Monthly Archives: September 2007

What a pleasure this book was to read. Many thanks to Emily for giving me a copy for my birthday!

Palace Walk by Naguib Mafouz is a long, sprawling saga about a family in Cairo who finds itself caught up in political turmoil at the end of World War I. The earlier sections of the novel are devoted to describing the family — a father and mother with five children — and its dynamics. As I’ve described before, the father, Al-Sayyid Ahmad, has an extremely tight hold over the rest of the family; he dictates what everyone does and where they go.

This is particularly hard on the women, as Al-Sayyid Ahmad insists they follow extremely strict traditional rules of modesty — the mother, Amina, is not allowed out on the streets at all, except for a very occasional visit to her mother. In one incident when Al-Sayyid Ahmad is away from home for a day, Amina breaks this rule and visits a local temple. It is an act of devotion, but it only lands her in trouble: out on the streets she gets hit by a car and when Al-Sayyid Ahmad discovers her injuries and finds out where she has been, he banishes her from the house. Only after his children and friends beg him to take her back does he allow her to return.

The novel describes the struggles each of the children have with this patriarchal authority; one son wants to marry, but Al-Sayyid Ahmad believes he is not ready and refuses to give permission. A daughter receives a marriage proposal she would gladly accept but the father is angry when he finds out the suitor has caught a glimpse of his daughter’s face through the window.

What the children don’t know, however, is that Al-Sayyid Ahmad spends his nights getting drunk, carousing with friends, and having love affairs. Amina sees his drunkenness every night, but even she doesn’t really know how he spends his time. Al-Sayyid Ahmad believes he is talented enough a person and strong enough a father to keep this double standard going; he is a model father as far as he is concerned, and he sees no need for consistency in his behavior.

As you can probably guess from this set-up, Al-Sayyid Ahmad is in for a world of frustration as his children find ways of doing what they want, in spite of their fear of him. The novel charts the increasing difficulty the father has in controlling them, a difficulty made much worse by increasing political unrest. The later sections of the novel become more political in nature, and tell the story of Egyptian demonstrations against the English occupiers. Violence takes over the city, putting the family and its traditional ways at risk.

The novel is slow-moving in the very best sense — it’s never dull or plodding, but rather rich and detailed about the lives and emotions of its characters. With his omniscient point of view, Mahfouz does a good job giving the reader a glimpse into the minds and emotions of many characters, and he can make us understand and even sympathize with the most unlikeable people. I like the way Mahfouz blends the personal, family story with the political one; I didn’t feel that the family story was told in the service of the political one or vice versa, but that Mahfouz wove the two together, showing how national dramas affect people’s intimate lives, and how the private world reaches out into and shapes the public one.

Fortunately for me, this is the first novel in a trilogy, so I have the pleasure of reading further in the lives of this family.

People told me I could expect to find some interesting gender dynamics in Ursula Le Guin’s novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, and that’s exactly what I’ve found. The story takes place on a planet that is called Gethen by its inhabitants and Winter by everyone else because of its extremely cold climate.

The inhabitants of Gethen have a very different kind of sexuality than humans do, and I’m finding it fascinating. Gethenians are ambisexual, meaning that they are capable of being male or female and they switch between the two. They follow a sexual cycle slightly shorter than a month that begins in a sexually neutral state; towards the end of the cycle they enter what’s called “kemmer,” a period of sexual activity that lasts 4-6 days. During this time if they find a desirable partner also entering kemmer they each take on either male or female characteristics and can have sex. They have no control over which partner is male and which female. Either partner is capable of taking on the female role and therefore either partner can become pregnant.

Kind of interesting, isn’t it? One of the book’s narrators, who is not from Gethen and therefore whose sexuality is like ours, speculates on how these differences in sexuality lead to differences in culture. I’m going to quote a long passage from this section, which I think would be better than if I were to summarize it; speaking of kemmer, the narrator says:

Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex.

Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be … “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be — psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.

…

Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible. Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.

Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.

Would you want to live in a world like that? There are other aspects of Gethen that don’t sound so appealing, but I can’t help but like the idea of a world where sex and gender still exist, but without the inequality and violence associated with them.

One challenge this model of gender presents to the author is what to do about pronouns; male or female pronouns aren’t really accurate and neuter ones aren’t either, since Gethenians aren’t neuter at all. Le Guin has her narrators use the male pronoun, and although I don’t really like this — it makes it seem as though Gethen is populated only by men — I’m not sure what I would choose instead. To make up a pronoun?

I’m down to only two books I’m currently reading, and I’m about to finish one of them! I haven’t been in this situation in a long time. The only thing to be done about it is to start a couple new books, at least. Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, Walter Scott’s Waverly, and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia are the ones I’m planning to choose from.

But for now, I want to write a bit about Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel Be Near Me. I thought the novel had a few flaws, but overall it’s beautifully-written, absorbing, and moving. It’s about a Catholic priest, David Anderton, assigned to a small parish in Scotland who finds himself (David often seems passively drawn into things) involved with two teenage kids, Mark and Lisa. Mark and Lisa are wild; they do their best to shock David, but find themselves drawn to him when he isn’t shocked — when they see he wants to spend time with them. The three of them hang out after school and at night, talking and driving places; David takes the teenagers on trips to local landmarks they had never visited; generally, they have a lot of fun, although it’s clear from early on that these relationships are complicated and bound to become more so.

The novel is told in first person, and mixed in with the Mark and Lisa scenes, David tells about his past, his time at school and at Oxford, especially, and the story of falling in love with Conor, a fellow student. These background stories help to fill in David’s character. He doesn’t fit in easily anywhere and says he’s not sure where he belongs; he had an exciting youth, participating in the student protests of the 60s (he’s now in his 50s), but when he became a priest, he turned away from all that and has since lived a very quiet life, serving in parishes in England and only recently in Scotland.

He seems disconnected from himself, and his voice comes across as stoic and a little bit melancholy, as though he knows he has missed out on much but refuses to admit it. His housekeeper Mrs. Poole, with whom he has forged a friendship, tells him has spent his life trying to avoid life, but he refuses to believe this.

So when he meets and befriends Mark and Lisa, it inaugurates something new; he sees in them the youthful energy he no longer has, but he also grasps at the chance to change himself, to be a participant in life, to take risks and do foolish things. This is the most moving part of the book, I think; the longing David has for newness that he finally allows himself to indulge.

But it all goes wrong, inevitably, and David pays dearly for this experience of freedom and abandon.

What I loved best about the book is how richly it describes David’s sense of self and his interiority; it’s a very smart, thoughtful book, rather sad in the way it portrays growing older and taking stock of what one has become, but hopeful about the possibility of change, even in the midst of disaster. I did feel the narrator’s voice was sometimes a little too withholding, a little too reticent, and in these moments, rather than communicating hidden depths, the narrator left me a bit cold. This is the danger of using first person with a character like David, I suppose; his ambivalence about himself can at times make him seem a little blank.

But I only felt this blankness in moments, and mostly the experience of reading this book was a pleasure.