The House of Jasmine
2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2013.0230
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Resumo64 World Literature Today reviews enough to waste hundreds of months firing millions of bullets into thousands of bodies.” Read this book if you are interested in cricket, Sri Lanka, or South Asian anglophone writing. More urgently, read this book if you want to know what it means to be human in a complex , changing, challenging, and sometimes rewarding and enriching world. Jim Hannan Le Moyne College Ibrahim Abdel Meguid. The House of Jasmine. Noha Radwan , tr. Northampton, Massachusetts . Interlink. 2012. isbn 9781566568821 Shagara, a minor employee in the shipyards of Alexandria and the firstperson narrator of The House of Jasmine —a translation of 1984’s Bayt al-yasamin by one of contemporary Egypt’s most prominent novelists— lives in a radically fraudulent and corrupt society. President Sadat’s operatives are in the habit of organizing , and financing, public demonstrations of support for the regime and its foreign policy of US-inspired rapprochement with Israel. Shagara is supposed to pay his fellow workers to line the streets and applaud when President Nixon drives by. In fact, he excuses them the street-lining and cheering but only gives them half of what he should, keeping the rest for himself. Later he becomes president of the workers’ union. He decides, however, that what he really wants is out. That, and the private contentment of marriage. The three friends with whom he often spends his evenings in the local café are as alienated as he is. In a long, condemnatory speech, ‘Abd al-Salam points out that “none of us has a purpose to his life”: Hassanayn reads to avoid self-examination, Magid hides from life in his pharmacy, and the speaker, at thirty-three, considers that he is too old to make a difference. On a street often walked by the young men is a “mysterious and magical ” villa surrounded by jasmine trees and unpolluted by compromise and evasion. Its owner and his wife have daughters, “the most beautiful of all creatures.” But the house is eventually Imre Kertész The Holocaust as Culture Thomas Cooper, tr. Seagull Books Holocaust concentration-camp survivor and Nobel Prize recipient Imre Kertész believes fiercely in the relationship between personal and historical events. Kertész reflects on his experiences and discusses his novel Fatelessness in this conversation with translator and literary historian Thomas Cooper (see WLT, April 2003, 4). january–february 2013 • 65 Tom Jones Nearing Palenque: Reflections on Native America Foothills Poet, attorney, human-rights activist, and, most importantly, teacher, Tom Jones has lived and worked in the Navajo Nation for over twenty years. His deep love for the land and its people is evident in this collection of new and selected poems. Nearing Palenque is presented in a carefully hand-sewn volume, featuring striking cover art created by Navajo artist Robert Manygoats. Nota Bene abandoned; its flowers wilt and their scent is no more. Later it is demolished , with a money-grubbing apartment building projected to take its place. Although the fictitious house of jasmine is razed, the novel of that name stands as a love letter to the ancient city of Alexandria and its beauties. However, the novel’s main focus is political. It is an effective, if occasionally tendentious, condemnation of Sadat’s Egypt (but did Shagara really think “The government has certainly been wrong to raise the prices of so many products. All these masses can’t be wrong” when caught up in the riots of January 1977?). The translator’s afterword, written before the electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood, optimistically compares 1977 with Tahrir Square and the fall of Mubarak, and hopes for a better future for “these masses.” M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley Marie NDiaye. Three Strong Women. John Fletcher, tr. London. MacLehose Press. 2012. isbn 9780857050564 With Three Strong Women, Marie NDiaye became the first black woman to win the Prix Goncourt. This intricately structured, subtle, and lyrical novel constitutes a tapestry of delicate threads connecting France and Senegal. Yet while implicitly addressing issues common to postcolonial and diasporic works, it foregrounds instead the inner suffering of its protagonists, capturing their deeply bruised humanity. The novel’s three sections unspool nonlinearly, within the...
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