More on the Purpose of Criticism

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Some time ago I posted some thoughts on Cynthia Ozick’s Harper’s essay “Literary Entrails” (see “Academic Criticism Criticized”). Belatedly, I notice that there was a good posting in response to it at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading which concludes that “Ozick’s better criticism . . . would add another reason to read, a further way to engage a book once it had been closed and to continually re-think and re-evaluate books that have been around for a while. This might not bring any new readers into the fold, but it might make better readers out of those who already do so. Over time, I think that would make books better for everyone.” I like the idea that the critic’s role is to keep us engaged and to encourage us to “re-think and re-evaluate” what we have read; as both this author and Ozick emphasize, the pace of reviewing can be too hasty to allow for a “slower, more contemplative critical approach to literature.” For myself, I have been finding it exhausting trying to keep pace at all with the texts and topics addressed in litblogs and literary journals: I’m starting to look forward to the start of the teaching term in September because I will be back to worrying obsessively over a small handful of books, and to feel grateful for “the canon,” however unstable or elastic its definition, if only because the very idea of a canon implies that there is no obligation to pay attention to everything!

Meanwhile, at The Reading Experience, Dan Green has some good things to say about the distinction between reviewing and criticism: “The essential task of criticism is not to evaluate fiction. It is an essential task of reviewing, but criticism can take place entirely outside the context of judgment and evaluation, or at least it can take place in a context that assumes evaluation and judgment have already taken place. Some of the best criticism attempts not to argue for the merits of a particular work but to describe and analyze a work the critic already values and wants to “read” more closely. Sometimes this results in convincing readers of the quality of the work, but doing that has not been the critic’s primary task.” I like to think in terms of appreciation rather than evaluation, because it sidelines the issue of taste. I can appreciate a work of fiction for being artful, well-crafted, original, historically significant, etc. without actually liking it (Pamela, anyone?). Yet I am unlikely to devote a lot of critical time (or classroom time) to any text that I am not personally convinced has value, whether artistic, intellectual, social, or some combination. We value different books for different reasons, after all. I’m not sure I’d want to convince anyone of the quality of, say, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, though I enjoy reading and teaching it and consider it an important example of Victorian social problem fiction. On the other hand, I find I am prepared to expend a great deal of energy convincing people of the value of Bleak House or Middlemarch! Of course, when past works are the ones at issue, there’s presumably no longer any question of reviewing them–or is there? Actually, that’s an interesting question, and one linked to my ongoing musings about the potential role of something like a blog in my own work. How or why could writing about a ‘classic’ be relevant, useful, desirable to a contemporary audience? I still hold to the fairly simple distinction that reviewing is a form of literary journalism that requires a specific occasion as an incentive, while criticism has more abstract (longitudinal?) interests. In any case, I like Green’s comment that criticism is “a way of paying attention and of perhaps assisting others in the effort to pay closer attention.” Like the comments at Conversational Reading, this one reminds me of Booth’s idea of “coduction,” which seems to me an excellent model of the way our judgments of literature are in fact formed and reformed.

Joanna Trollope, A Village Affair

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When I decided to take a break from more “serious” reading with A Village Affair, I wasn’t really expecting the novel to reach towards the serious itself. I had read it before, but what I had retained was admiration for the clarity with which Trollope gives us the people she has devised: many (though not all) of her novels that I have read have struck me as achieving an enviable quality in their characters: they are enormously specific and individual and often intensely, even poignantly, believable. Here, Alice’s father-in-law, Richard, seems especially well conceived. Everything he says communicates to us who he is and how he has lived, particularly in his marriage to a woman he persists in loving but who cannot, in her turn, recognize in him someone as complex and fully human as she is. He lives this hampered life in full knowledge of its limits, neither tragic nor stoic. Alice’s discontent is the stuff of cliches; her affair seems contrived (by the author) to break up the seemingly calm surface, the routines and compromises of daily life. In fact, this is how Trollope’s plots generally work: the ordinary people, the change or revelation, the repercussions. For me, it’s the repercussions she does really well. Having set up her experiment in life, she works out plausibly how it will play out, and she does not sentimentalize–as, in this case, Alice’s “coming alive” through a new and different experience of love creates more problems than it solves.

In this case, as in another of her novels that I think is very smart, Marrying the Mistress, Trollope sets her characters up to confront what is a central dilemma in many 19th-century novels as well, namely how to resolve the conflict between, or how to decide between, duty to self and duty to others. That she is aware of her predecessors in this investigation is indicated by the quotation from Adam Bede recited (OK, improbably) by one of the characters in A Village Affair. As that quotation forcefully indicates, George Eliot placed a high value on renunciation and on accepting (as gracefully as possible) the burden of duty: resignation to less than you want, or less than you can imagine, is a constant refrain, and this with no promise of rapturous happiness. Hence the melancholic tinge at the end of Romola, for instance, or Daniel Deronda, or, for all its lightning flashes of romantic fulfilment, Middlemarch. (Of course, famously, it is her heroines who must resign or, like Maggie Tulliver, die.)

Although much has changed socially and politically since George Eliot found it unrealistic to give Romola, Maggie, or Dorothea uncompromised happy endings, the struggle between what we want for ourselves and what is expected or demanded of us by others continues to be a staple of fiction. Though Trollope’s scenario is much more contemporary, she too accepts that one’s individual desire cannot (or not easily, or not ethically) be one’s guiding principle, because of the “visible and invisible relations beyond any of which our present or prospective self is the centre” (Adam Bede). So Trollope, with admirable restraint, refuses a fairy tale ending for her protagonist, though, with a different kind of insistence that perhaps George Eliot would respect, she also pushes her out of the unsatisfactory life that was her reality before, and into what, given this context, seems like a narrative limbo, or a waiting room. This is not to say that Alice’s single life is an incomplete one, but she herself acknowledges that it is not, in fact, what she really wanted–only what she was capable of achieving.

I think this novel makes an interesting comparison to another quiet novel about a woman reconsidering her life, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, which I have always admired. But Tyler, though far from offering simplistic fairy tales, offers her own version of the resignation narrative. In Ladder of Years, as in Back When We Were Grownups, it proves mistaken for the heroine to try to start a new life, however much she is, or believes she is, following the promptings of her innermost self. Again, the “visible and invisible relations” exert a powerful pressure, like the entangling webs of family and society in Middlemarch but perceived, overall, as more kindly, less petty and destructive. The plain litte room Delia takes and uses as a staging ground to reinvent her life is a room of her own, but her story is not rightly understood as being just about her own life (“was she alone,” Dorothea asks herself). In these novels Tyler’s women learn to appreciate the value of what they tried to leave, to see their own identities as having become inseparable from those of the others whose demands and complications hamper their desires. The vision seems starker in Trollope’s novel (“Aga saga” though it certainly is).

Blogging Reservations

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Today’s New York Sun includes a short piece by Adam Kirsh on The Scorn of the Literary Blog. Kirsh is mostly writing about the much-noted rivalry between “professional” reviewers and literary bloggers, in the context of the also much-noted decline of book sections in print journalism. I don’t have much to say about these broader contexts, but I am interested in Kirsh’s remarks on the limitations of blogging as a form of literary criticism:

The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn’t offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

That last bit seems disingenuous, as the links in fact take us to electronic versions of the longer pieces which are themselves seamlessly integrated into the web versions of journals, which include many features typical of blogs, including opportunities to comment and links to other related materials.

I agree that it makes a difference that “literature is not news” and that this distinction has implications for the kind of criticism that works on blogs. Literature can be news, in the sense that new books come out all the time and one function of book reviews is to let readers know about them. But not all kinds of literary criticism serve this market-oriented function. It’s not obvious to me that all blogs do either: many of the ones I’ve been reading don’t aspire to that kind of timeliness, but rather offer commentary on a range of reading material. If a book is not news, does that mean writing about it lacks relevance? It lacks urgency, I suppose, but surely not interest.

It’s also true that “bite-sized commentary” is common, but I’ve been reading a number of blogs that offer more of a mouthful–not in every post, perhaps, but often enough to make it seem unfair to dismiss all blogging as inevitably superficial. The literary posts on Amardeep Singh’s blog, for instance, can be quite extensive and detailed, as can those offered by The Reading Experience or The Little Professor.

Not coincidentally, I’ve used as my examples blogs maintained by writers who are are highly trained as professional readers and writers (two of them are English professors, one is a ‘reformed’ academic). While academic credentials are not the only things that can establish someone’s credibility as a literary critic, it’s hard to argue that the opinions of these three lack “authority,” even when offered in these less formal venues. Further, they set an example of thoughtful, historically-informed commentary that helps expose the inadequacy of the “anyone can say anything” culture of Amazon.Com reviewing and the many more slap-dash reading blogs. It’s hard not to see their efforts as complementary to those of the “professional writers” whose work Kirsh prefers.

And precisely because, as Kirsh says, “the whole point of a review is to set one mind against another, and see what sparks fly,” surely the bloggers who offer their expertise as generously as the three I’ve mentioned are doing us all a great service by putting their literary encounters out there for the rest of us to learn from and participate in.

Wish List and Back Lists

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I haven’t done much serious reading since finishing An Equal Music; I was so absorbed by that novel that I haven’t been able to settle on what to follow it with, so I’m taking a break with a little Joanna Trollope. The problem is not lack of choice, though, but a surfeit of attractive options, including not just the books already ripening on my shelves but my wish list of books I’m eager to read for one reason or another but have yet to get my hands on. Currently leading this wish list:

  1. Ian McEwan, Chesil Beach (is it just me, or between Saturday and his new novel, does McEwan have a bit of a “Dover Beach” thing going on?)
  2. James Wood, Life Against God
  3. Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
  4. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas
  5. Anne Tyler, Digging for American
  6. Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children
  7. Elizabeth von Arnim, Enchanted April
  8. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
  9. Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
  10. Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park

A number of these are fairly recent novels I have been reading a lot about in review sections and lit blogs. Some of them are older novels that I have learned about or become curious about belatedly. In fact, one of the questions that has been on my mind as I explore the world of literary writing online is how to break out of the ‘new releases’ or ‘hot properties’ cycle and find out about books you did not hear about back when they first came out. I have been frustrated sometimes when I’ve been motivated by the hype around a new novel to snatch it up and read it with great expectations only to find it disappointing (this is frequently my reaction to books I buy on the basis of glowing reviews in The Globe and Mail, a caution I now take with me to the bookstore). But there seem to be factors in the book industry, and certainly in the big chain stores, that make it difficult to discern which books are standing the test of time.

I think this problem relates to a question I asked earlier about whether lit blogging must be a form of literary journalism. Are blogs in fact best or most useful if they are opportunistic or occasional, offering timely responses to new material? If book reviews are buying guides, then there’s some reason for them to address primarily new options, and lots of reasons for them not to spend time on out-of-print options, though there are a lot of titles in between these two extremes. Blogs seem to be (or at least can be) less tied to the book market, more driven by literary than by commercial interests. Maybe this is even a particularly valuable thing bloggers can do, keeping “backlist” titles from going stale.

Vikram Seth, An Equal Music

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What an extraordinary, intense, poignant book. The central love story is compelling as a romance but would be conventional, perhaps even trite, if it weren’t entangled with another story about a different kind of love–for music. Michael’s desire for Julia, which borders on the obsessive, is itself a musical passion, aroused by and motivated by her playing, or their playing together. But his desire for his violin comes to seem like a purer form of desire, for something that transcends the impurities of human relationships or even human characters, with their flaws and imbalances. People (alas!) cannot be tuned to accommodate different needs, to make new or different combinations, new beauties. How utopian chamber music comes to seem here, as the members of the quartet ease away from their messy lives through the simplicity of a scale played in unison, until they are ready and generous enough to take their turns, to share the work and the pleasure of the music. But though I felt it this way, the novel itself is never sentimental. In his “Author’s Note” Seth remarks that he felt “gripped with anxiety” at the thought of writing about music, to him “dearer even than speech.” Perhaps as a result, he uses a spare but high-pressure style, relentlessly paced, never indulgent; the moments of grace appear as just that, moments in a turbulent, complicated world, themselves achieved by hard work, constant rehearsal, trial and error. Even the risky conceit of Julia’s hearing loss is handled coolly; like Michael, we shy away from pity even as we wonder how and why she can continue to make music she can hear fully only in her head. Beethoven too, we know, of course made music even after he could not hear it himself. In Julia’s case (she’s a fictional character, after all) we might ask if there is a metaphorical or symbolic dimension. Characters lose their sight in order to gain insight; is music here also a state of mind or perception from which sensory experience is a distraction? “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”? But in the end it does seem to be the “heard melodies” that matter here, outweighing and outlasting every other desire, met or unmet, every painful, joyful love:

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music–not too much, or the soul could not sustain it–from time to time.

Some love stories leave us longing (no doubt in vain) for that “happily ever after” ending, the miraculously harmonious human relationship. This one has left me longing for Bach and Schubert.

Follow-up: To my joy, it turns out there is a companion CD for this novel. I eagerly await its arrival and, eventually, a second reading of the novel complete with soundtrack.

Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

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I really did not like this book. I can see all kinds of literary things going on in it, some of the writing is beautiful, especially the elegaic concluding section, and all of it is artful. I can also see thematically interesting things going on, especially with the self-conscious inquiry into whether the suicides are symptoms of a historical malaise or a cultural decline. But none of that offsets how disturbing and morbid the basic premise is, how voyeuristic (falling just the wrong side of that fine line between exploring and representing male adolescent fantasies, and indulging them), and how exploitive and prurient. Among other things, Eugenides does seem to be challenging his readers to consider why or how they interpret stories, how information and observation is drawn on selectively as the narrator and his friends draw on their “evidence” about the lives of the Lisbon sisters. Again, interesting. But while I don’t think the novel glamorizes or makes light of suicide (it is, I’d say, despite everything, a sad and even tragic novel), it uses it to do these arty intellectual things. All five girls are objectified in life and death, and again, for me, the novel falls just on the wrong side of being about objectification vs. being objectifying. We have no idea who these girls are or what actually motivates them: their deaths matter because of how they affect others and how they are read by others. Fairly early in the novel there’s a comment about the hell of being a girl at that time, but these girls do not live anything like a representative life, so again, they are being used as symbols. Now, I know better than to talk as if the Lisbon sisters are real people somehow being abused by an unjust novelist…but there’s something awry with the imagination that set up this story, something uncomfortable about taking this premise in the first place.

Kermode, The Art of Telling

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Today again, I have time only to post a couple of short excerpts from my current reading:

Their [‘licensed practitioners’] right to practise is indicated by arbitrary signs, not only certificates, robes, and titles, but also professional jargons. The activities of such persons, whether diagnostic or exegetical, are privileged, and they have access to senses that do not declare themselves to the laity. Moreover they are subject, in professional matters, to no censure but that of other licensed practitioners acting as a body; the opinion of the laity is of no consequence whatever, a state of affairs which did not exist before the institution now under consideration firmly established itself–as anyone may see by looking with a layman’s eye on the prose its members habitually write, and comparing it with the prose of critics who still thought of themselves as writing for an educated general public, for la cour et la ville. (170)

We wean candidates from the habit of literal reading. Like the masters who reserved secret senses in the second century, we are in the business of conducting readers out of the sphere of the manifest. Our institutional readings are not those of the outsiders, so much is self-evident; though it is only when we see some intelligent non-professional confronted by a critical essay from our side of the fence that we see how esoteric we are. (182)

Literature and/as Faith

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Excerpts from my recent reading in James Wood’s The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and Christopher Hitchens’s god is Not Great:

Nervously aware that they have killed off Christianity as a faith, [Arnold and Renan] must reinstate it as a religion, as a guide to life, as a poetry … the poeticizing of nondivine religion was a characteristically nineteenth-century gesture. (Wood 246)

We [atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. (Hitchens 5)

The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. (Hitchens 283)

The Hitchens comments would make provocative epigraphs for a seminar on literature and morality; Wood points to the genealogy of claims such as Hitchens’s.

The Occasion for Blogging

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There has been a lot of public discussion recently about blogs in the context of the decline of book sections and book reviews in newspapers; much of it has consisted of attacks on literary blogs from more traditional writers and sources and defensive responses from bloggers (see, for instance, this response on The Reading Experience to an LA Times column that promised contemptuously to write “in language even a busy blogger can understand”). I have sympathies on both sides of this fence, as I agree that while anyone can write a book review or literary commentary, not anyone can write one that has interest and merit. In general, my position is simply the more people out there reading books and writing about them, the better all round. The more specific issue I’ve been wondering about is whether blogging is really only suited to be a form of literary journalism, focused on new releases and current authors in the way that book reviews are, or whether it is possible or useful for blogs also to write more in the spirit of literary scholarship or criticism of past literature. I’m also thinking more about the nature of literary blogs more generally, while well aware that so far I have still become aware of only a fraction of the options and styles out there.

One typical feature of successful blogging is apparently that it is incessant: unless they are constantly updated, it seems blogs lose their currency, their momentum and, presumably, their readers. I have already found that, at least for someone with other work to do, the rapidity of thinking and writing required to put up new posts even once or twice a week makes drafting and polishing impossible, which inevitably affects the kind and quality of writing you can do. This situation would differ, of course, for someone working full-time on a blog. It could also be overcome, or ameliorated, by writing off-line and not posting anything until it has been tidied up, though this too assumes that blogging is not a sideline to a “real” job. It may be as well that depending on the kind of site and voice you are trying to establish, you can take your time and post longer, more thoughtful pieces. It’s not as if there are deadlines, after all, and besides, who’s really reading most blogs all that frequently anyway, much less one like mine that hardly anyone even knows about? I started quite deliberately writing without a lot of second thoughts, to free myself up from academic hyper-self-consciousness, but all those first impressions are starting to seem inadequate, especially when the book at issue (The Map of Love, for instance) is quite complex, formally and thematically. I’m reaching a point at which I need to consider what I hope to accomplish by writing my posts in the first place and maybe experiment with some more in-depth analyses. But to do that, I would have to take the time and justify it professionally.

Another notable feature of the blogs I am most familiar with so far is their focus on fairly new releases and on the state of the current book and literary worlds. A next step for me will be looking around for people who write about the literature of the past. Literary journalism differs from literary criticism, it is usually assumed, in being prompted by an occasion needing a fairly prompt response to give it relevance. Criticism takes more of a long view. But without that occasion, that immediacy, what appeal does criticism have for the non-academic reader, especially in a medium like the internet? Is there an audience online for writing about Dickens or George Eliot? And what could be said that would matter, or appeal? The kind of stuff that gets written for academic audiences apparently (unsurprisingly) alienates almost everyone else, while the kind of stuff that gets written for popular audiences often seems trivial or redundant to those who read the academic stuff. And yet…books such as John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel or Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer do get published, so there is presumably some interest out there in enhancing one’s experience of reading “the classics.” One approach might be to look for the contemporary relevance in past authors, as I attempted to do with my paper on George Eliot as “Moralist for the 21st Century.” But that means only highlighting authors and texts that lend themselves to modern purposes, which gets pretty tendentious and unsatisfactory pretty fast.

A number of my posts have been in the spirit of “work in progress” notes, thinking aloud though (maybe oddly) in public–partly in the hopes, of course, of eventually getting some input (a fading hope). At this point, especially with my sabbatical coming to an end, I need to start putting my thoughts together about what I’ve been learning by reading and (in this modest way) writing outside the academic box.

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

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For about the first half of this novel, I was tremendously impressed and moved by it. Whatever it takes to communicate what feels like an authentic, rather than contrived, sense of history (see previous posts on historical fiction), Soueif has; she makes both Lady Anna’s past experience and the experience and perspective of Isabel and Amal in the (more or less) present seem alive, real. Isabel’s exploration, while running a nice parallel to Anna’s, turns out to be less important than Amal’s; while Isabel is in her own way experiencing the exotic world of others, Amal is taking another look at her own world, in the illumination provided by her experience of Westerners, from her husband to Isabel and Anna. Soueif seemed especially good, to me, at showing the complexities of identity, the impossibility of pointing in any one direction and saying, “look, there, that is (or he or she is) truly Egyptian.” But at the same time I felt the novel yearned for an idea of Eygpt, an idea of an Egyptian identity, that could endure the cataclysms as well as the slower erosions of history, cross-cultural conflict and change, and just time. Like Scott, Soueif avoids nostalgia, but in her landscapes especially there was a hint of something like it.

The two historical stories are interwoven artfully in ways that keep the reader thinking about relationships and continuities. Is Isabel looking for the same thing that Anna is? Anna looks for something like redemption, for her nation’s sins including those committed, however unhappily, by her first husband; she looks for freedom from rules about who she can be; she looks (of course, this being a novel) for love. Isabel starts with love, with Omar, but how are we to read her being struck so fast with feeling for him? She goes to Egypt in part to understand “where he’s coming from,” as the saying goes, but in this case, literally, as if knowing his homeland will tell her his character–which, it seems, it does, because his sympathies and loyalties, his politics, are the result of his history and the history of the Middle East. One of Soueif’s goals is clearly to educate her Western readers about international politics from a non-Western point of view, especially about the effects of colonialism in the early story, and the conflict over Palestine in the contemporary one. In the way novelists are often credited with, she puts human faces on what too easily become abstractions, such as redrawn borders. She also to some extent allows for the humanity on more than one side of controversies, showing up the inadequacy of single-minded advocacy on any one side.

By the end of the novel, though, I didn’t think she was able to sustain the weight of the political and historical detail she included: the story began to suffer as conversations or descriptions of gatherings required long lists of names and allegiances, factions and parties (always unnatural, as in ordinary conversation we don’t have to explain who everyone is). Sections seemed more like textbooks, and the momentum of the plot suffered. I also thought she did not use Anna well enough. Here she gave us an Englishwoman unconventional enough to ride across the Sinai dressed as an Arab man, whose very feistiness is part of what draws Sharif to her. But once she’s married, she accepts entirely the life of an Egyptian wife, including a degree of segregation and dependence that would surely have galled even a more conservative Englishwoman of the early 1900s. Her one ‘rebellion’ is by mistake, when she withdraws her own money from the bank only to learn she has thereby shamed Sharif by implying he does not provide for her. Rather than resisting this implication as a misrepresentation of the facts, she apologizes abjectly. How much more interesting if she had continued to defy expectations and tested the compatibility of her “English” values with the tolerance of her new Egyptian family, especially as the intolerance of the English community for her is shown to be complete. Would her new kin have loved her so easily if she had not adopted their values and customs? It’s true that Soueif is at pains to depict life in the haramlek as having its own kind of freedom, dignity, and beauty, and that Anna and Sharif become collaborators in the reports they send back to England. But Anna’s rapid embrace of all things Egyptian seemed like a lost opportunity to me, and her story became fairly boring, until the melodrama of Sharif’s violent death (leaving the killer’s identity ambiguous was a nice touch that allowed, again, for the multiple complexities of politics and allegiances). Amal’s struggle to negotiate the violent realities of contemporary Egypt held more dramatic interest and was movingly rendered. What are we to assume has happened to Omar at the end?