Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree
Tariq Ali
Verso, 1993
244 pages
ISBN 978-0860916765
Recommended by: Jesse




Finally, a book that I have actual problems with and didn't just love wholeheartedly. Now I can sound like I actually think critically about the things I read.

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree sounds like a really cool book: it's about a Muslim family in late 15th-century Moorish Spain, during the reign of Queen Isabella. Ali uses this family as a means through which to examine the history of Moorish Spain in this time period, which is pretty fascinating-- especially since Ali is a noted political theorist, historian and activist, you can take what he says about this stuff pretty seriously. Historical fiction is, I think, an excellent enterprise for teaching those who don't want to take an entire BA about important historical events, especially when the reader can feel confident in the author's scholarly credentials. Ali does provide an interesting analysis of the fate of the Moors in Spain, namely that things may have turned out differently had the Spanish Muslims been more united instead of dividing themselves over trivial issues and thus becoming much more vulnerable to the violence of Queen Isabella and the Inquisition.

Unfortunately, it is fairly obvious that Ali is a theorist, not a novelist. His historical exposition and analysis suffers as a result of inexpert prose and, possibly, rather shoddy editing-- I noticed a lot of words that were simply used incorrectly, which should have been caught at a fairly early stage in the publication process. This was very distracting for me as a person who trying to train herself to notice these things. In addition to these purely mechanical problems, I was distracted by his use of the third-person omniscient, which jumped from character to character in a matter of sentences with no warning and thus seemed not very purposeful. My biggest problem, though, was with his characterisation of the al-Hudayl family. I really dislike it when writers of historical fiction, in any sense, are so squeamish about the "dated" views of the time that they can't stand to write characters who hold these views, and thus make them unusually progressive in their opinions about race, sexuality, gender, whatever. And I mean, maybe Spanish Muslims in the fourteenth century were more liberal in these matters than I assume they would have been-- it happens, and I'm always surprised-- but I have a hard time believing that it wouldn't have been a huge deal for a young girl in a wealthy family to lose her virginity to a man, even one to whom she was (maybe) engaged to at the time, but they all seem pretty chill about it. This is one of the reasons I think Mad Men is so successful-- every character, every single one (except maybe Peggy, but she is kind of an outcast) is a product of their time and place, philosophically, politically, whatever (and if there are any dated opinions to be squeamish about, it's those of rampant capitalism in the early 1960s). As are we all.

So, while I'm philosophically interested in the rest of Islam quintet-- because Islamic history is pretty fascinating-- I'm not sure I'm capable of struggling through prose and characterisation that are less than artful. It's a story that needs to be told, with all historical, theological and political depth that Ali provides, but it needs to be literarily beautiful as well.

High Fidelity

High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books, 1995
323 pages
ISBN 1-57322-551-7
Recommended by: Peter, Jesse, Adam




What books do you bring when you're travelling? This is a tough question, I've discovered. You have to be discerning, since you can only bring so many (weight restrictions and what not), plus, I'm never sure how much I'm actually going to read-- after all, I should be out seeing the sites, not holed up inside with my nose in a book. I can do that at home. Before I left, I had a number of conversations with people about how many and what kind of books I should bring. Sue mentioned that she had recently been reading Mansfield Park while at the MLA in California, because it was comfortable, familiar: when you're in a strange place, the last thing you're going to want is something alienating and experimental. Fair enough. I didn't bring Jane Austen, but I did bring a number of "Western" books, even though I had recently been trying to read books from countries that weren't Canada, the US and the UK-- Amsterdam, a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories and High Fidelity.

As it turns out, the number of books I brought-- six, I think-- was perfect. I had two lengthy plane rides, and I spent 24 hours total on the bus, and probably more like 30 on the train. I ended up reading a lot. And Sue was right-- it was nice to have something familiar, comfortable and funny to read in the middle of the night, in the middle of ass-end nowhere Turkey between Bodrum and Istanbul with exactly no one that spoke English.

So do I actually have anything to say about High Fidelity? Not at all.* It's a movie I watch when I want something familiar, when I'm bored or sick or lonely, and it always cheers me up, and in that, it was the perfect travel book. Thanks, Nick Hornby!


* This isn't really true. I'm sure I could say a lot about being a girl reading this sort of "romantic comedy for boys" kind of thing. But I don't want to. I like High Fidelity because it reminds me of my friends, who are exactly this kind of boy, with all the flaws that entails, and all the good things, and I love them either way.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam
Ian McEwan
Vintage Canada, 1999
178 pages
ISBN 978-0676972177
Recommended by: no one, really; I had read Atonement a few years ago and really enjoyed it, and this edition just had such a warm, appealing cover that I couldn't help but be drawn in.



Amsterdam is about two friends who become more and more antagonistic towards each other following the death of a mutual friend, eventually with tragic-- albeit hilarious-- consequences. I don't have much to say about it, other than it is pretty delightful; at a sprightly 178 pages, it's a nice, neat, well-drawn little package, almost a vignette, very British, very funny, bizarre enough to make me like it. Especially with so many contemporary novels being so overblown, so swollen and sprawling, a skillfully executed, restrained short novel like Amsterdam is extremely refreshing.

The Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk, trans. Maureen Freely
Vintage International, 2009
531 pages
ISBN 978-0307386243
Recommended by: Andre





This book. I loved this book. It is an early contender for My Favourite Book I Read This Year. Not only is it a novel on a subject very close to my heart and mind (i.e., romantic obsession and possession, the subject of my senior thesis), but it was probably the most remarkable experience I've had reading a book so far. As I've come to realise, mostly through going to shows, the truly transcendent experience of going to a concert or reading a novel can't be achieved through objective merit alone-- the ones that stay with you do so because the external experience-- what you yourself bring to the table-- aligns perfectly with the novel or concert or whatever in question to produce something truly amazing. So let's recap-- I started reading The Museum of Innocence a week or so before I left for Istanbul, the hometown of the author and location of the events of the novel, and finished it there. I had already read three of Pamuk's books and so was familiar with and excited about him as an author. When I arrived in Istanbul, the friend I was visiting had just finished re-reading it (having recommended it to me last March, when I was finishing my thesis), and we were both pretty excited to have someone to talk to about it. Being able to share a novel with someone is something I value very highly, and to be able to share it with not only another person, but to be in the city it's about... well, there you have it. The recipe for a truly memorable reading experience.

Briefly, Museum is about Kemal, the sort of Orhan Pamuk protagonist I've started to become familiar with-- young-ish, melancholy-ish, somewhat aimless, prone to disastrous romantic attachments. Kemal is interesting, though, because he is not an artist, but a rather apathetic businessman, born into a rich family and given a position in the family business (in my experience most, if not almost all, protagonists in these narratives of disastrous romantic obsession are artists or academics). Kemal is happily engaged to Sibel, but upon a chance meeting with a distant relation, Füsun, he begins an ill-fated affair. The affair ends fairly quickly, but Kemal's emotional involvement with Füsun does not, to the detriment of, well, basically his entire life-- his engagement, his friendship, his business, all forgotten in the light of his all-consuming obsession. He begins to collect little objects connected, sometimes quite distantly, to Füsun. It is this objects that comprise the so-called Museum of Innocence.

The Museum of Innocence, on Cukurcuma

As in all of Pamuk's books, the line between fiction and reality is artfully blurred; there is the appearance of Pamuk himself at the end of the novel that I have come to expect by this point, as well as a map at the beginning of the novel pinpointing the exact location in Istanbul of the Museum of Innocence (which I set out to find one day), and in true Nabakovian style, an index at the back of important names occur throughout the novel. Not only here, though, is this line less clear than it could be: having just finished Memories and the City, Pamuk's memoir, I was struck by how closely certain places, experiences, feelings and people in Museum mirror the ones described there. Museum, out of the novels I've read, seems the most personal yet of Pamuk's novels, the nearest to being autobiographical. Of course, it is not as if Kemal is as simple as a fictional stand-in for Pamuk, since Pamuk appears as himself in the novel-- but it is perhaps a little more complicated than saying that he isn't, either.

There are also some fairly intriguing meditations on the museum, enhanced for me by all the museums I went to during my stay in Istanbul (everywhere from Ayasofya to the Istanbul Modern); I'm starting to want to write a paper on the museum, or on the act of collecting. Fascinatingly, Pamuk continues to bring this novel into the realm of reality by opening a real Museum of Innocence, supposedly later this year, at the location on Cukurcuma (I assume, given the fresh coat of paint and security cameras in the photo above), containing artifacts collected by himself from the Istanbul of his childhood. I'm a little sad I won't get to see it.

It appears that, like a big moron, I neglected to mark quotations I particularly liked, so I won't be able to include any of them-- I was hoping I had at least marked something about museums and curators from the section at the end of the novel where Kemal, now interested in displaying his very weird collection of Füsun's things, visits thousands of museums around the world, displaying collections sometimes as bizarre as his. But I didn't.

And so ends the Orhan Pamuk Project, for the time being. I did buy The Black Book a week or so ago (I was tempted to buy it at the wonderful Isankitap in Istanbul, but English books are understandably pricey and the Vintage International edition is nicer anyway), but I think I'll leave it for later on, when I want something familiar that I know I'll enjoy and be fascinated by. If I ever end up writing an MA thesis in literature, Pamuk is looking like a pretty likely topic for it.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

Istanbul: Memories and the City
Orhan Pamuk, trans. Maureen Freely
Vintage International, 2006
400 pages
ISBN 978-1400033881
Recommended by: Don B.




It's been such a long time since I read this book-- I finished it probably at the end of January-- that I may not have anything particularly exciting to say about it. Memories and the City is Pamuk's memoir, in a way, and it's also a book about Istanbul, but more importantly it's both. It's a book about how a place creates a person, and vice versa, how a place is seen by and created by the person interacting with it. The book is studded with beautiful photos of the city by Ara Güler, as well as photographs of Pamuk and his family from the 50s to the 70s. His meditation on hüzün-- what he describes as a communal, shared, melancholy (as opposed to individual melancholy) shared by Istanbullus and created by the city itself-- provides a beautiful, though-provoking, very striking centerpiece and connecting thread through the book.

Also, if you are reading this book secretly and somewhat ashamedly hoping for a tragic love story worthy of any of Pamuk's protagonists, don't you worry. And actually, on that note, one of the things that made reading Memories and the City so valuable was having read it immediately before beginning The Museum of Innocence, which occupies much of the same spaces (physically and philosophically) in fiction as Memories does in memoir.

In Cukurcuma, Istanbul

And of course, this was the perfect way to get excited for and acquainted with Istanbul in advance. Literature, for me, was the best form of research I could have done before travelling.

A few quotations:

"Especially when reading the western travelers of the nineteenth century-- perhaps because they wrote about familiar things in words I could easily understand-- I realize "my" city is not really mine. Just as it is when I am contemplating the skyline and the angles most familiar to me-- from Galata and Cihangir, where I am writing these lines-- so it is, too, when I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me; at times like these I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel as if I've become one with that western traveler, plunging with him into the thick of life, counting, weighing, categorizing, judging, and in so doing often usurping his dreams, to become at once the object and subject of the western gaze. As I waver back and forth, sometimes seeing the city from within and sometimes from without, I feel as I do when I am wandering the streets, caught in a stream of slippery contradictory thoughts, not quite belonging to this place and not quite a stranger. This is how the people of Istanbul have felt for 150 years." (289)

"Is this the secret of Istanbul-- that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments, and its sublime landscapes, the poor hide the soul of the city inside a fragile web? But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about the city's essence says more about our own lives and states of mind. The city has no centre other than ourselves." (349)

Interlude

I am going to buy a new computer soon. Very soon. This weekend, in fact. For now though, I am going to write down the books I read while traveling (and shortly before) so I don't forget:

Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk
The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk
Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
The Shadow of the Pomegranate Tree, Tariq Ali
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

My Name Is Red

My Name Is Red
Orhan Pamuk, trans. Erdağ Göknar
Vintage International, 2002
432 pages
ISBN 978-0375706851
Recommended by: ongoing Orhan Pamuk project... the Nobel Prize committee?


This book is completely badass. Wikipedia page/limited reviews I have read/back cover copy are always comparing Pamuk to Borges, Calvino, Nabokov, Thomas Mann, but I am a little surprised that nowhere in these reviews has what I consider the obvious comparison come up: friggin Umberto Eco, am I right? The Name Of The Rose? They are not that similar stylistically; Pamuk doesn't digress to nearly the same extent as Eco in Rose, but both novels are murder mysteries centered around, narratively, the murders of men involved in the creation of illuminated manuscripts, and thematically, among other things, the questionable moral value of the creation of beautiful religious artifacts.

My Name Is Red, like Snow, once again tackles the tension between East and West that I suspect is a running theme in Pamuk's work (alongside other running themes that I suspect, like the way he subtly or just-barely slips himself into the text); this time in the context of sixteenth-century representative art. Have I ever mentioned how much I love illuminated manuscripts and lengthy philosophical discussions about the theological merit of art? Because it's a lot. Pamuk appears to a be a good writer to have addressed my "try-reading-more-than-one-book-by-a-given-author" project, because it seems-- having read only two of his novels at this point-- that he really is someone who is constantly addressing, battling even, the same themes; it seems as though they crop up not even on purpose, they are just always the things running through his mind. Religion and politics, art and morality, east and west, tradition and freedom, the role of the author in creating a text, the role of the reader.

Also, since every chapter is told in the first person by a different person, this is far and away the book in which I have appreciated running heads the most.

I would have started The Museum of Innocence today on my giant debacle of a bus ride, but someone has loaned me Istanbul, Pamuk's memoir/reflection on the eponymous city, and so I thought I would try to read that before taking off to said city, as I wouldn't want to accidentally wreck or lose someone else's book.

Also here, a lovely review of the novel in question.