This is my review of The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif.

Lonely and at a loose end after her return to Cairo, Amal assists the thirty-something American Isabel Parkman to translate some of the papers left by her great-grandmother Lady Anna Winterbourne who married an Egyptian nationalist a century before at a time of great political unrest when Egypt was still "under the yoke" of the British Empire. Fascinated by Anna, Amal begins to reconstruct her story, although it is often hard to know where fantasy ends and real scenes from the past begin. To a lesser extent, she applies the same approach to Isabel's meetings with Amal's suave elder brother with whom she is becoming infatuated.

The prospect of gaining a perspective on Egyptian history and politics seen through the eyes of an Egyptian woman, the author Ahdaf Soueif, is what drew me to this book, although I agree that the combination of somewhat soft-centred romance with serious historical and political comment may cause it to fall between two stools. The theme of examining love affairs between different cultures across generations against a complex political background is very ambitious, and perhaps the price paid is that the reader's attention is stretched over too many people, rather than engaged with a few fully developed central characters.

The author's style may be typically middle eastern and therefore all part of the experience to be gained, but I found my growing impatience with it a real barrier to reading the book. Despite my strong desire to like this novel, I felt smothered by its embroidered wordiness, the often banal dialogues and overdetailed descriptions as a substitute for dramatic action, the convoluted structure clanking back and forth in time. At one point Soueif goes off at a tangent on the nature of colour and the impossibility of defining the point at which, say, blue becomes green. Why not simply express this fascinating idea in a few pithy words on the lines of, "How strange that one cannot see exactly when blue turns into green"?

This is, as a reviewer described another of her books, an acquired taste. If you enjoy long, slow, rambling, gentle even in the midst of violence, reflective family sagas with frequent little digressions this may well appeal. Also, apart from its length, this could be a good choice for a book group as it provides scope for discussion of both plot and style, and is likely to divide opinion.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of A New Life (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Bernard Malamud.

I owe my discovery of Bernard Malamud to Jonathan Raban's quotations in "Driving Home" from "A New Life" to capture vivid impressions of the landscape in the area round Seattle, such as the wide skies in which the clouds are "a clash of horses and volcanoes".

Drawing on his own experience of working in Oregon Community College, Malamud introduces us to city bred Levin, who tries to escape from New York, where a sense of failure drove him to drink, by seeking a new life teaching English in the parochial world of a vocational college in the mythical state of Cascadia. Malamud describes with wry humour Levin's frustration over being forced to teach grammar from the soul-destroying primer which has enriched the ageing head of department who is so dime-pinching with his staff.

After a halting and wimpish start, Levin begins to gain confidence, but it is not until events begin to unravel that he realises that he has lost the sense of "being in control" which he briefly enjoyed. We sense from the outset that things are unlikely to work out well for the accident-prone, awkward Levin. Acute loneliness will drive him to unwise liaisons, and his desire to achieve something in his life will cause him to stand out from the herd at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Yet, by describing Levin's personality and thoughts in such detail, Malamud brings him alive as a man for whom we can often feel sympathy, even respect.

"Flight flew in him. He wasn't fleeing yet fled, unable to determine whom he was running from, himself or X. He blamed the flight, paradoxically a pursuit of feeling, on the fact that too much had happened in too short a time."

Published in 1961, the writing is on the cusp between an older style of presenting events in strict order, with detailed explanations, and a more modern directness about e.g. sex, and passages of near poetry, with a touch of "stream of consciousness". Malamud has a knack for comical situations, all the more so for being unexpected, his dialogues are realistic, and his observation of people razor sharp.

In the well-constructed plot, incidents along the way return to haunt Levin, creating at times a real sense of tension. You know that the most you can hope for is a bittersweet ending, but you care about Levin and want him to achieve a new life, even if not what he had planned.

This is a true classic, one of the novels worth keeping to reread and extract all Malamud's wisdom. I think he may be one of the greatest C20 American writers, yet one of those most at risk of being forgotten.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont: A Virago Modern Classic (Virago Modern Classics) by Elizabeth Taylor.

This well-structured tale of an elderly widow seeing out her days in the 1960s as one of a group of lonely and under-occupied paying guests at a London Hotel may not sound a very engaging theme. Everything hinges on Elizabeth Taylor's renowned skill as a novelist. From the outset I was struck by examples of her original, acerbic wit, and strong sense of the humour of the incongruous. We are told that our heroine Mrs Palfrey "would have made a distinguished-looking man and sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag." She had a "magnificent calm" and was "unruffled" to find her first home as a young bride "more than damp" from the floods "with a snake wound round the banisters to greet her".

Depressed but stoical in the company of the small-minded, gossipy group of paying guests, who tend to use cruelty, alcohol or eavesdrop "with ears sharpened by malice" to assuage their own loneliness, Mrs Palfrey is saved by a chance meeting with Ludo, a charming and essentially decent young penniless writer. For all her conventional past, Mrs Palfrey is attracted by the young man's natural sense of mischief and vitality, without losing her commonsense. United by a surprising and unexpected friendship, they do each other good turns, although would Mrs Palfrey be quite so well-disposed to Ludo if she knew she was a source of notes for his first novel based on her own comment on the Claremont Hotel, "We aren't allowed to die here"?

The book is inevitably a little dated in reflecting the prejudices of early sixties Britain, but any real weakness lies in scenes like the fraught drinks party which descends into pure farce. Although witty, this lacks the subtle observations and real insights into the mixture of small joys, sorrows and missed opportunities of ordinary life which mark most of the novel.

Despite the room for optimism in an ending which leaves something to your imagination, this is a sad book. It is not only a portrayal of old age as a time when one feels useless, superfluous and often in pain, but also a comment on how an exaggerated concern with convention and respectability can limit one's life unduly. Elizabeth Taylor died comparatively young in her early sixties, and was perhaps glad to escape the darker or drearier aspects of ageing.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of The Rum Diary (Bloomsbury Classic Reads) by Hunter S. Thompson.

Written when the author was little more than twenty and based on personal experience, this is the tale of Paul Kemp, cynical, hard-drinking journalist who takes up a post on the San Juan Daily News, a rag produced on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico.

At first I was reluctant to read this book group choice, imagining it would be a prolonged drunken rant. Although said to be an example of "gonzo" journalism – "bizarre, crazy, exaggerated, subjective and fictionalized style" to use a dictionary definition, from the outset I was struck by Hunter Thompson's remarkably spare and lucid, razor-sharp style ( for one who is rarely sober) and the sense of anticipation that something interesting is going to happen. In fact, the book is short enough for one not to feel let down by the slightness of the plot which is not really the point.

As you might hope for a reporter, Thompson is very strong on creating a sense of place : "old Spanish Puerto Rico..where one part of the city looked like Tampa (Florida) and the other ….like part of a medieval asylum". The whole paragraph is much better than this but too long to quote. Or there is the description of his drive to a friend's house during which he encounters for the first time the native Puerto Rico: "I was not prepared for the sand road.. I went the whole way in low gear, running over land crabs, creeping… through deep stagnant puddles, bumping and jolting in ruts and chuckholes…"

This is a backwater that attracts conmen, petty crooks, failures and drifters, like Kemp – all at times subjected to his remarkably perceptive analysis for such a young man. The author describes very effectively the kind of disillusion with small town America that drives a man to travel the world, uncertain what he is seeking, often making astute observations, but always a rootless outsider.

At times I grew tired of the drunkenness, which led to some unsavoury if realistic incidents: the looting of a liquor store during a carnival, which reminded me of the UK city riots of 2011, or a man casually beating up his girlfriend. I could not work out whether the chauvinism displayed to some extent by Kemp and even more so by his wild colleague Yeamon was an unconscious product of the 1950s or meant to be a parody of male insensitivity.

I could not say that I liked this book, but the quality of the writing impressed me. I could have wished he had applied this talent to a less drink-sodden world. He would probably have said that the rum helped him to write. Yet he was all too aware of the "quiet deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing" and perhaps being wasted, but he lacked the will power to avoid this.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars