the time a reader is done reading this book, they will have an infinite reading list.
No dizzying magic carpet rides from Rabih Alameddine this time, no shocking form-defying stunts of the novel, just an engaging and steady stream of thoughts and memories about Beirut and its place in the world, and mainly a life lived in literature.
This is a contemplation on such a life, on writers, on readers, on literature. But if we listen closely, it does not necessarily glorify this kind of life. Instead, it asks questions: โ๐๐ช๐ข๐ฏ๐ต๐ด ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ญ๐ช๐ต๐ฆ๐ณ๐ข๐ต๐ถ๐ณ๐ฆ, ๐ฑ๐ฉ๐ช๐ญ๐ฐ๐ด๐ฐ๐ฑ๐ฉ๐บ, ๐ข๐ฏ๐ฅ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐ข๐ณ๐ต๐ด ๐ฉ๐ข๐ท๐ฆ ๐ช๐ฏ๐ง๐ญ๐ถ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ค๐ฆ๐ฅ ๐ฎ๐บ ๐ญ๐ช๐ง๐ฆ, ๐ฃ๐ถ๐ต ๐ธ๐ฉ๐ข๐ต ๐ฉ๐ข๐ท๐ฆ ๐ ๐ฅ๐ฐ๐ฏ๐ฆ ๐ธ๐ช๐ต๐ฉ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ช๐ด ๐ญ๐ช๐ง๐ฆ?โ
Our heroine is a flawed human being especially when it comes to human relations, and to read Alameddine is to learn to be patient with some details that make one uncomfortable โ but does he teach you so many things! And to learnโฆ isnโt that exactly why we read? Even when one of the things being taught indirectly is that tricky balance between literature and life.
Discovering a wonderful but obscure writer adds to my happiness these days. Although obscure only in my part of the world, at leastโฆ for after all, there is a public library in Paris named after Andrรฉe Chedid!
Having shelves largely organized by geography, I had trouble categorizing an author of Lebanese descent, born in Cairo but resided in Paris and wrote in French, and has won French literary awards including the Albert Camus Prize and the Prix Goncourt de la Poรฉsie in 2002.
Matters of roots often spring up in the novel. โ๐๐ฐ๐ธ ๐ต๐ฐ ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ญ๐ญ ๐ถ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฐ๐ด๐ฆ ๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ต๐ด ๐ธ๐ฉ๐ช๐ค๐ฉ ๐ด๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ข๐ณ๐ข๐ต๐ฆ ๐ข๐ฏ๐ฅ ๐ฅ๐ช๐ท๐ช๐ฅ๐ฆ ๐ธ๐ฉ๐ฆ๐ฏ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ๐บ ๐ด๐ฉ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ญ๐ฅ ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ณ๐ช๐ค๐ฉ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐ด๐ฐ๐ฏ๐จ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ฎ๐ข๐ฏ, ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐ต๐ฆ๐น๐ต๐ถ๐ณ๐ฆ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ฉ๐ช๐ด ๐ด๐ฐ๐ถ๐ญ, ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐ช๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ต๐ณ๐ข๐ฃ๐ช๐ญ๐ช๐ต๐บ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ฉ๐ช๐ด ๐ฉ๐ฆ๐ข๐ณ๐ต? ๐๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ข๐ต๐ฉ ๐ด๐ฐ ๐ฎ๐ข๐ฏ๐บ ๐ธ๐ฐ๐ณ๐ฅ๐ด, ๐ข๐ค๐ต๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ๐ด, ๐ญ๐ข๐บ๐ฆ๐ณ๐ด, ๐ธ๐ฉ๐ฆ๐ณ๐ฆ ๐ฅ๐ฐ๐ฆ๐ด ๐ญ๐ช๐ง๐ฆ ๐ฃ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ข๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ?โ
But for the time being, I will keep her in my Lebanon section, because although she writes with the elegance of the French (there is even one sentence that is Proustian in length and spans an entire page), this book has the structure of a Lebanese novel โ unconventional and unpredictable, and it is very much a reflection of Lebanon.
It ends as the civil war begins. Centered on the lives of a grandmother and granddaughter, we see their mirrored lives unfold while an unusual and refined suspense that drones throughout the delightful passages suddenly grips your whole being towards the end.
Andrรฉe Chedid is a literary gem! I am wondering at the scarcity of her works in our bookshops!
The Book-Butterfly 