Brazil - Near to the Wild Heart/The Chandelier

Country: Brazil       
Book: Near to the Wild Heart/The Chandelier
Author: Clarice Lispector
Publication Year: 1943/1946
Genre: Fiction

Brazil, it is no exaggeration to say, is big.Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Brazil. Listen..

That’s enough of that. There’s simply no time for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy parodies (FYI: there’s always time for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy parodies).

The point is that Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world and the seventh largest by population and has produced a lot of writers over its two hundred year history. As a result, this profile will do no more than scratch the surface. No. Not even that. Not so much. As with so many other nations, I will return and do a deeper dive into Brazilian literature at a later date.

For now, I chose the first couple of novels by Clarice Lispector: Near to the Wild Heart and The Chandelier.

As I might have mentioned before, I am a nerdy James Joyce fan (I can recite the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake from memory) and so any book that takes its title from a Joyce quote is bound to pique my interest. Near to the Wild Heart opens with the relevant passage from A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man:

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.

Lispector wrote the two hundred page novel in under nine months when she was only 22. She added the title and epigraph only once the book was written and she actually read Joyce for the first time.

Mainly because of the title, the book was described as ‘Joycean’ by literary critics, which irritated Lispector. She has a point. There is very little that is actually Joycean in Near to the Wild Heart. The opening passages contain perhaps some of the same ill-formed childish thought patterns of Portrait, but Lispector’s prose is nowhere near as stylised as Joyce’s (which is either a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view).

Compare:

Her father’s typewriter went clack-clack . . . clack-clack-clack . . . The clock awoke in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzzz. What did the wardrobe say? clothes-clothes-clothes. – Near to the Wild Heart

With:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Similar, but idiosyncratic to each author (although both bildungsroman do begin in sharp focus on the father figure of Joana and Stephen  Daedalus respectively).. Lispector employs a similar kind of stream of conscious writing made famous by Joyce’s Ulysses, but Lispector would appear to owe more to the French stream of conscious writers who inspired Joyce than Joyce himself. Not to mention the likes of Burroughs, Faulkner and Woolf.

Perhaps the greatest influence on Lispector’s early style was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Born in Ukraine in the years following the Russian Revolution, she could hardly escape his influence, even after her Jewish parents fled to Brazil after the latest round of pogroms against its Jewish citizens (regimes come and go but anti-Semitism is seemingly eternal).

To be fair, though, none of us can truly escape the influence of Dostoyevsky. To read him is to be changed in a way few other writers ever manage. There are few authors in the world worthy of the name that have not been influenced by Dostoyevsky, consciously or not.

A criticism made (see Benjamin Moser’s introduction to the New Directions edition: Hurricane Clarice) was that Near to the Wild Heart was compared to novels by European writers, but to very few Brazilian ones.

Yet one feature of novels made up of so much of a character’s inner life and inner monologue (while being written for the most part in the third person) is that little of the outer world penetrates. Near to the Wild Heart could be set in any city in Europe or any city in the world with little affect on the overall structure. Joana rebels, grows up, gets married, and leaves her husband, but the action could be happening in Madrid, LA or Katmandu for all the difference it would make.

By the time Lispector wrote The Chandelier, this was already changing and her second novel feels much more like a Brazilian centric novel. Though perhaps less accomplished than her first book (second novel syndrome), it is definitely a step in the right direction. 

The Chandelier is somewhat derivate of Near to the Wild Heart, stretching the same narrative flourishes almost to breaking point (translator, Benjamin Moser, called it, “perhaps her strangest and most difficult book.”). Yet The Chandelier’s protagonist, Virgínia, feels much more like a citizen of Brazil.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lispector completed The Chandelier while living in Naples. Like Joyce, writers often have to leave their home in order to write about home. Though unlike Joyce, Lispector returned to Brazil after 15 years of living in Europe and the USA and remained there for the rest of her life.

Likesay, this profile does little more than scratch the surface of Brazilian literature (and we didn’t even break the skin). Even Lispector’s bibliography has barely been entered into.

In referring to my well thumbed, pencil ticked copy of 1001 Books You Must Read  Before You Die (must read, don’t you know), there are two more Lispector novels in that somewhat arbitrary list, The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star. We will consider then when we return to South America’s most populous nation, along with such writers as Machado De Assis, Ana Paula Maia and Veronica Stigger.

Clarice Lispector

 

Eritrea - The Consequences of Love/ Silence is My Mother Tongue

Country: Eritrea      
Book: The Consequences of Love/ Silence is My Mother Tongue
Author: Sulaiman Addonia
Publication Year: 2008/2018
Genre: Fiction

The Consequences of Love is not Girls of Riyadh. Yet as discussed in the previous entry (see: Saudi Arabia), the two novels are not mutually exclusive, despite PR copy declaring The Consequences of Love “a corrective to Rajaa Alsanea’s recent novel Girls of Riyadh.” It is not a corrective, but rather a different window from which to observe Saudi Arabian society.

Which isn’t to say The Consequences of Love isn’t altogether the bleaker of the two novels. Stonings and public beheadings. Sexual exploitation and child abuse. Repression and authoritarian control. All are depicted in uncompromising detail in Sulaiman Addonia’s debut novel.

Addonia was born in Eritrea and spent much of his early life living in refugees camp in Sudan. We’ll return to this period of his live when considering Silence is My Mother Tongue. Like Nasser, the first person narrator of The Consequences of Love, Addonia and his brother relocated to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where his mother had previously gone to find work. Much of what he experienced and saw there informs the book’s narrative.

The main through line of the novel is the blossoming romance between Nasser and Fiore, a woman in full burqa, identifiable to him only by the bright pinks shoes she wears.

The near total repression of women in Saudi Arabia means the pair can only communicate in letters Fiore drops at Nasser’s feet. Later Nasser finds himself employed as a assistant to a blind Iman in order to use his bag as a dead letter drop. But love, like life, finds a way and the lovers are soon able to meet in secret and consummate their relationship.

Yet against this scene of young love is a cavalcade of the bad actors you find in most fiction. The restaurateur and fellow refugee who pimps Nasser out to his male customers. The religious policeman who likewise pursues Nasser for sexual favours.

I don’t know. It’s almost as if you effectively ‘disappear’ women from a society, male sexual desire persists and they instead turn to boys and young men. See also, classical Athenian society, all prisons and the Roman Catholic Church.

The euphoria of first love cannot last, especially in anywhere as repressive as Saudi Arabia, and the final act of the novel plays out in brutality, damnation and the slight, unresolved hope of redemption. As with Atiq Rahimi’s A Curse on Dostoyevsky (see: Afghanistan), there is more than a hint of Dostoyevsky in The Consequences of Love’s final chapters.

Many of these same themes play out in Addonia’s second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue, published ten years later in 2018. Societal repression of woman. Sexual abuse. More consensual forms that ‘dare not speak their name’ as the thankfully and increasingly obsolete phrase goes.

Here we are firmly rooted in the refugee camps of Sudan. Camps that have existed for long enough that individual family plots have been fenced in and become compounds.

Saba, the novel’s protagonist, is subject to the same pressures and conventions brought to bear on women whenever we have turn to with fiction and non-fiction located in Africa and the Middle East. Accusations of impropriety. Arranged marriage. FGM.

Saba is strong willed and able resist tradition and societal norms far longer than her contemporaries. Yet as the novel opens, she is on trial for allegedly sleeping with her brother, who has come to live with her and her new husband. The truth is far more complicated.

From there, the story moves back in time, as told by Jamal. He has grown up in the camps with Saba (a thinly disguised avatar for Addonia himself) and made his own cinema in the camp. Although the cinema is little more than a pinned up white sheet, behind which people perform in silhouette. The cinema also doubles as a court house, as in the trial of Saba.

By turns, the book rearrives at the time and place in which it started, moving beyond that starting place. As with The Consequences of Love, the characters of Silence is My Mother Tongue exist in a liminal state, which is ether Limbo (the inert first circle of Dante’s Inferno) or Purgatory, where redemption can only be achieved after unending suffering over millennia. And only then by finding a way off the island.

Unlike Dante’s afterlife, there is no way up for Addonia’s characters to the plateau occupied by Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh. For Nasser, for Saba, for most people in the world, the only allowable direction of travel is sideways. Which isn’t much, but it might at least mean they end up somewhere where filth isn’t raining down from above with the same level of intensity.

No one chooses to be a refugee. No one puts their family in a dinghy and risks a treacherous channel of water unless they have little or no choice. Even the Saxon, Angles and Jutes that came to England, forcing the Britons out in the process, were refugees. But there is a certain connotative dissonance found throughout the world, where the previous groups of migrants to a country denounce the next group, using the same dehumanising language in the process.

Sulaiman Addonia became a UK citizen in 2000, ten years after being granted indefinite leave to remain. “Home. “ he said in a 2016 interview with Eritrean Lowland League, “is just a thing that got taken away. At least that’s my experience of it.”

Addonia’s mother eventually returned to Eritrea. Which raises a question we previously discussed: What is a country? Eritrea was once part Ethiopia and didn’t become an independent state until 1991, the year after Addonia and his brother arrived in the UK. Nations rise and fall. South Sudan was the last nation to be recognised by the UN in 2011. It will be miraculous if the same number of countries exist at the end of this project as there were at the start.

Independent nationhood doesn’t guarantee peace. Relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia have remained tense since Eritrea gained independence. The Tigray War, which lasted between 2020 and 2022, killed hundreds of thousands of people (estimates vary wildly from 150,000-600,000), creating a new humanitarian crisis in the process. All of which led to more refugees fleeing to Sudan, which itself suffered a military coup in 2023, leading to more violence, like throwing grenades into the path of people fleeing a fire.

The Consequences of Love is a towering achievement and might be the best book I’ve read during this project. It’s up there with Black Rain Falling (see: Grenada) and Human Acts (see: South Korea). Silence is My Mother Tongue isn’t quite as good, but still compelling and well written. To be honest, though, I would rather live in a world where such books are no longer necessary, except as historical documents to remind humanity of how far it has come. Sadly, we have a long way to go to reach that point in our evolution. 

Sulaiman Addonia

 

Saudi Arabia - Girls of Riyadh

Country: Saudi Arabia      
Book: Girls of Riyadh (بنات الرياض)
Author: Rajaa Alsanea, Marilyn Booth (Translator)
Publication Year: 2005 (2007)
Genre: Fiction

The next couple of country profiles in this series, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea, are thematically linked. Two of the next three books we look at are connected by their depictions of love and life in Saudi Arabia for people from disparate backgrounds.

When we come to look at Eritrea (see Eritrea), we will see how poor immigrants living in the hardline Islamic country survive. First though, we take a rose tinted look at the love lives of women born in Saudi Arabia to prosperous and influential families.

Upon its release in 2005, Girls of Riyadh took flak from both sides of the political and religious divide. Hailed as the Sex and the City of Saudi Arabia, hardliners inevitably found in it the loose morals and corrupting influence of western life.

I haven’t read Candace Bushnell’s original Sex and the City novel, but having seen at least some of the TV adaptation, Girls of Riyadh is hardly so graphic. Indeed, it is entirely sexless. It plays out more like a Jane Austin novel than the tale of debauchery some levelled at it. Even the melodrama of the Bronte sisters’ best novels contain more eroticism (which is still to say almost none).

The Girls of Riyadh is written in the form of an email send out every week to its subscribers, in which the anonymous writer recounts the love lives of her four friends.

These lives are hardly reminiscent of Disney fairytale princesses. One is betrothed to be married, then the man calls off the wedding, leaving a large stigma attached to the jilted woman . Another is married and with child when she discovers her husband has a mistress. She confronts the other woman and is beaten by her husband when she refuses to apologises to his lover.

In the other camp critical of Girls of Riyadh were those denouncing it as a piece of romantic fluff that features the privileged rich girls of Saudi high society who are free to visit, live and even study abroad, unlike the vast majority of women (or indeed people) in the kingdom.

And yes, Girls of Riyadh is a sanitised view of Saudi society, entirely free of scenes of public stonings or beheadings, unlike Sulaiman Addonia’s The Consequences of Love (see: Eritrea). Yet this is perhaps the more egregious of the two sorts of criticism levelled at the book.

The criticisms of hardliners were reactionary, but hardly surprising. On the other hand, to criticise the book for opening a window onto the upper echelons of Saudi society is ridiculous. Why shouldn’t we see life as it is lived at every plateau of soceity? How can we assess a culture without seeing it from its multiple levels?

Moreover, it isn’t like Saudi Arabia is terribly different from other countries in the world, especially in the west. To live in the UK, a country with perhaps the most corrupt government in living memory, where the ruling party gives untendered contracts to party donors while vilifying the poor and asylum seekers, is to be reminded that the rot of hypocrisy is in the root and branch of all countries.

Money and power make people crazy. Their infection sickens them and they govern in (un)kind. Those at the bottom of society are expected to stick to the rules and adhere to standards for which those at the top are never to be held. We see this wherever those claiming benefits are demonised by politicians who claim thousands in expenses from the public purse: Where religious scripture is the literal truth and applied rigorously until it requires anything of those imposing it, at which point it becomes open to interpretation: or Where women are put to death for committing adultery, but the men they sleep with are treated leniently, as if the men were the ones without the power refuse, rather than forcing themselves on any woman they desire.

We can also hardly talk about Saudi Arabia from a western perspective without talking about the hypocrisy and double standards of western countries when dealing with hardline, repressive countries. Oil is money and the Arabian peninsula has plenty of it. Therefore, all of the usual standards we apply to other countries (Iran, North Korea, Russia et. al.) are declared null and void. We can, rightly, denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and fly Ukrainian flags at our sporting events. But we must never do the same or even talk about Saudi Arabia’s proxy war in Yemen, which has killed an estimated 377,000 people since 2014, because that is a war armed, financed and supported by the vast majority of western countries, including the UK and USA.

As such, it is hardly surprising that native Saudi Arabian families with money live a different kind of live from those in the lower echelons of Saudi society. But the point of Girls of Riyadh is that even rich young women growing up in the country are still treated as second class citizens, bought and sold by the men who oversee them. That it is regarded as some kind of revolutionary act to suggest that women in Saudi Arabia might have the same kind of romantic dreams as women the world over is damming. That the year is 2024 and yet in many parts of the world, including large sections of the supposed civilised west, it might as well be 1224.

At the end of the day, Girls of Riyadh is what it is. It’s not the greatest novel ever written. If it had been written in most western countries, I’m sure it would have been dismissed as a typical piece of  ‘chick lit’ and disappeared beneath the weight and white noise of a thousand similar books published each year.

As it is, Girls of Riyadh is a revelation exactly because of where it is set and by whom it was written. It is disingenuous to devalue any book written by the repressed, because each liberated voice is one more breath blowing in the winds of change.

Girls of Riyadh shouldn’t be treated in isolation, but as part of a matrix mapping the mechanics of love in present day Saudi Arabia. We shall add to that matrix when we turn to Sulaiman Addonia and a very different sort of tale of love in Saudi Arabia and in the refugee camps of Eritrea. 

Rajaa Alsanea

 

Turkey - The Forty Rules of Love/The Essential Rumi

Country: Turkey     
Book: The Forty Rules of Love
Author: Elif Shafak
Publication Year: 2009
Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction

Country: Turkey     
Book: The Essential Rumi
Author: Rumi (translator: Coleman Barks)
Publication Year: 1273 (1997)
Genre: Poetry

Today’s books spans time and space from Turkey in the 13^th century to modern day Massachusetts. Ella Rubenstein starts working as a reader for a literary agent. The first manuscript she is given is for a book called, Sweet Blasphemy, a historical novel about the friendship between the Turkish poet, Rumi, and his mentor, Shams of Tabriz.

The novel plays out as a ballet between the text of the manuscript (the novel within the novel) and the slow unravelling of Rubenstein’s home life. She contacts the author, Aziz Zahara, a Scottish born photographer and Sufi, resulting in a burgeoning relationship between the two.

The main plot reminds me of something Margaret Atwood would write (The Blind Assassin is the novel that springs to mind) combined with something by Nora Ephron (Heartburn is the only book I can think of as it’s the only one of hers I have so far read). Yet as we largely travel these roads for the countries from which they come and tell us about, the main focus in this entry is Zahara’s novel and the life of Rumi.

Indeed, when I had finished reading the novel, I found a short collection of Rumi’s poetry and read through it in the course of an evening, though admittedly not in any great depth. Of course we have to judge it based on the time in which it was written, but it is easy to see why Rumi’s work is still in print today.

At times his aphorismic verses are like something you would expect to find in The Little Book of Calm, or similar collections of inspirational quotes (I’m sure Rumi features heavily in such stocking filler books). But there is clearly much lost in translation. Poetry is arguably the hardest of all literary forms to translate faithfully into other languages.

The sort of thing posted by 'that' friend (we all have one).

We are dealing here with Turkey, but Rumi was actually born in modern day Afghanistan to Persian parents (he wrote mostly in Persian). His family moved to Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan when he was about five. However, he spent most of his life in Konya, a city in Central Anatolia in the Asian part of Turkey. He worked as a teacher and a jurist until, in his late 30s, he met Shams of Tabriz, who transformed his life and turned him into the poet we remember today.

Shams was also a Persian and a poet. Tradition has it that Shams instructed Rumi for forty straight days before fleeing to Damascus. Though as with any event that happened in the mists of time, there are any number of stories about the friendship between the two, including the idea that Shams was ultimately murdered by those who thought he was too close to Rumi and even suggestions of a physical relationship between the two men. Such prurient gossip is found in all ages of mankind.

This is then is the background against which Sweet Blasphemy is set. It is told by multiple narrators, including Rumi and Shams, as well as Rumi’s wife, sons and daughters. The mythology surrounded the relationship of the two men is spun for all its worth and many, though not all, of the most outlandish stories, rumours and outright fables are given their due.

The normal difficulties reviewing a book are exacerbated when there is a book within a book. We can never be sure what characterises the author’s beliefs and what is that of the characters and the author within the author. Even with a surface level novel, we must bear in mind what Sir Author Conn Doyle wrote in his poem, To an Undiscerning Critic:

Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?

That said, if there is one criticism of either Shafak, or more likely Zahara, it is that Rumi is shown to have never drunk wine in his life, in line with the general Islamic ban on the drinking of alcohol. Yet even in a cursory reading of Rumi’s poetry one can find many references to the drinking of wine, its deleterious effects and even the pain of waking up with a hangover.

The Tales of the Arabian Nights, which contains stories told over many centuries across the Middle East (although most of the ones we know in the west were written by Europeans in homage to their form), feature frequent tales of drunken debauchery. The prohibition on alcohol seems to have been only liberally enforced during much of the Middle Ages. And as we have seen in A Curse on Dostoyevsky (see Afghanistan), even the Mujahideen were tolerant of its consumption.

It’s a minor criticism and isn’t even really a criticism, given that the author of Sweet Blasphemy is a convert to Islam and his positive portrayal of Rumi is understandable within the confines of the novel. There is much else in the enclosed novel that is fanciful, but there are very few novels about which one cannot say the same.

Every chapter of The Forty Rules of Love begins with a word beginning with the letter 'b'. The book is written in English, but this done in reference to the Arabic word, Bismillah. which begins the phrase, Bismillah ir Rehman ir Rahim (In the name of Allah, the most Beneficent and the most Merciful). It is one of the most important phrases in Islam, repeated before many actions and activities, especially prayer, and appears at the beginning of all but one surah in the Koran.

I am in no way qualified to opine on the significance of beginning each sentence with a ‘b’ word, but the Arabic form of the letters apparently contains a dot, considered within Sufi thoughtto represent the universe. Given Aziz Zahara is a Sufi in the novel and Rumi himself practiced Sufism for many years, the choice of each first word seems to unite the two narratives.

I suppose it also connects the story back to Islam. Although to make this truly work, the ninth chapter would need to start with a different letter, as that is the only surah in the Koran that does not begin with Bismillah ir Rehman ir Rahim. I’m very much nitpicking at this point (it’s the Joycean in me). The overall effect is impressive. Like poets who write tautograms: poems containing word that start with the same letter of the alphabet.

Anyway, it’s a satisfying novel with an ambiguous ending (the best kind). It is one of a number of novels I have recently read told by multiple narrators (see also: Trumpet by Scottish writer, Jackie Kay, which is excellent). Shafak is another writer to whom I will definitely return beyond this project..

Elif Shafak