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.

C

The more I sit and think about this novel, the more I am fascinated by it - I think it might be brilliant.  This is not to say I enjoyed every aspect of my read, or that I understood why on earth Tom McCarthy took me to certain places until well after they were over.  But his dexterous weaving of complex themes is starting to make more and more sense as I reflect on them - or am I finding patterns and interpreting codes that don't exist?

The novel opens with the birth of a baby boy, Serge Carrefax, second child of an eclectic set of parents.  Serge's father runs a school for deaf children that emphasizes teaching them to speak and be understood - and he is fascinated with "modern" wireless communication technology.  Serge's mother is deaf (and a former student) who inherited a family silk factory - complete with insect-residents.  Serge's older sister Sophie is his greatest companion (and a compelling character) until her untimely death.  From these characters, three themes emerge - communication, insects, and death - and are repeated in countless ways time and again through Serge's action-filled life.

It is the continual re-appearance of these themes in Serge's life that ultimately makes this book a comprehensive unit.  Serge's adventures as a sick adolescent, WWI pilot, architecture student, drug addict, and Egyptian explorer often cause jarring juxtapositions in the story that took me some getting used to.  But I'm having so much fun reflecting back on what it all means, and trying to decode the appearance of insects, communications and death throughout the book, that I'm not sure it matters to me anymore.  And don't get me started on the book's title - there are so many instances of the letter C that I can't begin to decide the importance of them.  And what about Serge's lifelong problem conveying physical perspective (a problem indeed for a student of architecture)?  I would love to convene a discussion group just to pick apart this novel.

Although sometimes I felt lost in the middle, this read was worth it and has stayed with me for many days.

The English Patient

I suspect that reading The English Patient and watching the movie are very similar in that you either like the slow pace, character sketches, and reflective mood -  or you hate it.  In some ways, I am disappointed that I saw the movie first - it colored my visual images of the characters and the villa, and gave away the ending.  But of all movies to see first, this one captures the mood, pace, and style of the writing beautifully - it was wonderful in both formats.

When I was reading it on the bus, someone asked me "Oh, The English Patient - its a love story isn't it?"  And I hesitated - "not really..." Perhaps because the focus of the movie was the romance.  This novel is so much more than a story about the English Patient and the nurse Hannah, or the Patient and his mistress Katherine, or Hannah and Kip.  It is a mystery story, and a story about war, and its aftermath, and the global consequences that can sometimes be felt even in a confined place and time.  It is also a story about the various ways a person can lose his or her identity, and what can be dome to reclaim it.

By far, the most fascinating character in my opinion was Kip, the Sikh sapper from India.  His complex relationship with his familial and cultural background, and his troubled experience in the Western world at a time of the blurring of national lines were very compelling to me.  Each of the characters was, in their own way, nationless and without family - and Kip's story highlighted these elements in all of the other characters.  And I really enjoyed the literary tension created by each explosion - literal or metaphorical, which were tied to Kip as well.  Overall it was a fantastic novel - highly recommended.