Update 1 of this adventure highlighted some real gems of Mediterranean literature. Round 2, however, was more of a mixed bag, which is a polite way of saying I slogged through some stinkers so that you don't have to.
ISRAEL: A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev ** ½
Winner of
the Brenner Prize (Israel) and several other European awards from an
internationally-acclaimed author. With
all due respect to the author and to the literary establishment that heaped
glowing reviews onto this book, I need to tell you from the get-go that it’s
going to be hard for me to describe this book without sniggering. I do agree with one professional reviewer who
call the book “unforgettable”. Spoiler alert in effect as from this point. Yair is a short dark muscular boy born into a
tall blonde family, and we suspect something is amiss from the beginning. Written from the view point of Yair as an
adult in the throes of his own marital turmoil, our attention is focused on the
story of a pigeon handler during Israel’s war of independence, who is (queue
menacing music… dah! dah! dah!) a
short dark muscular boy. All that
remains is to figure out how his mother met the pigeon boy, and what could be
more straightforward than a pigeon boy meeting (drum roll, cymbal clash and pregnant
pause…) a pigeon girl! The pigeon boy decides they will not have sex
before he goes off to war because of his belief that he would not return alive
if they did. But hang on a minute … we
know from the beginning of the story that the pigeon boy dies in battle, torn to
shreds by snipers’ bullets. How could
the boy possibly be Yair’s father,
you wonder? Well you have clearly
forgotten about the pigeons, my friends.
As the boy lies dying alone in a small monastery, he manages to… well, er, uh… expel and collect his
sperm in a small glass vial that he attaches to the leg of his champion carrier
pigeon. The pigeon manages to lift off
with its precious burden and flies bravely between whizzing bullets to the
pigeon girl at the zoo, who understands immediately that the bird’s return
means that a) the pigeon boy is dead and b) that the vial contains his
sperm. (As an aside, does this remind anyone else of the Monty Python sketch,
“what is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”) Scrambling madly
through the zoo lab in search for a spoon and a syringe, she flops on her back
and inseminates herself. The rest of the
story unfolds with relative ease. It’s
too bad, really, since the book is otherwise well written, the story lines are
interesting, and the characters are vibrant and engaging. I had intended to give it a 3-star rating up
until this (dare-I-say-it?) seminal moment
in the story. Alas, after such
revelations, I found it hard to take seriously anymore.
LEBANON: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih
Alameddine **
Finalist
for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. The story flows from the memories of
70-year-old Aaliya, an endearing feisty blue-haired heroine who dared to live a
modern and independent life in the constrictive society of 1970s civil-war
Lebanon. Her salvation from both the war
and the society that condemns her lifestyle is literature. The novel combines all the ingredients needed
to create an appealing story for modern women and lovers of literature and
history; me, me, and me. But I didn’t
love it. After a beautiful start (and I
recommended it enthusiastically to a few friends after a promising first quarter),
the book gets bogged down in Aaliya’s literary reviews and ponderings to the
point that the plot disappears completely and we feel like we’ve accidentally wandered
into an academic treatise where the author tries to dazzle us with the breadth
and depth of her knowledge. Towards the
end it was simply a painful slog to finish.
MEDITERRANEAN
overview: On the Shores of the
Mediterranean by Eric Newby ***
Fans of
travel literature should feel their hearts skip a beat with excitement when
they see the name Eric Newby, author of the classic works A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and The Last Grain Race. Newby
sailed a 4-masted schooner from the UK to Australia in 1938, climbed the
Nuristan mountains of Afghanistan, was a prisoner of war, escaped from his
concentration camp and was recaptured, returned later to marry the Slovenian
woman who hid him during his escape, and spent some years working with his
father in a women’s high-fashion business.
For most of his career, when he wasn’t traveling himself, he served as
travel editor of The Observer. With such credentials, it’s impossible not to
be enthralled by his sometimes hysterical recollections of traveling around the
Mediterranean basin, clockwise from Naples, in the 1980s. In the acknowledgements in the front of the
book, Newby thanks Colonel Muammar Kaddafi for hosting them during their jaunt
through Libya. While some passages are
dry and dip too deeply into the historical landscape for my tastes, the book as
a whole is a fantastic read and is an essential companion to the fiction from
each country that I’ve been reading.
MEDITERRANEAN
overviews, continued: The Middle Sea: A History of the
Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich ****, and The Pillars of Hercules *1/2 by Paul Theroux.
The Middle Sea is essential reading, the bible of all things
Mediterranean, and despite the comprehensive historical coverage, very engaging
and readable. After reading Norwich and
Newby, The Pillars of Hercules by Theroux struck me as the personal
ramblings of an often poorly-informed traveler content to offer up summaries of
a place based on meeting a few local characters in a bar. His goal is to write a book and cover as much
ground as possible as quickly as possible.
Perhaps this approach is meant to offer a snapshot in time and many
critics loved the book. I found it
annoying and didn’t learn anything useful or interesting about the Med from
it. It’s all about him and his insights.
Pass.
