Category Archives: Literature

The Long Way Home

Bethany Beach Aerial.JPG

Yesterday I finally arrived home to Maryland/Washington, DC. For some reason the eight hour flight seemed longer than usual — and I was taking a direct flight from Madrid for the first time in six years. One thing that I found interesting while looking at those maps they show on the screen on the flight was just how immense the world was. I was about two hours out over the Altantic and the map was showing cities like Paris, Madrid, Santiago, Rabat, and others. The couple sitting next to me where Indians who had emigrated to the US about 10 years ago and had three very nice boys. Two rows ahead of me was my co-worker Gon’s sister and two daughters. I was thinking about how rich the world was with such diversity of people and places.

Anyways, I arrived home saw my father, cleaned up a little, and about one hour later left to Bethany Beach with my mom where her youngest son and his girlfriend were waiting for us. As when I am always about to go home, I go onto Amazon and buy all of those books I have trouble locating in Europe and all of the music I can’t find on iTunes. So when I arrived yesterday afternoon, I found the following books and music waiting for me, which I put in my bag and set out for the beach: Continue reading

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Filed under Digressions, Friends / Family, Jazz, Literature

My Name is a Masterpiece

My Name is Red

I just finally finished My Name is Red, and Orhan Pamuk has created a true masterpiece. I don’t even know where to begin. This doesn’t mean that I necessarily recommend the book. Although it is only about 400 pages long, it is dense, often times too slow and over descriptive on the history of Persian and Ottoman art. Nevertheless, I am in awe of Pamuk’s endless creativity and insight.

As alluded to in my previous post about the book, Pamuk has created a multilayer story that appears to be a murder mystery, but which in reality, is an in depth analysis of the role of the artist, the meaning and purpose of art, the paradoxes of Islamic art, and the Islamic world’s struggle to accept the inevitable influence of the West in 16th Century Istanbul. In this sense, Continue reading

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Filed under Essays, Friends / Family, Literature

My Name is Red

Pamuk My Name is Red.jpg

I first started reading My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk in 2004 while on vacation en solitario in Fuerteventura. My friend, Waya, recommended it to me and said that it was an amazing story that I would love. After reading and re-reading the first thirty pages, I gave up. I just couldn’t follow the story, and it made me feel like a countrified ass cornfed half wit. Then I started to notice that a lot of other people had the same experience with Pamuk’s novels, so I felt a little better about myself and began to quietly boycott his works.

Last week I was browsing my bookshelf with William (ironically Waya’s bro), and we came across My Name is Red. When I mentioned that I couldn’t get into it, he was completely relieved. His girlfriend made fun of him because he couldn’t get through it either. Did that mean that she was also laughing indirectly at me, calling me a chickenhead? So I decided to give it another go. Continue reading

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A Woman’s Body

I just finished Sardines by Nuruddin Farah, from his trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. The last book I read of his was From a Crooked Rib and had written a post, Desire and Temptation, about how different cultures viewed temptation and who was to blame. In that post, I discussed how the tradition of women having to cover their bodies depicted women as being so tempting that men could not resist the very sight of them.

Well, I just came across these lines in Sardines where a mother is looking at her daughter’s body and says, Continue reading

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Filed under Digressions, Essays, Literature

Half of Lost

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I have gotten myself into a bit of a bind. On Friday night, I started to read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and continued reading most of Saturday. The novel is set in 1960s Nigeria and during and in the period leading up to the Biafran War, something that I knew almost nothing about.

On Sunday, though, I woke up a little later than normal and was frustrated to find out that my TV (which I almost never watch) was not working. This was due to the fact that I am much less of a geek than one would think from my New Set Up, and I had inadvertently unplugged my TV set and DVD player. So what did I do? I dug up the first season of Lost that my brother had given me months ago and decided to watch one episode (on my laptop), and the next thing I knew, I had a major problem on my hands. Continue reading

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Tuareg

Tuareg.jpg

I just finished one of the most engaging novels that I have read all year, called Tuareg by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa. Nevertheless, I fell into an error that I have recently been committing quite often. Continue reading

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The Yacoubian Building

I look out my window and I see people huddled inside a bar, with others looking through its window. There are maybe 15 minutes left in the match, and Real Madrid is losing at home 0-1 to Mallorca. If they don’t score two goals, they lose the lead and hand the title over to Barcelona.

But instead of getting involved (I am weak hearted), I have decided to finish The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, but I must admit that if you are truly interested in modern Egypt, then you really must read the larger Cairo Triology by the great, late Naguib Mahfouz (or even Midaq Alley). Al Aswany’s story is really nothing more than putting Mahfouz’s triology into the present. Continue reading

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Filed under Digressions, Literature, Living la vida española

Not Books Again

Books June 2007.jpg

Not another post about books! At least it’s not another one about the rain (everyone loves the sushine). I am finally trying to be a little bit more “reasonable” about my purchases, but I just saw that Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, After Dark, has finally come out in English. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but I already have a pretty long line of books on deck to finish before going on another book buying rampage. But, it’s Murakami, probably my favorite writer. So, I decided to order the book anyways, and because I hate to waste the effort on Amazon with only one purchase, I added Paul Bowles’ Let it Come Down to the list. Continue reading

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The False Love of the Poets

Choukri Streetwise.JPG

For the past year of so, I have been playing with a certain notion. I had almost forgotten about it until I had read the following passage from Streetwise, the second part in Mohamed Choukri’s autobiography. Streetwise is, by the way, horribly translated from Arabic to English in the edition I am reading, not that I am one to judge — I can only count from wahid to tissa wa tissaoune.

Café Central: 25.9.1961

The woman that I choose to live with for life will only be the right woman for me if she can keep me from going with other women. She must be all women to me. No other woman will have what she has. I’ll be able to pick her out in dark. When the candles go out, each of us will light the other. Even if they cover us with a veil of darkness, I shall see her and she will see me. I have still not found the ideal woman, for she will be a woman of extraordinary light, a woman of transparency.

Poets like to talk and write about love, but if my suspensions are correct, they actually fail miserably or, at best, are incredibly limited in their ability to love. When it comes to love, they are a superficial, shallow lot. Continue reading

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In a Free State

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Last night I finished In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I had previously read A House for Mr. Biswas and A Bend in the River. In a Free State is really three novellas dealing with individuals who have all left their homelands in search of some form of freedom (all for various different reasons) and have eventually found themselves even further lost than before. Continue reading

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