● Summer Read with Beth
● Sudanese author
● Originally published in 1970
● Characters: Mustafa Sa'eed, brilliant Don Juan with a secret..........Narrator/returns to his Sudanese villabe after studying abroad for seven years to find Mustafa firmly entrenched in his home village
● Setting: Sudan, post WWI
● Quotes:
》 p.27......"The string of the bow is drawn taut and the arrow must needs shoot forth.".....Mustafa uses this metaphor often....fatalism?
》 p.33......."The train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris". .....Mustafa's downfall
》 p.34......"My bedroom was a spring-well of sorrow, the germ of a fatal disease. "......Mustafa's affect on women....
》 p.43......"Were every person to know when to refrain from taking the first step, many things would have been changed."
》 p.46......"Occasionally the disturbing thought occurrs to me that Mustafa Sa'eed never happened , that he was in fact a lie, a phantom, a dream or a nightmare that had come to the people of that village one suffocatingly dark night, and when they opened their eyes to the sunlight he was nowhere to be seen. "
》 p.59....."And here you are now believing in superstitions of a new sort: the superstition of industrialization, the superstition of nationalization, the superstition of Arab unity, the superstition of African unity. Like children you believe that in the bowels of the earth lies a treasure you'll attain by some miracle, and that you'll solve all your difficulties and set up a Garden of Paradise. Fantasies. Waking dreams. Through facts, figures, and statistics you can accept your reality, live together with it, and attempt tobring about changes within the limits of your potentialities."
》p.69...."The voices of people, birds, and animals expire weakly on the ear like whispers, and the regular puttering of the water pump heightens the sensation of the impossible. And the river, the river but for which there would have been no beginning and no end, flows northwards, pays heed to nothing; a mountain may stand in its way so it turns eastwards; it may happen upon a deep depression so it turns westwards, but sooner or later it settles down inits irrevocable journey towards the sea in the north."
》p.71......"According to my grandfather, a couch raised high off the floor indicates vanity, a low one humility. "
》p.73....."By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the universe. He is no towering oak tree with luxuriant branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility, rather he is like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life."
》p.88....."Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood. "
》p.107...."This room is a big joke--like life. You imagine it contains a secret and there's nothing there. Absolutely nothing. "
● Notes:
》 Loved the impromptu celebration of bedouins and travelers
》 Is narrator Mustafa?
》 Is locked room his psychic retention of English education?
● Review:
This novel started out slowly and gradually became mind boggling! The author manages to convey the downside of colonialization and one culture being sdueced by the exotic in anither culture, and then killing off the original beauty of what seduced them in the first place. I was entranced by many of the Arab traditions, emotions, and euphemisms. I was absolutely delighted during the impromptu celebration of travelers and bedouins in the desert. I was appalled at the treatment of women as property. Overall, I was thoroughly engaged emotionally and intellectually. Excellent!
