Choice
(July 1, 2001; 977-424-499-0)

A well-known Palestinian poet, Barghouti was exiled from his village near Jerusalem for 30 years and finally granted permission to return for a brief visit. In a rich and evocative language, he reveals his feelings as he re-enters Palestine and begins to visit again places he knew as a boy. Barghouti writes in a poetic prose whose unexpected images constantly open new vistas for the reader. With neither polemics nor exaltation he explores the sense of self and loss, the interaction of the past and the present in the emotional baggage that exiles brings with them on return home. He makes the reader feel in the most personal way a sense of presence and absence and the changes that time has wrought both on him and on his homeland. In the growing body of exile literature (the Iranians contribute an important share), this book is one of the most human and humane documents available. It is both timely and timeless, a powerful statement of an existential condition that is becoming increasingly common in the world. It should be in every library.

Do you want to know the story, suffering, feelings etc. of the Palestinian refugees? You won't find, as far as I know, better than this book to give you the picture. I think it is time for us to realize the misery of these people.

Genet allows you to feel the immediacy of the Palestinian situation with particles from lives,from ill-defined fragments of lives disrupted with no future,he stayed with a family in 1980 a half-day and a whole night where the young son,Hamza a fedayee went off at night to fight. Genet hearing gun fire in the distance inhabited his bed and was brought Turkish coffee and water in the night as a replacement for the young man,by his mother. Genet is a writer/poet,a political thinker,but never a man of politics, a deeply sensitive man,a virtuoso of the sensual image, as the starry-night reflected against the curtain in his room with the small blue table. "Of course it's understood that the words,nights,forests,septet,jubilation desertion and despair are the same words that I have to use to describe the goings on at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris when the drag queens depart after celebrating their mystery,doing their accounts and smoothing banknotes out of the dew."

Genet was allowed with special permission to visit the massacre site at the camps at Sabra and Chantila,smelling the rotting flesh, "They happened I was affected by them. I talked about them. But while the act of writing came later, after a period of incubation,nevertheless in a moment like that or those when a single cell departs from its usual metabolism and the original link is created of a future,unsuspected cancer,or a piece of lace, so I decided to write this book."

Genet has an intense need for passion of any dimension,scouring the vigours of whatever parts of fragments of the lifeworld's complexity presents itself to him. I once thought of this book as a romantic means of portrayel a betrayel of a political situation,one, the only one that excited Genet.It means something that only encounterings lives in struggle,bent into a repressive state that Genet finds the only life worth encountering,sensing and feeling about. This book was completed in 1986 after suffering from throat cancer, he died on the night of 14-15th of April,1986,while correcting proofs.

This book is absolutely essential to any understanding of the Palestinian situation. It is also the mostimportant work of Genet's entire career.

The most striking aspect of this novel is the candor with which Soueif treats sexual themes, a radical and refreshing departure from most novels and memoirs by contemporary Middle Eastern women writers. Asya's sexual awakening occurs on the riddling boundaries between East and West, her early life in Egypt and her adult life in England. The descriptions of her childhood and adolescent days in Egypt are heart rendingly beautiful. At over eight hundred pages, the book is a quite a tome, but utterly absorbing; I read it through in a matter of sittings! The politics she charts were only vaguely known to me, and so the book also functioned as a sort of primer on Egyptian and Palestinian history of this century. Truly groundbreaking!

From a Jewish woman poin of view, totally devoted to the existence of the State of Israel, I could read the other side's opinions and attitudes without feeling offended or irrate. Just saddened. Ms. Soueif is too smart a writer to give it fanatic overtones. As far as the story is concerned, I couldn't put the book down. The dialogue and the characters are so real that I deeply cared for what happened to them. My God, this Saif, never wanting to have a conversation, became quite talkative when the pain was in his soul. And Asya, so emancipated and yet so impotent to take a strong stand against the lowest of men; compliant and scared not to hurt his feelings; totally paralyzed by her Middleeastern upbringing. Some things a woman just doesn't do... Oh, this book... I took pleasure in the smallest detail - doing the dishes, putting handcream on, metaphors and semantics, important and unimportant, they breathe life into this novel. It's one of the best I read in a long time. My only question is: do Saifs exist? I know there are plenty of Geralds, but except for Saif's aloofness that is real, his generosity and at the same time his disinterest in his wife - are they real? I wish I could personally congratulate the writer.

This is the second of Four Souief Books so far. It is a real treat, very well conceived and written. It is an excellent portorial of Egyptian society and the various coflicting influences affecting the Egyptian charachter. Ahdaf Souif paints each and every charecter in the novel in a "real" fashion, they are all very plausable in their strength, pecularities and humanities; the goodies and the badies alike are all well rounded. This does not only apply to Asya, Seif, Crissie and the other main personalities, but to the many minor ones too.

Souif painted an outstandingly accurate picture of the how a wedding, a funeral, school life and even war and politics feels like in Egypt. Souif was specially masterfull at the way she weaved the funeral scene, with her suprb translation of the Quran. I could actually picture myself in Ateba in Cairo receiving the mourners.

Ahdaf Souif's mastery of both English and Arabic comes across in every word in the book. She loves both languages and takes and gives joy in illustrating their beauity without losing the theme of the book.

The book shed a great deal of light on how Egyptian view not only themselves but also how they view the west, the arabs and also Israel. It provides a very realistic look on how integrated moslems and christians are in City life in Cairo.( at least used to be , not really sure about now)

Aisha and Sandpiper are 2 other outstnading books by AS, if you enjoy this book, you will certianly like these 2. In a funny way, some of the stories from these 2 books are intertwined with In the Eye of the Sun. You will appreciate these 2 shorter books many times more after you have read this one.

The Map of Love, her most recent book 1999, was short listed for the Booker prize (and should have won it over Disgrace which is also a fantastic book with great insight on life at the other end of the Africa) , is an excellent book but not half as good or real as this book, In The Eye Of The Sun is a real treat. I was depressed when I finshed it, I wanted more!

Ahdaf Soueif charms her (mostly Western?) readers with this romantic tale of a Victorian English Lady abroad who falls in love with an Egyptian Pasha fighting to free his country from its colonial masters. While you're being swept away by the thrill of forbidden love -- which has its sequel in the novel as the couple's great-grandchildren (American and Egyptian) rediscover their common roots -- you'll also learn a thing or two about the history of the modern Middle East.

The story moves back and forth in time from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the late 1990s. It is told in fragments, mostly diary entries and letters from the past assembled by the present-day narrator, whose own tale and imaginings about the past are interspersed throughout. The use of at least three different fonts helps the reader keep track of the constantly changing narrator. There is also a handy glossary of Arabic words and phrases at the back of the book.

In many ways, The Map of Love is less a historical novel than it is a history lesson dressed up as fiction. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Soueif's moderate Arab perspective on how things are and how they got that way -- including the neverending Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- will be truly educational for many readers.

Unfortunately, Soueif's fiction suffers from the ailment that plagues so much contemporary writing: it feels contrived. A reviewer's blurb on the back cover of my edition compares her to Allende and Marquez. I haven't read Allende so I can't vouch for that comparison one way or the other, but to compare Soueif to Marquez is to do a great disservice to the author of Love in the Time of Cholera. The Map of Love is serious entertainment, but it's not great literature, a Booker nomination notwithstanding.

The Map of Love is a romantic and intelligent read -- and a reminder that although we might forget the past, the past does not forget us.

If you love books which transport you to another world (in this case, at least two different worlds in two different time periods), which give you fascinating insights into other cultures, which incorporate a good deal of history into an exciting and completely developed story line, and which introduce you to a main character so charming and intelligent that you hate to have her disappear at the end of the novel, you will be thoroughly captivated by Map of Love.

Anna Winterbourne, an aristocratic young widow from England, travels to Egypt in the late 19th century during the height of British imperialism. She observes (and resents) the condescending behavior of her countrymen towards the Egyptians and is intelligently critical of British military "adventures" there and in other Arab states such as the Sudan, South Africa, and Palestine. As she comes to know the Egyptian people and falls in love with an Egyptian, the reader--along with Anna's granddaughter and great-granddaughter, who are reading the letters and diaries which reveal her story--learns much about the historical betrayals which have so complicated presentday relations between western and Arab countries.

Like most romances, this one requires you to accept a very high level of coincidence, but that is more than offset by fine descriptive writing, fully drawn characters, and the placing of a great many very recent Middle Eastern events into their Arab contexts. It is not surprising that this very well written book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. What is surprising is that this Egyptian author is so successful in presenting events from an Arab point of view to a western audience--a view that is culturally honest without being polemical.

Listed among the entries for the Booker Prize, Soueif's novel "The Map of Love" is a narrative of relationship between Britain and Egypt in the last century and a story of cross-cultural love. With innovative techniques, the author draws a parallel between the Egypt of early 1900 and the end of the century, carving the present out of the past. The past is represented by the story of an English woman (Anna Winterbourne) who identifies herself with Egyptian struggle against English occupation and married an Egyptian nationalist (Sharif al-Baroudi). The present is represented by Isabel (Anna's great granddaughter) who is determined to find the roots of her Egyptian ancestry.

Drawing upon different time lines, with interrelationships, and the use of different narrators, Soueif's novel requires an active and attentive reader. At times excessively romantic and with sugary characters, the author compensates with strong, critical, and biased (understandbly so) politics. There are no kind words for Zionism, imperialism, colonialism, and fundamentalism. In her quest to understand Egypt as a nation the author leaves the reader with the underlying notion that things have not changed much during the country's past century. Despite all the "isms" to be blamed for the country's present state of affairs, internal struggle for power is the epicenter.

A passionate, culturally enlightening story, with a beautiful symbolic artifice: the legend of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

"Salamy Aleikum!" (Peache be upon you)