Travel – Page 4 – The Book-Butterfly

Hisham Matar: A Month in Siena

A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar

“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.”

Yesterday was heavy. Not only for me but for a lot of people I care for, and for different reasons. It somehow made me yearn for Hisham Matar’s prose, because I don’t think I have read any other writer who speaks straight to my heart about life with such authenticity and accuracy and with such emotional and artistic intelligence. (I read three of his books in 2024, and one of them, My Friends, was the best book I read last year. Until now I cannot find the words to do it justice.)

So, I tried to see if there was an older book of his that escaped my attention. A Month in Siena was the answer. I finished reading it last night and had taken five pages worth of notes by midnight. I’m glad today is a Sunday so that I can reread my notes and fully process the beauty of this 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 he is writing about art, architecture, his homeland, or politics, Hisham Matar’s books are often so heartfelt — wholly made wise by having known such things.

William Dalrymple: City of Djinns

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.

Zulfu Livaneli: Serenade For Nadia

*“Only those whose stories are told can exist.”*

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.

Philippe Delerm: Second Star

*“The afternoon advances, you feel proud of all the time you’ve passed.*
*Passed but not lost, no, won, and won again.”*

This is how I feel about all the time I spend reading. It’s time won, and won again.
And here’s where Delerm has, perhaps, slightly gained an upper hand over Proust. Haha

This is a book that one can read fast, but which one should not read fast or else miss the whole point. It’s a most delightful exercise in paying attention to life’s ordinary little details. (It’s always the French! They seem to have all the time in the world for such things! Haha) But I won’t write too much about it. Once in a while, a book comes along and compels one to write about life, rather than about the book itself. This book is such a book.

Radwa Ashour: Granada – The Complete Trilogy

“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.

Franz Kafka: Letter to Father

“Franz Kafka was Prague and Prague was Franz Kafka,” wrote Johannes Urzidil.

But by the time I was able to travel to Prague in 2018, the Kafka House where the author was born, which is a few meters away from the Old Town Square, had already closed for reconstruction, and my own Kafkaesque experiences of the city kept me from buying a Kafka book as a preferred souvenir.

What a delightful surprise to receive “Letter to Father” as pasalubong from family friends who just got back from a trip to Europe a few weeks ago!

This publication by Vitalis is exquisite as it reveals Kafka’s lesser-known side as a graphic artist by featuring Kafka’s drawings in this famous indictment of his father.

Although it is a painful book to read, and it took me longer to finish it than I would normally a text of this length, it is nonetheless a revealing and important part of the author’s body of work. It is probably the Kafka work that has affected me the most. One line especially stood out: “My writing was all about you, all I did there was lament what I couldn’t lament at your breast.”

Intercepted by his mother for obvious reasons, the letter sadly never reached the father. And here I am, heartbroken over the fact that these words have struck the hearts of millions who have read it over a hundred years after its writing, but forever lost to the eyes that were meant to read them.

The Museum of Books

“Is this the way to the Museum of Books?” The main entrance where a statue of Shota Rustaveli stood guard seemed to have been closed for an indefinitely long time, so I had to walk around the loggia and look for another door.

“Follow me,” the guard said without hesitation and led me through office backdoors and hallways lined with filing cabinets and some curious eyes peering through them when the rhythmic footfalls of my boots echoed through the corridors.

Just as I was feeling a little lost and self-conscious for being the only non-employee around, he turned around and said, “When you’re done, just exit the way you came in.” He left me, alone, staring open-mouthed at what was the entrance hall of Tbilisi’s Museum of Books.

Amber sunshine streamed through the windows, casting light on intricate adornments that I had never seen applied to buildings before. It was as if I was drawn inside a page of a medieval illuminated manuscript.

I soon learned that the building is a collaboration between the architect Anatoli Kargin and well-known painter Henry Hrinevski, who was also a book illustrator and manuscript illuminator as well as a scholar on traditional Georgian architecture, but who was sadly arrested and killed during Stalin’s Great Purge.

The building was completed in 1916 and erected as a bank, but became part of Georgia’s series of libraries, fittingly so, in 1931. It is Building I out of V monumental buildings housing the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia.

Recognized as one of the finest museums dedicated to the written word, it boasts of personal libraries of Georgia’s eminent authors, the first book printed in the Georgian language, and autographed works by famous writers including Victor Hugo.

I went there for the books but came out deeply impressed knowing that the building that holds such treasures is, itself, one for the books.

Edward W. Said: The Question of Palestine

Significant Palestinian literature, to this reader, seems to indirectly and collectively ask the Other this particular question: We acknowledge your pain, do you acknowledge ours?

The frustration and the trouble stem from the fact that the answer has often been “no”.

Although worded differently and more succinctly, this book asks the same question, alongside all the other important questions concerning Palestine and Israel. It is Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 101 for those who cannot decide on what to think or say about the whole thing.

Without the dramatic and emotional pronouncements of novels, Edward Said organizes rational thinking, facts, and hopeful solutions with the most concise, coherent, and decisive voice I have ever heard on the Palestinian predicament. All that, while being understanding and un-dismissive of Jewish history and concerns.

This book is evidence that it is not so hard to understand the question of Palestine — but only if one is willing to understand and undo years of hearing only one side. It is also the perfect antidote to well-intentioned and shallow sloganeering. Never have I been so impelled to give a book a standing ovation.

But this book does not need my commentary. It only needs to be read.

Two books set in the Balkans to start the year!

“*But the thing is, she didn’t die.*
*No, she went on.”*

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris

A book set during the Siege of Sarajevo hits differently when it is recommended by someone whose family was directly affected by the Bosnian War. It heightens the truth in a work of historical fiction.

It was an easy pick as my first book of the year, despite the promise of grim events. I did not wait for the hard copy to fall into my hands. The e-book was immediately downloaded when I learned that its main characters were an artist, a writer, and a bookstore owner who lent his books during the siege because he believed it was a time when people needed stories the most; and I could not put the book down as soon as I learned that “black butterflies” were the scorched pages from the burning of the national library — “burnt fragments of poetry and art catching in people’s hair.”

The friend who told me that I should read this was not wrong. It is a poignant story about how art triumphs and can oftentimes be the thing that saves us. But at the same time, this book is a sobering and relevant reminder, amidst the season’s celebrations, that similar things are happening in other parts of the world; histories are being erased; libraries are being bombed and burned; entire nations are going through the most violent traumas; and the heritage of entire peoples are being turned to debris.

Books like this convey what hate can do, but books like this also proclaim what art can do. To be one less person in this world who hates — may this be the lesson that the books and the art we consume always teach us.

*“He had put the* Times Atlas of World History under the paper on which he was noting my answers… The boy likes leafing through it when the shells fall.”

Death in the Museum of Modern Art by Alma Lazarevska

These evocative short stories by Bosnian writer, Alma Lazarevska, complement Black Butterflies. It does not go into detail about the history of the besieged city in which her characters are set. Nothing about what caused the war or about the opposing factions, nothing about a nation’s history. Rather, the history of a day, the history of a feeling, and the intimacy of a thought. Lazarevska leaves the greater scheme of things to the historians and paints ordinary life and “the space of their painful interweaving” as the city is being starved and bombed.

This was recommended to me by another friend after I posted about Black Butterflies. I wouldn’t have predicted earlier on that the first two books I’d read in 2025 would be set in the Balkans, and yet, here we are. Are the Balkans calling (louder this time)?

In one of the stories, an Austrian writer is referred to, “Whose books are an excellent weapon against shallow sentiment.” That line stuck with me and it aptly applies to this masterful work.

Thank you, Anna and Vishy for these splendid recommendations!

Celebrating 40 in Georgia

To celebrate my 40th in Iran, that was the dream. It was supposed to be Iran.

But life often has a knack of improvising on my dreams. Flights to Iran were suspended as I was about to book tickets; and it wouldn’t have been good for my parents’ hearts had I forced it at this volatile time in history.

Iran chose to remain elusive. Then I was reminded of a line from Ali & Nino: “Surely love is the same in Georgia as in Iran.” Georgia, or Gurjistan, was one of the Persian “stans,” after all, and was under Persian suzerainty for centuries. And surely, if love is, as they say, the same in Georgia as in Iran, then perhaps celebrating 40 in Georgia wouldn’t be too different either? (“But there are protests,” they said. “At least there are no missiles,” I answered.)

The time had come for Georgia to be lived, aside from being read — for the literature of the Caucasus to be finally given the chance to lend depth and texture to my travels, and to the narrative of my experience.

Little did I know that the flight route from Doha to Tbilisi would fly over Shiraz and Isfahan. As if on cue, there was a sudden otherworldly sunset display through the airplane window just as we flew over Isfahan. Instead of Isfahan’s Eternal Flames, I was given the sun. And through the clouds, I saw traces of Isfahan down below; appearing to reassure me that it would be there waiting until the right time came along.

Then a full moon ushered me to Georgia. And I soon learned that Georgia, for a nation so tiny, is a generous country — not just in their wine servings, but in beauty and unforgettable experiences. (Maybe therein lies the advantage of smaller countries: beauty is concentrated, undiluted, and undiffused.) All at once, Georgia felt right.

Hopefully, someday, Iran will feel right, too. But at this particular point in life, Georgia is exactly what I needed. The trip was a gift that I’ll always be grateful for — a melding of deeply beautiful things and non-things, as if traveling knew no other way to be.

I’ve been asked what being forty feels like. With books (and maybe an occasional glass of wine haha) by my side, forty feels right. 🤍