The Map of Love

*I know I have been silent for some months - we recently welcomed our first child!  I promise that I have been reading, but I have a lot of writing catch-up to do, as I was very tired throughout the last trimester.  Now that I am on maternity leave, I am hoping to catch up on posts while the baby is sleeping.*

The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif, was a decent attempt at an epic multi-generational love story, that fell flat for me.  While I thought it was a nice story, I never really got drawn in, and a few of the author's loose ends or bizarre, unexpected and ultimately dropped plots ended up irking me long after the novel was finished.  

In the present day, a young American woman, Isabel, has become smitten with the older Egyptian-American conductor, Omar.  In an attempt to become closer to him, and to learn more about her own Egyptian roots, Isabel visits Omar's sister in Egypt.  There, the two unravel the story of Isabel's ancestor, the Englishwoman Anna Winterbourne, who falls in love with Sharif al-Barodi in Egypt in 1901.  Somewhat coincidentally, Anna's lover's sister is an ancestor of Omar.  (Did you keep that straight?  There is a very useful family tree on the front sheets of the novel that I had to refer to frequently...).  And it gets even more confusing, as a subplot involving possible incest is put forward and then dropped almost casually, without adequate resolution.

While I found the story of Anna and Sharif to be interesting and at times poetic, it never felt very plausible.  I'm not one for love at first sight stories - if you want me to believe that two people fell in love in the space of one or two shared moments, they had better be pretty magical moments.  I was never convinced that Anna and Sharif had the emotional compulsion that would have been necessary to enter into their bi-cultural marriage.  The characters were just too flat.  Also, in an attempt to place their romance in the context of the greater political reality, their story dragged through the middle of the book, and I lost interest in the romance and started to wonder when we were going to get to the climactic death (this being the downside of the family tree, with birth and death dates for every character).  

Also implausible were the ways in which the characters in the present-day narrative were all related to and interconnected with each other.  I found it highly unlikely that Isabelle would fall in love with a famous Egyptian-American in New York City who also happened to be her distant cousin, and who also knew her mother in New York many decades earlier, unbeknownst to Isabelle.  And the situation was not helped by the fact that these characters suffered from the same two-dimensional limitations as the historic ones.  Perhaps in an attempt to explain these coincidences, Soueif mixes in some magical realism elements in the eleventh hour of the story, which was totally out of place and only served to muddle the story line.

This review seems harsh - despite the narrative problems, I enjoyed reading the book.  There were, for example, some really lovely descriptions of family life in Egypt at the turn of the century.  It just didn't sit well with me once it was over.

I finished this book on July 13, 2012.

Disgrace

While excellently written, and clearly qualifying for its Booker prize, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace is not a book I will be revisiting anytime soon. 

Getting older really sucks.  And it especially sucks for the main character of Disgrace, 52-year old white, elitist David Lurie living in Cape Town, South Africa.  An entirely unsympathetic man, Lurie experiences or causes almost every definition of the word Disgrace I can think of.  Beginning with rejection by his regular prostitute, Lurie suffers career termination, inquisition, sexual scandal, physical abuse, imprisonment, the rape of his daughter, theft, rejection by family, ridicule and ultimately winds up with a long term position assisting in the euthanasia and disposal of unwanted dogs.  Pretty Heavy Stuff.  And I'm sure that if I had the perspective of approaching old age and a better understanding of post-apartheid race relations in South Africa it would only add to a complete understanding of the many ways in which disgrace is possible and experienced.

It is no accident that an overwhelming amount of the disgrace in this novel arises from interracial interactions, with the whites suffering disgrace at the hands of  non-whites.  There is some poetic justice here, but I don't understand enough of the context to grasp more than that.  South African readers... help?

His disgrace also stems frequently from a narrow view of women and gender relations.  His sexual needs are  placed above the needs and desires of others, and the words he uses to describe the women in his life - including his own daughter - reveal him to be fundamentally misogynistic.  He reasons with Melanie that she "ought" to sleep with him

"Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone.  It is part of the bounty she brings into the world.  She has a duty to share it."

He is unrepentant and unapologetic even after he is tried and dismissed for his actions, which makes him even more distasteful.  The flames of passion he describes led to him being literally lit on fire.  His only repentance seems to come through writing his opera about Byron and his Italian mistress - an opera with no artistry and for which there will never be an audience.  And in the end he has fallen so far that he compares his workwith the dogs to that of a harijan - an Untouchable of the Indian caste society.  And it is very hard to feel pity for him, or to feel that he has not invited this fate.