Anglo-Egyptian Fiction

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As I putter away at my project on Ahdaf Soueif, I’ve been trying to think of other modern novels that qualify as “Anglo-Egyptian”: that is, novels by English novelists but set primarily (or at least significantly) in or about Egypt. For my purposes, I think I would exclude novels about Ancient Egypt (which in my experience tend to be of the costume-and-jewelry form of historical fiction–not that there’s anything wrong with that, and also Pauline Gedge’s Child of the Morning is an old favourite of mine). I would also not expect to be interested in lighter fiction, such as mysteries, for which Egypt is really just a conveniently exotic setting. I could be persuaded, of course, to look at interesting examples from either of these categories. But I’m mostly looking for “serious” or literary fiction, fiction with some ambition, if you like, primarily because that’s where I would expect to find interesting ideas about what it means for an English novelist to write about Egypt. The obvious examples I’m aware of are Lawrence Durrell‘s Alexandria Quartet, Olivia Manning‘s Levant Trilogy, and Penelope Lively‘s Cleopatra’s Sister and (another old favourite) Moon Tiger. Other suggestions?

Update: Now that I’ve read it, I realize that Lively’s Cleopatra’s Sister is not actually about Egypt.

Ian Colford, Evidence

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“Evidence of what?” might reasonably be a reader’s first question, heading into this volume that is not quite a novel, not quite a collection of individual stories, but instead an assortment of incidents in the unsettled (and unsettling) life of Kostandin Bitri, described in the jacket blurb as “a wanderer uprooted by war.” Each incident teases and disturbs with what it leaves out as much as what it includes (and some of them include elements that are, in fact, quite disturbing). They are not presented in chronological order, and the continuities between them are primarily of tone: Kostandin narrates in a flat, expository tone, like someone who has seen and done so much that he can no longer be surprised or deeply moved. And yet the content, the action, often turns on surprising and moving moments of connection–or, even more often, failed connection. Unlikely meetings become fragments of unsustainable relationships. People want or expect too much of each other, or of themselves; they cling to hope, they ask for help, but they receive or extend pain and disappointment.

Kostandin’s specific history is offered in fragments throughout the volume. “You’re from one of those countries over there that used to be part of Yugoslavia. I’m right, aren’t I?” asks one of his employers, and Kostandin opts “to let him think what he wanted about where I was from”; later he tells the members of a group counselling session about the “tribal” customs of his home country; an orphan, he eventually returns to seek the remains of his parents in a mass grave for which Communists are blamed. Even if we trust what he tells us, the details are left just vague enough that Kostandin’s stories seem to be about trauma, loss, and betrayal as ongoing conditions of human life rather than attempts to render, literally, the effects of historically specific events. Kostandin himself is sometimes victim, sometimes criminal. His world does not allow for heroism; in it, also, acts of generosity, including his own, lead nowhere in particular. There is evil, or at least cruelty. In one episode, Kostandin awakes in the hospital, badly injured; he is unable to recall what happened, and the absence of an explanation seems to epitomize the meaninglessness of the damage people inflict on each other, and the larger mystery of human motives–a mystery that cannot, after all, be solved but for which each of this strange episodes is partial, oblique evidence.

Throughout, the language is precise and controlled; details of colour and sound, rooms and personalities, emerge in sharp focus. Emotive language proves redundant, or at least optional. The situations Colford conjures for us through Kostandin’s almost clinically detached observations speak eloquently enough of strain and yearning, love and failure. The stories end rather than conclude or resolve. Perhaps because of the many questions they leave unanswered, they linger, uncomfortably, hauntingly, in the mind.

Red Hot Classics

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Somehow I hadn’t seen any of these editions before today, when I ran into a couple of them as I was browsing through Chapters (thanks, again, to parents who hold their children’s birthday parties at The Putting Edge across the way!). I’m fascinated by the marketing approach: an unwary reader might well pick these up not even realizing they are “classics” …which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. I’m also interested that Jane Austen gets such different covers:

Your Vote Counts!

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At least, it might. Pretty soon I have to finalize book orders for a new course I’m teaching in the winter term, a second-year survey of “British Literature Since 1800.” I feel strongly that despite the pressure it will put on the very limited time I have available to cover a vast range of material, I can’t teach such a course without including at least one 19th-century novel and one 20th-century novel–but picking just one puts a lot of pressure on each choice! I’ll be using the second volume of the Norton “Major Authors” anthology, which will take care of poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction. I’ve been thinking that if you’re going to showcase a single Victorian novelist, it simply has to be Dickens, and as we have at most two weeks and I will mostly have students without much literary experience, I’ve been thinking it has to be one of the shorter Dickens, meaning basically Hard Times or Great Expectations. Before I put the order in, though, I thought I’d see how many people agreed with me and how many would consider someone else the “must read” author of that century, or another book a better choice. So I’ve put a little poll at the side; feel free to place your vote there and/or to put a suggestion in the comments. For what it’s worth, my underlying theme in the course will be something like “what do people think literature is for, and how do they use literary form to get this done?” And the 20th-century novel I’ve almost decided on is Atonement, for lots of reasons, one of which is that it is kind of a two-for-one deal, given its engagement with Woolf-ian modernism (which we will address through readings from the anthology too).

Weekday Miscellany: Reading, Writing, Teaching

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It sure is quiet around the blogosphere, including around here. Must be summer! It’s not that I haven’t been reading, but for some reason–no particular reason–I haven’t been writing up as many of the books I read as I used to. At this point I’m more likely to do a full write-up only if a book has deeply engaged me, for better or for worse. This approach makes some sense, but it also means a certain slackening of discipline, so perhaps I’ll try to get back in the habit of finding at least something to say about most of my current reading….we’ll see. Right now I’m working on quite a varied collection, including Evidence, by fellow Dalhousian Ian Colford, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I’m only 400 pages in, but I’m pretty sure I disagree with Val McDermid’s claim that I won’t “read a better book this year”), and, of course, Villette. I just finished re-reading Villette this afternoon, and I was completely drawn in by the intensity of both the language and the vicarious experience of Lucy’s passions and sorrows. In the end, I think I like her because she’s a fighter; she has pride, and wit, and perseverance, even sheer cussedness. But I like her best when she cries out, “My heart will break!” More about that tomorrow. Discussion at The Valve has rather petered out, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see a surge of energy around the novel’s conclusion. Overall there have not been nearly as many comments as during last year’s Adam Bede reading, but on the other hand the comments have been extremely interesting and thoughtful. I kind of wish more of the regular Valve authors had participated…but then, catch me reading some of the stuff they post on! So no hard feelings.

As another project, I’ve been working on a piece about Trollope at the invitation of Steve Donoghue at Open Letters. Now, I’m very enthusiastic about Trollope, and so, it turns out, is Steve, and I love having this opportunity to put my thoughts into some kind of readable form. It turns out, though, that a lot of the self-conciousness I thought I had fought off by blogging all this time has come back: all the material I have so far seems both dry and obvious, and I’m riddled with anxieties about tone and audience. I guess the only thing to do is to keep writing, in the spirit of Trollope himself, who famously said, “I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. I certainly believe in the cobbler’s wax much more than [in] inspiration.” (Ah, but he didn’t know about the internet, which lets you stay quite fixed in your chair but wander, mentally, far from the task at hand….)

And, as September comes relentlessly closer, even as I cling to the hope that I’ll make more real progress on my major research projects, I find I can’t stop thinking about my fall and winter classes. I actually really enjoy planning classes, setting up the syllabi and assignments, organizing the reserve lists and Blackboard sites and so on. Of course, this is a good thing–but it’s also a bad thing, when in fact I don’t need to do this stuff so early and should be leaving it until the very eve of my first class, as apparently most of my colleagues do (hence the crowds at the photocopier in early September). I like the concrete tasks involved: there’s something satisfying in checking specific items off the to-do list, like “first day handouts” or “links for BLS” or “study questions for Aurora Floyd“. But as a result, I often choose to do these tasks instead of the more amorphous, mentally demanding, never-really-done tasks that make up my research. Really, it’s a question of self-discipline, so starting tomorrow, I vow to spend at least half of every work day on research and writing. Or maybe I can use a rewards system: for every two hours spent in concentrated work of other kinds, I can spend half an hour getting something in order for the fall or winter.

One of the biggest distractions related to my upcoming teaching is that I want to try some new things (new to me, that is, not new in any sense of breaking pedagogical ground), and so I have to figure out how to make them work. For a winter term class, for instance, a lecture class on “British Literature Since 1800,” I am thinking of a wiki assignment that I hope will help students attend to and process the material they hear in lectures, taking more responsibility for it and engaging with it more creatively. My idea (still in development) is to have each tutorial group responsible for its own wiki; a specific student would be responsible for posting his or her notes on each lecture, with the whole group responsible for editing and amplifying them until, by the end of the term, they have a collaboratively-produced study guide for the whole course. I thought perhaps we could liven things up by making a bit of a game of it, with a prize for the best wiki (pizza for the group?). I quite like this idea, in theory anyway. I try hard to make my lectures engaging (though I now understand that I really do talk pretty fast), but I also try hard to make students see that just sitting listening, passively, is not enough. I imagine that this exercise will not only make sure at least someone is listening hard some of the time, but also reveal to them that each of them may hear me differently, may pick up on an example or an argument and think differently about it. I think the wiki format will give them room to challenge each other’s interpretations as well as mine, and to put in counter-arguments, link to additional contexts, and so on. But I am only just learning how to use PBWorks (formerly PBWiki), and before I can assign something of this kind for credit I have to be quite confident about the technology myself, and I have to think hard about how to explain it to them and how to define the requirements and expectations. (If any of you have used wikis in your teaching, advice would be welcome, now, before it’s too late!)

I’m also thinking about having the students in my George Eliot graduate seminar help me build up a really good website (very primitive version started here): I’ve been surprised at the relative dearth of good web resources on GE. Here I’m more confident about the mechanics of it, but I need to think through the academic and scholarly aspects: the what, why, and how of the information we would present. I feel as if this kind of project might help them define an audience and purpose for their work that might motivate them more than sticking to the conventional seminar-presentation-and-paper format, though probably a paper would still be part of the course requirements as well. I asked one of my PhD students, now done with her coursework, what she thought of the idea, and she was very enthusiastic, which was encouraging. But again, more thinking and experimenting to do. At least this, like the wiki idea, is for a course that won’t start until January.

For fun, I’ve also just watched both seasons of In Treatment, which I found totally mesmerizing. Gabriel Byrne can come and listen to me any time.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

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I finally read Mrs. Dalloway. It was a strangely unsettling experience. I had tried to read it many times before but never made it past the second page: my problem was (and continues to be) that I don’t altogether understand how to read this novel. It drifts and wanders, and then pauses in a place that doesn’t seem very significant, but becomes so as it is allowed to just be and develop on the page. You have to be patient–which may sound like a strange thing for a Victorianist to struggle with, but it’s a different kind of patience than the kind you need for Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot. So, although I have been very interested in the novel for a long time, I kept starting it and then putting it aside. This time I decided I should stop trying so hard and just keep reading, allowing myself to drift and wander and come back. When I did that, I started to fall under the spell of the language, which is beautiful and langorous but shot through with moments of startling clarity and, sometimes, brutality. And then, finally, I began to feel I was brushing up against the ideas of the novel, not in the abstract way I had considered them by reading about the novel, but more immediately, sensually as well as intellectually. So much has been written on this novel that I won’t add any more commentary of my own, except the brief observation that I hadn’t realized it was so much about London. Instead, here are my two favourite passages (so far):

Big Ben struck the half-hour.

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell, making the moment solemn. . . . Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? When, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

And,

She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). The (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Villette Chapters 1-35: “Oubliez les Professeurs!”

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The thread is now open at The Valve for discussion of this week’s installment of Villette. In case you are wondering whether you should have joined us in this project, taste this:

What was become of that curious one-sided friendship which was half marble and half life; only on one hand truth, and on the other perhaps a jest?

Was this feeling dead? I do now know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet, and dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through coffin-chinks.

Clearly the folks behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are behind the curve: the undead lurk already in Charlotte Bronte’s perverse imagination.

Nota Bene: Interview on Middlemarch

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Back in May I made a trip to Ottawa to present a version of my work on Ahdaf Soueif at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. While I was there I enjoyed meeting up with Nigel Beale; we had a good dinner and talked a lot about books and reading and criticism, and then recorded a conversation about Middlemarch for Nigel’s “Biblio File” collection. The interview is now available at Nigel’s site. As I’ve mentioned here before, I have a bit of a reputation for talking fast, which I admit is (ahem) confirmed by this recording (I think I get a bit better as we go along, so if you do tune in, bear with me…). On the other hand, I also speak more or less in complete sentences, which I suppose counts in my favour. Ironically, I wondered before we started if I’d be able to think of much to say, as the set-up was informal and we didn’t prepare at all; as it turned out, Nigel was probably wondering if he’d be able to get me to shut up. But then, isn’t it the mark of a good interviewer that he keeps his subject talking? Thanks, Nigel, for giving me a chance to talk (and talk) about my favourite book–after listening to us, I feel charged up about teaching it again this year. I stand by my closing comments: it never disappoints.