Hisham Matar is a relatively young and new Arab writer who writes in English.

I loved this book. Read a very good review at the following site:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/29/featuresreviews.guardianreview19

Hisham Matar: Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011)

I had the pleasure of meeting Hisham recently in Dublin at the Dublin Writer’s Festival. He talked about the opening sentence of the book which he read to us and said that once he had found this sentence it became the pivot upon which the book moved. “There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table.”  The book is not autobiographical. Hisham’s own Libyan father disappeared in 1990s and his fate remains unresolved to the present. Hisham, however, is not chronicling the events of his father’s disappearance but rather as he explained at the book reading in Dublin the desire to explore the existential event of a disappearance and all that entails. The narrator is a young boy, Nuri, at the beginning of the novel. His mother, a dim figure, dies from an unexplained illness or event and he is left alone with his father who never does seem comfortable with the responsibility of a young son. The father remarries, Mona, a young woman as close in age to his son as she is to him and the passion of the young boy for his father’s wife is beautifully narrated. The father disappears and the two are thrown together and then drift apart as grows into a confident but solitary academic in the UK who eventually returns to Egypt to try to find the boy he was and the father he lost. There are interesting twists to the story and Matar takes us right inside the mind of the narrator with his very fluid and addictive style.

Patti Smith: Just Kids (2010) Patti Smith tells the story of herself and Robert Mapplethorpe in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the book takes us the death of Robert in 1989. This is not just the story of the amazing friendship between these two incredibly talented people; it is also a chronicle of the time in New York of a city that was buzzing with change and creativity. It is also a testament to the mind and talent of this amazing woman that is Patti Smith. She emerges as a powerful person totally dedicated to her determination to become a poet and willing to go through all kinds of pain and deprivation to achieve her goal.  She was mostly self-educated and read and absorbed poets such as Rimbaud, Rilke, Blake and many others. Her emergence as one of the great rock/ punk musicians of the times is almost by chance as she put some of her poems to music. Through all the trials that these two amazing people went through, they remained firm friends right to Mapplethorpe’s death. Patti emerges as an incredibly honest person whose life has been totally dedicated to art, music, poetry and the people who have shared these experiences with her. She is still going strong. I heard her in Venice in the summer of 2010 at a marvelous concert in St Mark’s Square. This weekend she sang in Skibereen. Long may it last Patti – Power to the People.

Robert Lacey: Inside the Kingdom  (2009): This is a really great read as Lacey who has recorded the doings of the kingdom for decades manages to write a book in which he says what he wants without offending those who could very easily be offended. Lacey begins in the Preface with the following: “In theory Saudi Arabia should not exist – its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than men, and running their oil-rich country on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops are closed five times a day, executions take place in the street – and let us note even get started on the status of women. Saudi Arabia is one of the planet’s enduring enigmas.”  Lacey wrote his first book about Saudi Arabia in 1981 in which he looks at a medieval kingdom emerging as an oil rich state and this book carries on to look at the Kingdom since which spawned 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers and of course Osama Bin Laden. His first book was originally banned in Saudi Arabia but he was invited back in 2006 to write this sequel. It is definitely worth the read.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: 1492 (2010): The book positions 1492 as the beginning of the modern world for a whole range of reasons and not just because of Columbus’ voyage in search of a new route to the Indies and China.  The conflict between religious and secular power intensified as the world opened up and men became more aware of natural rather than supernatural phenomena, including how to manage the winds which provided more opportunity to control sea voyages. A great cast of characters wander through the pages and are presented in real life  characterizations along with the issues that shaped the future of countries and regions like Europe, the Americas and China.

Kao Yu-Pao Story of a Poor Peasant Boy: Kao Yu-Pao (1960): Reading this book written by the man who was the boy in the story reminds one of why an ideology like Communism was so successful in China in the mid 20th century. This is not great literature but is a powerful story of suffering, hardship, abuse and why a young man grew up to seek revenge on the overlords both Chinese and Japanese who made their lives absolute hell in  the farms, villages and towns of pre-Communist China.  Kao Yu-Pao, the boy, was deprived of the chance of an education and forced to go work as a swineherd by a tyrannical landlord. However, under liberation he went to university and became a newspaper editor. The book tells of the boy’s struggles growing up in the village and the sad journey of the family to the city where conditions were no better.

Amin Maalouf: The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1984). We were raised on the Western view of the crusades, sanitized and entirely delivered from a European perspective so it was great to read this scholarly book on my travels through the Middle East. Maalouf who writes in French (this is a translation) has used a wide range of primary sources from Arab chronicles based often on eye witness accounts to give us a much more complex picture of events in the Levant at the time of the crusades than I had previously read. Internal conflicts among the local tribes, alliances and misalliances between these local groups or with Frankish invaders constantly shifted the balance of power and influence often causing untold tragedies for residents. Intrigue and cruelty were prevalent.  A book like this provides a  comprehensive picture of what happened and Maalouf is a wonderful stylistic writer even through translation.

Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine (2007) – a scary theory/ doctrine as Klein explains Milton Friedmans’ observations that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”  Klein goes on to explore how this doctrine affected the development of events in a range of locations including Chile, Russia, Chile, Iraq, Lebanon and the USA itself. A scary book but makes perfect logical sense when it is all put together as Klein does.

Fareed Zakaria: The Post American World (2008) - Zakaria begins his book by saying that “This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else”. He explains the great changes that are taking place in the world with power, especially economic power, shifting to the East and Far East. He talks about the importance of America accepting this shift, recognizing its declining importance in political events and becoming more of an honest broker in world affairs.  The way forward is not to develop an obsession with catching the terrorists whoever they might be but developing strategies to ensure that the world’s economy. society and political systems continue in spite of such terrorist events.

Matilde Asensi: The Last Cato (2001) – This is a great adventure story set in the context of Christian myth and scholarship and in my view streets ahead of the Da Vinci Code. Characters  arrogant, intellectual and exciting set out to discover the secret of the True Cross. There is lots of intrigue, excitement, scholarship and even some romance. A great read.

Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America (2010) – an interesting approach to the presentation of two totally different perspectives on France at the time of the French Revolution. The narrative moves between the war torn aristocratic environment of revolutionary France to America with its emerging democracy and egalitarianism.

The Ireland books – back in Dublin I have found myself rereading books on Dublin/ Ireland trying to understand what has happened to the little island. Have we taken a wrong direction or is this who we really are?

James Plunkett: Strumpet City (1969) – This is a wonderful book and enjoyable on the second read. It gives a much more insightful picture of early 20th century Dublin than Angela’s Ashes. The events of the novel take place primarily during eh lockout of 1913 under James Larkin and gives a wonderful picture of the society at the time both rich and excruciatingly poor citizens of inner Dublin. It also provides an insightful view of the role of the church among the wealthy and impoverished. It was particularly interesting reading at the current economic critical times and reflecting on why and how we have ended in the state we are in. The corruption both at the individual and political level is still a burning issue.

Frank McDonald & James Nix: Chaos at the Crossroads. (2005) This book chronicles the corruption, vested interests and disgusting behaviour of many players in the development of the real estate world in Ireland over the last 20 years or so.  The writers see the country being wrecked by the pathetic policies of greedy politicians particularly the Fianna Fail party in power since 1997. In m,any cases, local councils protested at decisions about rural and urban sprawl to have their protestations over-ridden and dismissed by vested interest politicians. A depressing but wonderful book. I am a big fan of Frank McDonald.

F.S.L. Lyons: Culture and Anarchy in Ireland (1979) – Another re-read in which the author shows the four conflicting cultures – Gaelic, English, Angl-Irish and Ulster Protestant – that go into the making of modern Ireland. The book concentrates on the period between the fall of Parnell in 1890 and the death of Yeats in 1939 and Lyons conclusions are very interesting and may indicate issues that lay unresolved for years and have only begun to disappear with economic changes and the receding of the church. Lyons concludes: “The diversity has been a diversity of ways of life which are deeply embedded in the past and of which the much advertised political differences are but the outward and visible sign. This was the true anarchy that beset the country.  During the period from Parnell to Yeats, it was not primarily an anarchy of violence in the streets, of contempt for law and order such as to make the island, or any part of it, permanently ungovernable. It was rather an anarchy in the mind and in the heart, an anarchy that sprang from the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreoncilable cultures unable to live together or live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history.

Out of Ireland have we come;

Great hatred little room,

Maimed us at the start.

Ulick O’Connor: The Troubles 1912-1922.(1975) – Ulick O’Connor was one of the major voices of the 60′s and 70′s on Irish issues. Here he gives us an account of the events of the ten years surrounding the Rising of 1916 and the book is based on first hand interviews and eye witness accounts.  Good for information and setting the scene for  later events of the century in Ireland.

Eamonn Duffy: Faith of our Fathers (2004)  – an interesting and frank discussion by a believer of the catholic Church as it began its post modern trip in post Vatican 2. He focuses on eh importance of tradition.

Robert Lacey: Inside the Kingdom. (2009) – This is a great book and gives a powerful insight into post 2001 Saudi Arabia along with providing the historical context. Lacey does a great job of providing an honest analysis while ensuring that he retains the politeness and sensitivity necessary for someone writing about the reserved gulf societies without jeopardizing his right to return.

Linda Grant: When I lived in Modern Times. (2000) – This book is very interesting for about three quarters of the events but its ending is extremely irritating and unbelievable. A writer tackles a fascinating topic in a work of fiction and gives interesting perspectives on the topic seems to tire of her narrative near the end and gives us a kind of semi Hollywood ending – very annoying.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Eating Animals (2009) – If I were not a vegetarian before reading this book, I would be by the end. The author provides well researched information about the American food industry particularly in the raising of chickens, turkeys and pigs. All meat eaters should read this and rethink. In addition, there is the contribution of the meat industry to global warming.

Barbara Ehrenreich: This land is their land (2008) Reports from a divided land.

Alia Younis: The Night Counter (2009)

2. Second Language grammar: Learning and Teaching : William Rutherford

This is a book I have been through a number of times but find myself picking it up again from time to time to reread.  Rutherford clarifies the organic nature of language and the language learning process. I was a bit sceptical first time I picked it up with the expression ‘consciousness raising’ but that is really what language learning is all about. I am sure I shall dip into this book again and again.

3. Cultural Globalization and Language education: B. Kumaravadivelu

This book was a great find as was knowledge about the author and his contribution to the field of language learning. There is a lot of quotable information here that suits the direction taken in the post global world. It is great to find a writer who argues the importance of taking approaches other than the dominant western paradigm into consideration in teaching and learning. Kumar explores the complexity of culture and the dangers of stereotypes in approaching cultural issues. He argues for the importance of learning from each other and not about each other and believes that this is the only way we will achieve real liberty and true learning.

4. Mysteries of the Middle Ages: Thomas Cahill

5. The Sixties: Jenny Diski

1. The Wedding of Zein

This is pure traditional Sudan – a village with all its characters, ‘normal’ and idiosyncratic. Everyone has his/ her place because each one was created the way he was created for a reason – by God and by the author! The reaction to the news of Zein’s forthcoming wedding is delightful – it grips the village with an excitement that negates everything else. The story then backtracks so we see why this news is so exciting and worthy of so much gossip. All the characters are there – from the Sheikh to the Imam, to the boys, the beautiful girls, the gossiping crowds, the headmaster, so real and so Sudanese. Salih’s style of writing is delightful – enough description but not over-done. His story of the return of Seif al-Din Badawi, the prodigal son after the death of his father is  earthy and visual. “He carried a stick of the sort used in the east of Sudan and had no luggage whatsover. His hair was ruffled  as a sayal acacia tree, his beard thick and dirty, and his face that of a man who has come back from Hell-fire. He gave greeting to no one and all eyes avoided him. However, his eldest uncle on his father’s side walked up to him and spat in his face, and when the news of his arrival reached his mother in the other side of the house where she was leading the women of the household in their mourning of the deceased, she broke into renewed wailing as though her husband had just died.”

2. The Season of Migration to the North

This is Salih’s great work in my view – it explores culture, alienation, occidentalism, orientalism, the outsider, the insider within the context of a Sudanese village. That in a sense is what makes it great. The narrator is a character who has a foot in both worlds, that of the village and the great outside. He talks about his return from studying abroad, of the villagers’ welcome and the melting of the ‘piece of ice’ inside him “as though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone – that life warmth of the tribe which I had lost for a time in a land ‘whose fishes die of the cold’”. But the novel is not concerned with the narrator’s dilemma though that appears periodically through the book. No, this is a tale of Mustafa who has come to live in the narrator’s village during his absence. Mustafa is different to all the others and as the story unfolds we realize why. Mustafa was an outsider from birth. Raised alone by his mother with no relatives and with a rather odd relationship even with his mother, Mustafa relished the freedom that the absence of a family presented. He was the first to go abroad to study leaving his mother with “no tears, no kisses, no fuss.” “Two human beings had walked along a part of the road together, then each had gone his way. This was in fact the last thing she said to me, for I did not see her again.”  Mustafa’s life  is an enigma and his disappearance even more so. This is a novel that Edward Said mentions in his discussion on Orientalism but it fits very much into the tradition of the existential literature of Sartre and Camus. This is a world where we have moved beyond the absolute values of the traditional environment – it is a place where we make choices and we live with the consequences of those choices. We create ourselves and we live or die with that creation. “Now I am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning.”   I feel very fortunate to have met Tayib Salih and to have heard him talk about his work.

3. Eric R. Kandel: In Search of Memory

Kandel’s discussion of his search to understand how memory operates is truly fascinating. Though it discusses a lot of scientific facts and ideas, it is immensely readable. Kandel began life in Vienna, Austria but he and his Jewish family were forced to flee in 1938 when Nazis took over Vienna. He grew up in New York where he determined to become a psychoanalyst and follow in Freud’s footprints.  The journey took him through medical school, an exploration of cell biology, neurobiology and genetics.  His painstaking work eventually won him the Nobel Prize for physiology/ medicine in 2000. The book covers fascinating political and social details as well as the complex but absorbing analysis of his scientific journey. He was part of scientific discoveries that proved the unity of the brain and mind. He explained that “we now understand that every mental state is a brain state and every mental disorder is a disorder of the brain. Treatments work by altering the structure and function of the brain.”  There is still much to learn because as  Kandel explains though we understand something of cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory storage, it is important to move to system properties of memory. we still do not know the neural circuits that are responsible for various types of memory.

4.Peter Backhaus: Lingusitic Landscapes

This is a book that looks at an old event but a new study. Signs have always been part of the public space but it is only recently that it has become a linguistic study in its own right. The term Linguistic Landscapes was first used apparently in 1997 in reference to signs in the Canadian provinces.  The term geosemiotics is now also used. This book gives a good theoretical background to the analysis of signs in public places by discussing the semiotic background to such a study. It then goes on to summarize previous studies before getting to the main focus of the study, a look at signs in Tokyo. The book is an exciting discovery for me as I have long been fascinated by street signs particularly from a linguistic perspective. I can now expand this interest into the political and social domains.

2. Yasunari Kawabata: Snow Country – a re-read of this novel by the Nobel prize winning Japanese novelist selected from the shelf because of its title in the recent freezing weather in Europe. Shimamura, a Tokyo playboy/man goes to the remote hot springs town of yuzawa and involves himself in an affair with the rural geisha, Komako. The novel contrasts the aloofness and detachment of the urban sophisticate, Shimamura, with the simple, traditional, rural komako. A very poetic read.

3. Knut Hamsum: Hunger (Robert Bly’s translation) – Another re-read and fascinating again second time around. The book is written from the perspective of a young struggling writer in Norway at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. The story recounts the trials and troubles of the writer as he tries to survive while waiting to have pieces of work published. He is overcome by hunger and days pass when he has nothing to eat. He tries to hold on to his artistic soul, thoughts and inspirations as he explores his own psyche in the face of his growing disastrous circumstances.  The novel explores the effects of his increasing hunger and impoverished circumstances on his body. At another level, his novel has been seen as a criticism of the focus of writers in the late 19th century on social realism. This is a profoundly psychological novel.

4. Fintan O’Toole: Ship of Fools, How Stupidity and Corruption sank the Celtic Tiger – O’Toole shows how Irish politicians, bankers and developers created a huge illusionary world of prosperity and profit through the late 1990s and early 2000s that has come crashing around the heads of every Irish person living on the island. The question one is left with after reading the book is whether or not these political and financial criminals believed and still believe their own stories as the lie goes on. O’Toole summarizes the major events that identify and define the Celtic Tiger, highlighting the origin of ‘ethitical’ banking in the Ansbacher / Cayman Island scams. Inconsistencies and paradoxes abound in the events of the last 15 years.  He shows how so many were willing to step into the gentry role and create a new feudalism in Ireland. When the country was being hailed as the new technological capital of the world, so little of technology was being used and taught in everyday life. He argues that the Irish were living in an illusion, a fantasy that drew them closer to Dubai, Bermuda and Cape Verde than it did to the reality of its windswept position on the edge of Europe and at the door to the wide Atlantic. He deals with the demise of the church authority and the failure of the country to develop a civic morality to replace the authority of the church. A good summary of the main events leading to the current crisis and a good read.

5. James Lovelock: The Revenge of Gaia -Lovelock argues that the earth is a total interwoven system designed not just for the convenience of humans and about which we need to devote attention and change our attitude “we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does this most of our descendants will die.” He argues that the current focus on renewable sources of energy is misdirected and believes that we must  ”accept nuclear energy as the one safe and proven energy source that has minimal global consequences.” Gaia, he explains, is a thin shell of matter surrounding the earth that keeps it fit for human habitation. It consists of animate and inanimate matter and life is facilitated by sunlight. If the sun becomes too hot or too cold, this delicate life balance will be upset.  He creates the metaphor of the earth as a large animal that can accommodate to a limited variation in earth’s temperature. Lovelock explains how the chemical balance of the living universe is being disturbed even by well-intentioned environmentalists and green party members. Over-population, over-urbanization and over-use of natural resources by self-centred humans is contributing to the accelerating process of the destruction of the earth. He sees earth in its natural state as a self-regulating, self-healing system. He concludes that “the more we meddle with the Earth’s composition and try to fix its climate, the more we take on the responsibility for keeping the Earth a fit place for life, until eventually our whole lives may be spent in drudgery doing the tasks that previously Gaia had freely done for over three billion years.” If we let Earth do it in its own way, the earth will regulate itself. We need to stop damaging and mainpulating it.

From a style perspective, however, the book is not very enjoyable. The style of writing is erratic and the voices are mixed.  It is hard to tell who is actually telling the story. The book is full of details that can be confusing.  It was viewed as a book that is a must read for its content but most definitely not for its style of writing.

2. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche: Half of a Yellow Sun – fiction but takes you through the harrowing events of the Nigerian/ Biafran war of the late 1960s.

3. Daniel Everett: Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes – Everett lived with and studied the Piraha tribe in remote Brazil. He was the first linguist to record and understand the language of this tribe. He comes to some interesting conclusions based on his analysis of the language. He questions Chomsky’s theories of Universal Grammar  and suggests that human cognition rather than any specific propensity to language acquistion can explain human communication. 

4. Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book – a great read that draws the world and history together in this mystery surrounding the restoration of a sacred book.

5. Cearbhall O Dalaigh: Celtic Meltdown: Why Ireland is Broke and How We Can Fix It – sums it all up and explains why Ireland has suffered so disastrously from the global crash of 2008.  There is a way forward but it means bringing in high standards of accountability with everyone willing to share in the solution. Cover-up lies at the root of the current approach and everything must be revealed and accepted.

6. Kieran Allen: Ireland’s Economic Crash – this book argues for a government take-over and the institution of a public works scheme to create employment. Allen refers to Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era as ‘a casino economy’ where vast wealth was wasted by the government. It is time for them to take responsibility.

Adiga sets out to tell the story of India from the bottom up. The format of the book is quite clever as the narrator, a murdering ex rickshaw/ taxi driver tells his story in a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China who is about to visit India. In a number of night time epistles to Wen, Balram alias Ashok tells the Chinese premier how he came to be a wealthy man in Bangalore. No doubt this book fits into the recent trend to tell the story of India from the poor man’s view. The character began life in a village and determined to work his way out. he manages but at the cost of another life. This book is easy to read, very entertaining and also plenty to reflect on. The narrator tells us: ‘I am tomorrow. In terms of formal education, I may be somewhat lacking. I never finished school, to put it bluntly. Who cares! I haven’t read many books, but I’ve read the ones that count.’ Indeed in this book India has moved into the Age of Kali. An enjoyable read.

2. The Exception: Christian Jungersen

I didn’t enjoy this book but I couldn’t put it down. The setting is the Centre of Genocide in Denmark where four women work out the petty tensions and neuroses that trouble their working life against the backdrop of sensational kidnapping, Serbian murderers to suggest that in the end it is not the Serb, or the Kenyan who is peculiarly driven to genocide. The possibility is within us all. A strange book but lots to reflect on.