I got this one off BookMooch. Some years back my book club read Broken Verses by Shamsie and I like it so much that I mooched this and Kartography which she also wrote.
Salt and Saffron is the story of an aristocratic nawab family in Pakistan. It is told by Aliya, the daughter who is educated in America. Aliya has learned her craft of story telling from her family. On her flight back to Pakistan Aliya meets a young man, Khaleel, born and raised in the poorer side of Karachi. The encounter leads her to question the class values that she is raised with. Her search takes her through a number of family secrets and legends. The legend of "not quite twins", the curse associated with it, the mysterious Mariam Apa who never speaks, the family tree chart with a star marking Aliya and Mariam as spiritual twins, and Aliya's interpretation of the parallels between their lives, lends the story its intrigue. Many of the stories are passed on from generation to generation orally, so no historical proof of any event can be found. Yet the stories do have powerful influence on the lives of the descendents as they are reinforced through the generations, keeping people trapped in the legends and curses. Aliya's only escape from the curse and the social division that separates her and Khaleel is to do some soul-searching, coming to an understanding of her family history and her position within it, and thereby discovering her own identity.
I loved this book; I'm looking forward to reading Kartography.
Sometimes I choose to read things because I should. This is the case with Night. Elie Wiesel is well known for many things (Nobel Prize for Peace 1986 for example) and I had heard that Night is a must-read novella based on his experiences as a holocaust survivor. Although it is the 'typical' holocaust story somehow it feels more potent because it is based on his own life and could be anyone's, even mine if circumstances were different.
Eliezer was 15 (as was Wiesel in the picture to the right, just before he was taken) when he was loaded into a train car. Upon Eliezer's arrival in Birkenau he was separated from his mother and sisters, never to see them again. He manages to stay with his father until the physical tortures of their existence (including a long cold trek on foot in the snow to Auschwitz without food or shoes) kill his father. The agonies continue until the Americans liberate his camp. In Wiesel's life his father also becomes very ill due to camp conditions but actually dies in the crematorium, two months before the camp is liberated.
This is not easy reading, but it's necessary reading. I am no longer naive to think that merely reading about history will prevent us from repeating it, and yet I feel that it's everyone's responsibility to know what has happened. Certainly this story put another human face (The Diary of Anne Frank) on the problem.
The first book I read by Thrity Umrigar was The Space Between Us and I loved it so much I couldn't wait to read this. I did like this but I like Space better, maybe because Space takes place in India and this story takes place in the US.
The main character is Tehmina "Tammy" Sethna, a recent Parsi widow who has landed in suburban Cleveland because her beloved and very successful son (Sorab) settled there with his American wife (Susan) after finishing college. For decades she relied on her gregarious and decisive husband Rustom; now that she has lost him and left their Bombay home she feels more hesitant and ambivalent about everything. Although Sorab and Susan (who is really snobby and irritating) try to make her feel at home she gets on their nerves. And although her grandson adores her he is an American child with our culture's casual indifference towards societal elders. There comes a point where Tammy must decided whether to return to her noisy, crowded home in Bombay where everything is familiar, or stay with her son in an uneasy and uncomfortable guest status.
What awakens the dragon in Tammy is the cruelty and abuse she sees going on next door, where the owner's trashy sister-in-law mistreats her two young sons past the point of Tammy's ability to turn the other way. On Christmas Eve she takes matters into her own hands, leaps the tall suburban fence between the two houses and rescues the children from their sad situation. This turns out to be a transformative moment in Tammy's American life. She has not only asserted herself without her husband's endorsement but realizes her own strengths and capacities that allow her to see her life here and make her very much want to stay in the US after all.
This was on my BookMooch wishlist for a long time and I finally got a copy. I'm always looking for novels that take place in Iran that don't have anything to do with politics and being thrown in jail. After reading this book I will never again look at our Persian rugs in quite the same way.
This was a lush adventure into 17th century Iran (in the legendary time of Shah Abbas The Great) where a strong-willed 14 year old village girl with carpet weaving skills dreams of getting married and growing fat from easy access to gastronomic delights and having servants to do all the work. The death of her father changes everything and rather than starve, the protagonist (we never learn her name) and her mother travel to bustling Isfahan to live with a distant uncle. There she matures both physically and in her skills as a carpet maker at a time when women didn't work unless poverty demanded it.
Amirrezvani does a great job of portraying the lives of carpet makers, both the well established ones as well as the strugglers like the narrator. We get a peek into how designs are decided upon, how the perfect wool or silk is chosen and how the right colors are mixed and matched to create the softest and most delicate rug. (This makes me look at our Persian rugs with more appreciation and wonder.) While the designers agonize over color swatches and fiber quality down to the thread, the actual weavers (including the narrator) suffer from different problems:
“I had heard stories about women who became deformed by long hours of sitting at the loom, so that when they tried to deliver a child, their bones formed a prison, locking the baby inside…Even the youngest knitters suffered aching backs, bent limbs, tired fingers, exhausted eyes. All our labors were in the service of beauty, but sometimes it seemed as if every thread in a carpet had been dipped in the blood of flowers.” (thus the book's title)
But our protagonist is clever and seeks a better life than the harsh one she is offered. Although she manages to learn how to please her husband through sigeh, the situation becomes intolerable when he takes her wealthy friend as a 'proper' wife and rather than sacrifice a long-standing friendship she decides to walk away from the relationship. Banished from the uncle's home, she and her mother fall further and further into poverty and eventually create a new 'family' with friends in an impoverished part of the town. Our young carpet weaver expends great effort to develop into the artisan she believes she can become in the belief that she will then be able to assure a decent life for herself and her mother. The strictures of life for women of strict Muslim cultures are well-known, but the author's goal does not seem so much to point out the unfairness of the culture as to paint a portrait of a memorable and believable individual who learns how to prosper within these strictures
Amirrezvani also incorporates story telling within narrative, with each story beginning with, “First there wasn’t and then there was. Before God, no one was.” This is the equivalent of “once upon a time” in English. Not only do we learn about one of Iran’s most famous products but also about one of its traditions, which is telling a story within a story. The seven folk tales woven into the main story pay homage to the traditional folk storytellers throughout many cultures. The author's rich descriptive detail, each word like a tiny knot in a finely crafted rug, and her knack for good storytelling transported me to an ancient and exotic Iran. I really enjoyed this book.
I received this book from Gabriel and Shirin for my birthday. It was the perfect "car book" for me to read aloud to Saeed on trips back and forth from Athens since Sacks' topic (the brain) is Saeed's area of interest.
In The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. The Mind's Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person's eyes, or another person's mind. Sack's himself goes blind in one eye due to cancer and includes his story along with the other narratives. Very interesting but unsuitable reading for anyone without an appreciation for science and research.
OK that's it for now other than to mention that I've recently finished listening to Alan Dershowitz's America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation and am currently listening to Columbine by Dave Cullen. I have also started reading a new book but will blog about that when I'm done with it; it's long, so it may be a while. You get a break!
2 comments:
Here is our new "car reading" book: Saved by beauty: Adventures of a romantic in Iran, by roger Housden. How about it?
Absolutely!
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