Books

“Return: A Palestinian Memoir” by Ghada Karmi – Telling right from wrong

This is my review of Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi.

Forced to leave Jerusalem as a child under the 1948 Nakba or Palestinian Exodus, Ghada Karmi felt the need to experience life in one of the semi-independent areas set up on Palestinian soil under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. In 2005 she moved to Ramallah in the West Bank to worked as a consultant in media and communications for the Palestinian Authority.

As she might have foreseen, this proved to be a privileged sinecure in a closed bubble of complacent bureaucrats and politicians bent on furthering their status and material interests without rocking the boat, of expatriates caught up in romanticised demonstrations against an Israeli occupation which did not affect them personally, and poorly paid junior staff who kept their heads down for fear of losing their hard-to-obtain jobs.

Despite this, she managed to witness examples of ongoing injustice: camps like those in Gaza, “islands of memory in an erased landscape”, increasingly the sole places where isolation and hardship keep the fight for an independent state alive; Qalqilya, a town on the Green Line between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank, surrounded by a twenty-five foot wall with razor wire and watchtowers ironically reminiscent of a concentration camp, but justified by the need to keep suicide bombers out of Israel and to protect settlers from their Arab neighbours; one of the few farms in Hebron still Palestinian-owned, where the defiant owner agonised over his withered vines, deprived of water by the Israeli authorities which disconnected his piped water supply and blocked his well, as part of the process of connecting the surrounding Israeli settlers.

Ghada Karmi made me realise for the first time how many Palestinians live outside camps, assimilated over time into countries like Jordan and Israel, inevitably resigned to the situation even if it makes them second-class citizens. She portrays the West Bank as a land of self-delusion: there is no sense of solidarity with Gaza, and many bright young people are employed by NGOs, precariously dependent on grants of foreign aid, to produce detailed research reports which remain unused. Likewise, frequent references to the conferences and political initiatives are depressing since we know now they failed to achieve any progress. It all seems like a displacement activity to allow the Israelis to consolidate their displacement of Palestinians. I was also intrigued to learn that middle class West Bank families wish to get their children educated at American universities, undeterred by the irony that it was US support which protected and empowered Israel.

I was interested in the views of Ghada Karmi’s ageing father: when she expresses concern over the apparent increase in traditional Islam as a “retreat into the past” which will “play into the hands of the West”, he counters that it is the West which has armed Israel and left the Arabs “dependent and enslaved” – “Islam is all they have left”. Sadly, this is the closest we get to her sole major omission: an epilogue updating events on the rise of a democratically Hamas and the increase in fundamentalist terrorism in the Middle East.

Although the author comes across at times as a self-absorbed and possibly difficult person, her intellect rises above understandable emotion to provide a revealing and thought-provoking analysis of an ongoing injustice which left me, like her, with a sense of “gut-wrenching despair” which needs to be more widely understood.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars


Return: A Palestinian Memoir
 

Timshel – man’s freedom to choose

This is my review of East of Eden (Penguin Modern Classics) by John Steinbeck.

This epic masterpiece reminds me of aspects of Dickens and Hardy applied to God-fearing yet sinful turn of the century California. The opening chapter captures the beauty of the "Eden" of the Salinas Valley where Steinbeck was born. This forms much of the backdrop to the saga of two contrasting families whom Steinbeck uses to develop his ideas on the nature of good and evil, love and hate, beauty and ugliness.

The Hamiltons are close-knit and loving under the influence of their charismatic father Samuel, based on the author's own grandfather, who despite his silver tongue and inventiveness is doomed to poverty because he has only been able to afford a plot of poor land. The Trasks are introspective and repressed, generally unhappy despite their wealth because of their inability to find love. Steinbeck uses them to explore the theme which fascinated him: the story of Cain and Abel which he reinterprets over two generations, dedicating the book to his own two young sons.

The book seems dated in its use of an intrusive and omniscient narrator who tells the reader what to think about the characters, digresses into expounding his views on American society, and at times even lapses into the first person and enters the story as John, the grandson of Samuel Hamilton. These Escher-like shifts in point of view can be justified as part of Steinbeck’s emperimentation as a writer. From a critical angle, one can also find many of the author’s key characters quite implausible, in particular Cathy, introduced from the outset as a monster. She seems to represent the Devil in the novel, and the idea that evil is often an inexplicable force. In describing her manipulative nature, Steinbeck was sadly seeking some catharsis from the break with his second wife. Perhaps because he is intended to be a symbol of goodness, Lee, the impossibly competent and virtuous Chinese servant who saves the Trask family from total collapse and somehow learns to speak like a professor while talking pidgin English since that is what ignorant Americans expect, is also not entirely convincing. Yet he provides not only a good deal of wry humour but also serves, like Samuel, as a mouthpiece for Steinbeck’s philosophising, some of which is fine-sounding hokum.

Despite these reservations, it is easy to understand why East of Eden was an instant and longstanding bestseller. Beneath the gripping plot with all its twists of violence and emotion, made tolerable by comedy and the descriptions of American life a century ago, there are moving passages and some profound insights. A story which in the hands of a lesser writer might have sunk into sentimental soap becomes brilliant because of Steinbeck’s gift for words. Apart from the enjoyment of his dialogues and anecdotes, powerful passages come without warning to stop you in your tracks and demand to be reread: the descriptions of the different types of men who become hobos; even Samuel’s droll eulogy of his ancient horse Doxology “with his feet like flapjacks”; Dessie Hamilton’s musing over Samuel’s insistence on flouting the superstition that white doves bring “sadness and death” – she realises that they do, it is only a matter of time.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

East of Eden (Penguin Modern Classics)

The false path to gold for public lavatories

This is my review of Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings by Owen Hatherley.

4 stars for subject matter.

For what might be more accurately called “townscapes", journalist Owen Hatherley presents a detailed, at times indigestible, analysis of Soviet era architecture. Despite limited finances, he managed to roam quite widely with firsthand impressions of cities including Moscow, Berlin, Kiev during the recent demonstrations on the Maidan, the remains of Ceaucescu’s Bucharest, Warsaw, Vilnius, even Shanghai.

Each starting with a relevant quotation, the chapters are themed: the “magistrales” or wide boulevards cut through cities to permit state-orchestrated demonstrations of power; the massive, impersonal to the point of soulless suburban blocks of apartments to house large numbers of workers as fast as possible; “houses of the people” to encourage suitable social activities; palatial metros, some stations ironically built in Moscow at the height of Stalin’s Reign of Terror. There is even a chapter on quirky examples of improvisation: extra rooms tacked onto the sides of high-rise flats, and self-managed tower blocks in New Belgrade like the Genex, resembling two enormous linked grain silos. Themes are set in context by an initial introduction on the nature and aims of Soviet architecture.

I learned a good deal from this book. I had not realised how much Soviet styles varied in a relatively short period and liked Paperny’s useful if simplistic definition of “Culture One” Modernism, dynamic, with horizontal structures, low, long and linear, as opposed to “Culture Two” Stalinist, with its “monumental, solid, massive, immovable” vertical structures. These harked back to past grandeur for the frontages of “people’s palaces”, intended as spacious flats for ordinary workers as in East Berlin’s flagship project, Stalinallee, together with major buildings like Moscow State University with their stepped ziggurats and the “Socialist Realism” of the huge, stylised statues of patriotic workers.

I had not considered how “Utopian Soviet planners” rejected distinct urban quarters as a survival of “obsolete capitalist structures”, so that individuality was only possible through chance variations in a site. Even under Krushchev’s less extreme regime, decrees led to an “International Style” extending between the far-flung borders with Scandinavia, Afghanistan and Japan, with identical standardised plans down to the use of the same mass-produced doorknob.

Ironically, the “social condensers” constructed to provide under one roof a variety of activities to create good socialist citizens often became rare examples of creative, “one-off” architecture, such as Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers' Centre in Moscow.

I accept that for reasons of economy only small, grainy black-and-white photographs are used, but they are often not placed right next to the relevant text. Some buildings, like the famous Dessau-Törten cubic houses of Gropius are described without the inclusion of any photograph at all, which is like a radio programme explaining how to make a complicated origami bird. Hatherley’s prose is a little too leaden to get away with this. Key points may be lost in his verbose and sometimes opaque style. Hatherley’s lack of clarity matters because it is confusing. The omission of the construction dates of many developments discussed is also unhelpful.

Concepts like Modernism and Constructivism need concise definitions, and a glossary of terms (Potemkin village, phalanstery – both very interesting) and architects would have been useful for reference. The book would have been more effective with fewer examples, each with a better photograph and concise text. When I took the trouble to find buildings on Google images, I could understand much better what the author was getting at, but it is cumbersome to read a book in this way.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings

What price honour?

This is my review of The Ends of the Earth: (The Wide World – James Maxted 3) (The Wide World Trilogy) by Robert Goddard.

“The Ends of the Earth” is the third part of a trilogy set in the aftermath of World War One, for which it is strongly advised to read “The Ways of the World” and “The Corners of the Globe” in sequence first . Volume 3 opens with a group of James Maxted’s colleagues and a hired support team waiting in Yokohama for his arrival in order to embark on the dangerous mission of discovering exactly why his father, the diplomat Sir Henry was murdered. James aka Max also has a parallel task of thwarting the activities of the Moriaty-style villain, German spy-master Fritz Lemmer. Skip the rest of this sentence to avoid a spoiler if you have not read the previous two novels: Max’s friends are initially unaware that he was in the process of being murdered in Marseille at the end of Book 2.

The fiendish convolutions of Goddard’s plots are of course a large part of their attraction, but by the end of the second volume I was feeling quite unengaged: a tortuous chain of fairly stock violent episodes were becoming hard for me to want to bother to take in, not to mention the large number of characters of whom to keep track. I was also unimpressed by the author’s device of recapping on past events for Volume 2 by means of a highly condensed secret service report, too clunky and indigestible for my liking. So, I embarked on Volume 3 with no great enthusiasm, but was pleased to find that Goddard has done a better job of triggering memories of past events, by inserting brief reminders at suitable points. Even so, I would have found it useful to have for reference a brief separate summary of each previous volume together with a glossary of characters names and past roles.

Overall, I found this novel to have a sharper and more satisfactory plot than Volume 2, with Goddard’s gift for unexpected twists undiminished, together with crises and tense situations from which escape seems impossible. This story is as far-fetched as required of a mass market thriller, but it is set apart by the interesting detail on early C20 Japan, social, political and geographical – Goddard has taken pains to research Tokyo as it was before the Great Earthquake of 1923. He has also slipped in some Japanese dialogue for good measure. Amongst all the derring do and cliché, the main characters have moments of introspection and insight, so that the novel manages to be moving at times as well as an intriguing page-turner. The somewhat open-ended conclusion appeals to me, although if it leads to a fourth volume, I think the author would have done better to revert to a one-off novel with fresh characters, focussing on a single issue, full of twists, of course.

On reflection, I think Goddard's earlier novels had more depth, but even if his current output is more patchy and commercially-orientated, he is still capable of spinning a good twisty yarn.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

The Ends of the Earth: (The Wide World – James Maxted 3) (The Wide World Trilogy)

The Knot of Vipers by François Mauriac: Cutting the knot of vipers

This is my review of The Knot of Vipers (Modern Classics) by Francois Mauriac.

An ageing and embittered miser, Louis is obsessed with his determination to ensure that not a single member of his family inherits a penny of his considerable wealth. Why does he hate his wife and offspring so much? Is he right to believe that he is loathed in return? To what extent is this situation his fault? As Louis’ plans begin to unravel combined with a sense of his mortality, he begins to see life a little differently. Questions arise as to whether people can really change, or is it a case of merely wishing to do so, or even self-delusion?

After a slow start to set the scene and explain Louis’ upbringing and early love for his wife Isa after a childhood and youth of loneliness and isolation, this becomes an intense and gripping psychological study in the context of the snobbish, self-satisfied, devoutly Catholic bourgeois families of the Bordeaux region whom Mauriac does not seem to have tired of dissecting. His flowing prose is a pleasure to read, with his sharp irony contrasting with almost poetical descriptions of the countryside – the smell of burning pines on the air and mists over the vines, timber and wine forming the basis of the economy.

There is a double tragedy at the heart of this novel. Although it may be hard to credit, Louis’ love for his wife is destroyed by his devastation over the discovery that she had a previous lover, even though it was probably only the passing infatuation of a very young girl. His inflexible nature combined with a lack of experience prevent him from adopting a sense of proportion. His inability to “forgive” his wife drives a wedge between them, probably causing her a degree of unhappiness of which he is unaware, and blinding Louis to a love for him she may have had to suppress. Mauriac contrives to make us feel some sympathy for both these characters in due course, if the not for their son and their daughter’s husband.

Mauriac was content to be called “a Catholic writer” and the essence of this novel is that Louis, a freethinking atheist, is repelled by the smug hypocrisy of the Catholic family into which he has married. He is further infuriated by what he sees as his wife’s indoctrination of their children against his wishes, poignantly perceiving this as a way of alienating them from him. Yet Mauriac would have us believe that, despite his flaws, Louis may be more truly spiritual than the rest of them, and if he really is the sinner they make him out to be, he is all the more deserving of “God’s grace”.

Even if the reader is also an atheist, it is possible to find the story moving and thought-provoking. Although most of the characters are unappealing, with a tendency to create their own unhappiness, this novel is not depressing by reason of its psychological insight and the quality of the prose. I prefer this novel to the other two famous works of Mauriac, his favourite “Thérèse Desqueyroux” and “Le Mystère Frontenac” which I believe he wrote as an antidote to the intensely emotional “Knot of vipers” but which seems somewhat bland in comparison.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

The Knot of Vipers (Modern Classics)

More than a handful of dust

This is my review of Shadow of the Rock (A Spike Sanguinetti Mystery) by Thomas Mogford.

When former school friend Solomon Hassan knocks on his door in Gibraltar, tax lawyer Spike Sanguinetti decides to give him the benefit of the doubt over the charge of murdering his employer’s step-daughter in Tangiers. Spike’s attempt to persuade the Moroccan authorities to drop an extradition charge involves travelling to Tangiers and collecting some of the evidence the police should have found.

The spare style conveys more than many tales of twice the length. Details are gradually revealed without any clunky information dumps, although the novel occasionally reminded me of a travel guide or geography book. The author creates a strong sense of place, which reads as if it is based on first-hand knowledge, drawing interesting comparisons between Gibraltar and Morocco, both on the edge of Europe, separated from it by more than distance. Gibraltar is a historical anomaly, an anachronism is many ways, belittled by the Spanish who call its inhabitants “chingongos” – “ a remote tribe of people who are interbred”. In Morocco, the traditional culture is fractured by some of the less savoury aspects of western influence, with capitalist development involving more than a tinge of exploitation, as typified by Solomon’s employer “Dunetech”, “Powering a Greener Future” amongst the desert Bedouin.

So this pacy thriller with serious undertones might seem calculated to please a wide audience. I would have liked it better with fewer formulaic elements: the hook of a prologue describing a context-free murder made more sinister by the assassin’s calmness and the victim’s lack of fear; the frequent scenes of loveless sex and gratuitous violence which are not essential to the plot, but presumably intended to excite or titillate; last but not least, the use of very short chapters, often only a page or two in length, assuming a sound-bite level of concentration. Some scenes fall flat, or are frankly confusing, suggesting a need to edit more for clarity. It is a pity that all chapters do not sustain the excellence of say, Chapter 11 when in less than four pages we are treated to the sharp contrast of Tangiers, Spike’s wry humour, the incongruous presence of Dunetech “gleaming in the sun as if God had just finished buffing it with his own chamois leather” and the firm’s unappealing Head of Corporate Security Toby Riddell. Perhaps this reflects the author’s previous success as a short fiction writer.

Despite my reservations, this is a page-turner, with reasonably developed main characters and some interesting background issues, the denouement is quite sound and does not disappoint, although it would have been more powerful without the final chapter to spell out what the reader has already deduced..

I may read the next in the series, but not for a while.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

Shadow of the Rock (A Spike Sanguinetti Mystery)

Turkish Delight

This is my review of The Janissary Tree (Yashim the Ottoman Detective) by Jason Goodwin.

Like many detectives, Yashim is a loner, but it is for the unusual reason that he is a eunuch and therefore somewhat set apart from others and so better-placed to observe events. This makes him invaluable to his employer, the Sultan in 1830s Istanbul, even if the ruler ironically does not fully appreciate his skills.

In the first of what has turned out to be a successful series, Yashim is called upon to solve the murder of a concubine in the closed, sinister world of the harem, but is under greater pressure to investigate the disappearance and bizarre sequential murders of four young army officers.

At first, I was drawn in by the vivid images of Istanbul, by the appealing personality of Yashim, understandably bitter over his state, yet maintaining a wry sense of humour combined with a penchant for cooking mouth-watering dishes. The snippets of history concerning past sultans, the fall of Istanbul to the Turks and the bloody demise of the once influential yet corrupt military Janissaries are quite interesting.

Yet I soon became irritated by the short sound-bite chapters (132 in 329 pages) which seemed to be a device to pad out with digressions a thin plot, often making it quite tortuous and hard to follow in the process. On page 164, I became so disengaged by a chain of implausible dramatic events that I gave up on the book for a while. No serious spoilers intended, but apart from the fact that the author’s descriptions are often quite complicated and unclear, I couldn’t accept the idea of Yashim stopping the advance of a fire by demolishing a house it would seem virtually single-handed – surely the flames would leap across the gap, or simply blast down the other side of the street? Neither could I accept his ability to chase an assassin through crowded alleys on the basis of “magic……..an unreasoned and unexamined knowledge”. While I’m at it, some of the dialogue grated on me in sounding far too modern – more suited to metrosexuals meeting in a London wine bar – not to mention describing a tanning yard as the size of a football field.

When I returned to the novel for the sake of a book group, I enjoyed the second half more, perhaps because the end was in sight. The denouement is quite neat, but some key points seem unduly rushed, and I feel the novel as a whole could have been developed better. I do not plan to spend more time reading other books in the series, yet it is clearly quite popular.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

The Janissary Tree (Yashim the Ottoman Detective)

St. Agnes’ Stand by Thomas Eidson: Desert yarn

This is my review of St. Agnes’ Stand by Thomas Eidson.

This is not a typical western, even if at first handsome, tough and wily loner, Nat Swanson seems like standard material for the hero of one. As he rides through the desert wastes of New Mexico en route for a new life in California, on the run from a trio bent on avenging the death of a man he has just killed for reasons not fully explained, Swanson comes across two wagons ambushed by Apaches. Haunted by the face of a woman he has glimpsed at a window, he is drawn into offering help, only to find himself trapped in the apparently impossible task of saving a nun convinced he has been sent by God and the companions he has not bargained for, including several vulnerable children.

""The intense heat and wind were playing with the air, making it warp and shimmer over the land." What sets this novel apart from most westerns is the author’s skill not only in capturing a sense of the striking landscape but also in entering into the characters’ minds on both sides, so that we are half-able to identify even with the dilemma of the cunning, brutal Apache leader. Both Swanson and the nun are brought at times to question their actions and beliefs. Most of all, Eidson has a gift for creating a sense of tension, which is evident from the first pages as Swanson looks out for the slightest sign that he is being followed.

In his desire to hold the reader, Eidson does not shy away from images of gratuitous brutality which linger too long in one’s memory, nor from indulging in far-fetched plot twists. Suffering from multiple wounds and exhaustion, how on earth does Swanson manage to scale cliffs and hit targets with his crossbow, let alone carry packs containing blankets and even the luxury of coffee? Yet despite feeling disturbed or irritated by all this, combined with unease over the negative portrayal of the Indians and the dollops of sentimentality which are combined too casually with all the violence, this book is a page turner.

The author describes himself as inspired by a strong oral tradition of spinning yarns, and this tale reminds me of Norse legends, in which there is a thread of morality and spirituality beneath the thud, blunder and exaggeration.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

St. Agnes’ Stand

Recalling Bellow’s Gift

This is my review of Humboldt’s Gift (Penguin Modern Classics) by Saul Bellow.

A prize-winning author whose creative life is stagnant while his personal life is in a mess, Charlie Citrine is haunted by memories of his former friend and mentor, the brilliant but manic poet Humboldt Fleischer. Humboldt is based on the real-life poet Delmore Schwartz, a one-time colleague of Saul Bellow, to whom Charlie himself bears quite a strong resemblance.

The rambling plot which switches back and forth in Charlie’s mind is mainly a framework for Saul Bellow’s astonishing prose, a mind-blowing stream of consciousness, with punctuation (minus commas between adjectives, an interesting technique). This is leavened by many very funny descriptions and dialogues, which may atone for any irritation over yet another novel by a writer about writers, and for Bellow’s casual cultural references which require everyone who is not an American with an encyclopaedic general knowledge to either break the rhythm of reading to look them up, or remain in ignorance.

The humour also serves as an antidote to Citrine’s philosophical musings about the state of the soul, the existence of an after-life and the decline of American society by the 1970s into consumerism and banality. Citrine’s monologues, which tend to be made more digestible for the reader by frequent mocking or teasing interruptions, generally from female lovers past and present, suggest that his ideas are underdeveloped, even confused. Yet this may be intentional, since Bellow himself seems to have changed his opinions substantially over his long life spent reflecting on the meaning of life.

You may regret that Bellow dissipated his extraordinary verbal talent on such a self-absorbed, self-indulgent, weak, lecherous man as Citrine, although he is redeemed by a self-deprecating sense of humour and a rather appealing ability to understand the viewpoint of those fleecing and manipulating him, and to find a sense of proportion when things get tough. Bellow might of course argue that Citrine is merely a parody of himself, a man whose flaws did not prevent him from producing brilliant prose. So, despite its verbosity, repetition, sometimes woolly thinking, and damp squib conclusion, this original, remarkable work with its stunning descriptions of places, notably Chicago, and people, its wit, interesting ideas, insights and ultimately entertaining plot is worth reading – although you have to take the novel slowly to get the most out of it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

Humboldt’s Gift (Penguin Modern Classics)

“Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History” by Catherine Merridale – Bedevilled by detail

This is my review of Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History by Catherine Merridale.

For enthusiasm and research, Catherine Merridale deserves five stars, but despite having visited Moscow both before and after the collapse of Communism, and been inside the Kremlin, I found this history hard going.

The opening chapters seem padded out, since there is little to say about the rural backwater of Moscow and the wooden fortification of the initial Kremlin when Kiev was the centre of activity for the region. In the later Middle Ages, the political rulers on one hand and religious patriarchs on the other are hard to distinguish, with the exception of Ivan the Terrible who tried without success to interest Elizabeth 1 of England in marriage.

For me, the book begins to come alive from the time of Peter the Great in the C17, through Napoleon’s destruction of Moscow to the impact of Communism and Putin setting out to harness the aura of the “red fortress” to cement his authority. Perhaps this is because it is easier to engage with people and ideas rather than often arbitrarily selected facts about buildings. I accept that this book may be invaluable for students, but for the general reader it is somewhat longwinded with a good deal of dry detail outside the entertaining anecdotes, which makes for a somewhat indigestible potted history.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars


Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History