Monthly Archives: April 2012

Nuri-el Alfi is a teenage boy living with his father after his mother passes away. On a holiday to the Magda Marina beach in Egypt, Alexandria, he meets and falls in love with Mona, a 26 year old woman who later will marry his father. Then one day his father disappears and an avalanche of questions seems to overwhelm Nuri. Where is his father, who took him, and most importantly, is he still alive?

The action takes place in Egypt, Switzerland and England. The small number of characters make the novel easy to follow – the enigmatic father, whose secretive life style is revealed in small doses but never in its entirety, the furtive glimpses of his first wife, Nuri’s mother, provided here and there around the novel, her unexplained death, and the role of Naima who is not just a housekeeper, all seem to come together towards the end.
A feeling of absence and longing pervades every page, the disappearance of the father transforming the son into an emotionally crippled young man living in the past, trying to cling to the memory of his father by smoking the same cigarettes, wearing the clothes he left behind, looking at photographs. Smells, memories, gestures, become ties that bind Nuri to a brief past he shared with his father and he is reluctant to let them go.

I found the novel somehow disjointed; halfway through the story I got frustrated with the bits and pieces that didn’t fit and others that didn’t make sense – too many questions and so much mystery. Some of those questions got answered in the end – just enough so that I wasn’t left with a total feeling of incompleteness. I was intrigued and I did a little research on the author, only to discover that his own father, who was involved in politics, had been abducted, his whereabouts known only years later.
Hisham Matar is probably the first Libyan author whose work I have read. It is very likely that I never would have picked up this novel on my own, but a book club I recently joined chose this as the book-of-the-month and so I gave it a try. I have mixed feelings about it – the story did not appeal to me, too gloomy and hopeless, but the occasional sparkle of the language made reading it bearable; this one paragraph about Nuri’s mother I particularly liked:

“Her hands, the pale thin fingers that never seemed to match her strength, would be frozen twigs. She would tuck them between my knees or, if I were lying on my back, slide them behind my lower back, the place that is still hers.”

And another one:

“The world had to be sliced into hours to fill, otherwise you could go mad with loneliness.”

My review feels incomplete, more like a jumble of ideas glued together but that’s ok – it took me a while to reach the final page and I had days when a sort of dread was creeping on me, knowing that I had to finish it because I hate giving up on a book, especially one that is not even that long. At just under 250 pages, it should have been a quick read. Alas, it wasn’t. Or maybe I just needed something more cheerful.
And that brought a question to mind: how do you feel about gloomy stories? Do you enjoy these kinds of books or stay away from them? Or perhaps the degree of sadness doesn’t matter as long as the author keeps the story interesting?

*Read in April, 2012

You can also read Athira’s review here

Since I started blogging I have tried to post as regularly as I could and while I have read quite a fair number of books last year, the last time I did a summary was for my Best Books of 2011 post. And so I had a nice surprise to see my name nominated for the 7X7 Link Award, by writer Andrew Blackman (whose book, On the Holloway Road, is on my TBR list) and thought it was about time I got a shovel and started digging through the archives to get some answers for this fun meme.
Before I start, here are the rules:

1: Tell everyone something about yourself that nobody knows.

3: Pass this on to 7 fellow bloggers.

After some research, picture selecting and some deliberating, here are my answers:

1. I love to bake, and while this isn’t exactly a big secret, the part I actually enjoy the most is the decorating. I have a special fondness for whole wheat muffins and cookies, which not even the very high temperature can dampen. After all, I’m living in a country with a perpetual summer and baking is not easy but oh, so rewarding!
Cute, isn’t it? Here’s another one: the first time I saw a live, full grown monitor lizard I was looking out the window and the first thought that crossed my mind was: Oh my God, what’s that crocodile doing in the yard? Then I ran for the camera but by the time I got back, the lizard had disappeared. A while later the penny dropped and I realized crocodiles don’t have a snakelike tongue, but in my excitement that detail was completely forgotten.

2. The Most Beautiful Piece. There’s a mango tree in my front yard and every year it bears fruit but last year most of them just fell while still small and green. Weeks of waiting for that perfect sweet fruit left me with nothing. And then, this year, an amazing thing happened: in February, the tree was so full of fruit that I had to give some to the neighbors because once they fall, the soft skin breaks apart and the ants eat them or they start rotting. And not only I had enough mangoes to eat for a month or more, but they also had a pinkish tinge, something I haven’t seen before. This story is about that tree.

3. Most Helpful Piece. That might be Best Books of 2011 but I think it was mostly helpful for me, as I discovered interesting new blogs to read.

4. Most Popular Piece. If I were to judge by the comments, I would say the one at no. 3 but people seem to stop by and read Haunts – Reliquaries of the Dead quite often.

5. Most Controversial Piece. Nothing in this department, I’m afraid.

6. Most Surprisingly Successful Piece. For some reason people seemed to like One Day, by David Nicholls but it’s definitely not on my top 10. The movie didn’t do much to change my opinion, either.

7. Most Underrated Piece. That must be the whole Wandering Thoughts section which consists of verse.

8. Most Pride-Worthy Piece. That’s an easy one. Farundell, by L.R. Fredericks – I liked the book so much I wanted to know more about it so I contacted the author for a written interview. I was so happy when she agreed to answer my questions that I walked around the whole day with a big silly grin on my face. It was one of the best experiences that came from starting this blog.

The bloggers I am passing this on to are:

1. Carl@stainlesssteeldroppings A site that is updated quite often and includes movie & book reviews and also The Once Upon a Time Challenge which consists of reviewing books and movies based on the classic fairy tales.

2. Jenners@Life…With Books She has a great sense of humour and writes posts about her experiences and the books she reads. Her funny posts always cheer me up.

3. Hannah@Wayfaring Chocolate Here’s a girl who loves baking and posts some mouthwatering recipes on her blog. She takes great pictures, too.

4. Charlie Louie@Hotly Spiced A great blog about food (with recipes, yum!) and life in general.

5. M—–L@Outgoing Signals I like this blog not only for the posts, which cover book reviews, music and other random stuff, but also for the comments. That is also the place where I first found out about Babo, the cutest ugliest doll I’ve seen so far.

6. Jov@JoV’s Book Pyramid A book blog with quite a mix of classic and contemporary authors.

7. Olduvai@Olduvai Reads A new blog I’ve just discovered. Olduvai and I bonded over our love for mangosteens and I look forward to reading more of her posts which combine book reviews and snippets of her life.