In December, we will be reading The Map of Love by Soueif.
Please post your comments and questions in this thread.
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In December, we will be reading The Map of Love by Soueif.
Please post your comments and questions in this thread.
Oh cant wait! going to go buy it this week. still working on God of small things. :)
I've bought it... it's a tad big though!
Should be a good read anyway - if anyone's interested The Guardian newspaper in the UK is running a piece on this book on Saturday.
Oblivion, I have been meaning to post and thank you for alerting me to the Guardian article. For those of you who have not read it: It is Soueif's account of how she came to structure the book as she did, and what she hoped to achieve by writing it. Excellent companion piece to the book itself. I have finished the book, and the article gave me some insights into why I responded to it as I did.
Quote:
Originally Posted by oblivion252
It's a thick volume but it's a fast enough read. I'm right about halfway done. I hope there will be a discussion here, I think it would be interesting. I'm glad that it comes in the heels of The God of Small Things (our choice for November) .... it could be worthwhile to compare the two books. Well anyway, discussion or no discussion, I'm going ahead with reading this book .... because I'll be going to Egypt in January. :):thumbs_up
I thought the point of the forum was for there to be a discussion.
I'm having someone order this for me for Christmas, so I'm hoping to get it read before the start of January.
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Originally Posted by Paige19
Paige -
You are right but you know how sometimes things do not fulfill their function, like when a library book never gets borrowed or like the shirt that one buys but never gets around to wearing! Check out the thread for Murder in the Cathedral (book for Halloween '08), for example. But who knows, a discussion still might materialize, perhaps tomorrow or next week or months from now....
I myself have just finished reading The Map of Love. I did not expect the story to be so blatantly romantic and so charged with political facts and commentary.
Well, bouquin, that sounds like the start of a discussion to me. I expected the romance, but I did not expect it to be so generic. The political facts and commentary are, I suspect, what got this book on the Booker list to begin with. When you say "charged with political facts and commentary," do you mean this as a negative?
I'm only about 50 pages in (started yesterday) and it's ok. As bouqin says the romance is terribly obvious and if it doesn't improve much over the next 100 pages, I'm giving up!
I'll be interested to see whether you find it worth going on, oblivion. I did get all the way through, but was frankly surprised by the book's lack of complexity (in terms of character development) and the heavy reliance on historical events to move the story along. Maybe others did not feel this way.
Both romances, I thought, were very undeveloped.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Paige19
I could not help suspecting that Soueif used this novel as a platform from which to air her political views. But then I also say, why not? authors usually express in their works their own personal views, the experiences they have actually lived through. But somehow Soueif's representation seems overly lop-sided. There's one side that's the image of everything that's noble and intellectual, only that it is suffering from oppression. While the opposing side is greedy, mean, unjust, etc. It's too black & white, almost fairytale-like. Also, there is not an ounce of self-derision and the absence of that in a story always makes me doubtful.
I thought a lot about the political views expressed in this novel. Not so much the "historic" views. The events that took place in the Anna story - the British occupation of Egypt - were not specifically familiar to me as I do not know much about Egypt's history, but they were generally familiar because they were pretty much in line with what I do know of British imperialism of that time. I was much more interested and surprised by the sentiments expressed by those characters in the contemporary story. Yes, I think Souief intended the book as a platform for those views, but I suppose if they are the views held by a large number of Egyptians (I have no way of knowing if hers is indeed the majority view), then it's fair that she do that. As I say, I was surprised by what I read, and perhaps it is important that I know that this is how America is viewed.
In fact, this aspect of the book - the portrayal of the contemporary political climate in Egypt - was the thing I found most interesting. The contemporary romance was just as boring as the historic one (more beautiful people falling in love at first sight with no attempt at character development), with the exception of that one plot twist (I won't say what it is so as not to be a spoiler for others) regarding Omar's possible relationship to Isabelle, which I found, frankly, bizarre (as well as ridiculously improbable; how much co-incidence were we going to be asked to swallow here?). Why take the story in that direction? And if you are going to take it there, why then dismiss it so quickly and without resolution?
And I'm just curious - did anyone find the writing itself particularly good?
So far I've got to say the writing isn't exactly amazing.
It seems, as someone mentioned earlier, that the novel only reached the Booker nominations because of its political messages, not because of the book in itself.