In 2020, the author, Korean, adopted as a child, nearly 30, decides she needs to find her biological mother before her mother dies. Finding few leads, clues, she hires a private detective who disappears. Then she takes the task of investigating on her own. This book details her investigation, her long relationship with a Serbian furniture mover, life with the parents who adopted her, and her career as a writer, plus going to South Korea to meet her biological family.
Her writing style is a bit different and somewhat rambling. However, for those who have experienced the same sort of search, this book provides details on how to go about finding “the lost”.
This memoir tells the tale of an unusual tour for a specific purpose, to follow the path of Mennonites who left Europe to escape conscription into the army since the Mennonites are pacifists. The author’s own life is unusual. Her mother was a Swiss Mennonite missionary to Somalia. Her Muslim Somali father taught the Mennonite missionaries Swahili. The two met and married. Samatar grew up and lives as a Mennonite. She teaches African and Arabic literature at James Madison Un. She is most famous for her fantasy novels and short stories which is how I discovered her writing.
In the late 19th century a group of German speaking Mennonites left Russia for Central Asia where their leader believed Christ would return. They suffered many hardships, rejection, abuse, but finally found a place that welcomed them in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva in what is now Uzbekistan. There they built a white church which the locals called Ak Metchet, the White Mosque. Their village lasted 50 years.
If you go online, you can find tours today that follow the route of these Mennonite travelers, trace their route. This book details Samatar’s experiences on the tour, the tour guides, the food, the architecture, the culture and the history: a 15th century astronomer king, the first Uzbek photographer, Mennonite martyrs. She also discusses her own unique upbringing, local beliefs and culture, how people develop their own personal identity, and the surprising interconnections people sometimes discover.
Shafak is a popular Turkish writer. One of my all time favorite books is her novel about the life of Rumi.
“Three Daughters of Eve” takes place one evening in Istanbul in 2016. Peri, one of the daughters from the title, is on her way to a fancy party when a thief snatches her purse out of the back seat of her car which is stalled in traffic. She parks the car and chases him through back alleys. As she fights him for her purse, an old photo falls to the ground. It portrays three young women and their university professor. This photo jars her mind, takes her back to her time at Oxford University when she was a student there in 2000-2002, her childhood in Istanbul in the 1980s and 90s, and her life. She thinks back to her life with her two friends, Shirin, an adventurous Iranian young woman, and Mona, a devout Egyptian Muslim who word a headscarf out of choice. And then there is the famous professor Azur, whose class on God either makes students hate or love him and the scandal that caused Peri to return to Istanbul.
Until her daughter, who was in the car and eventually chases her mother down in the alley, sees the photo, no one, except her husband, seems to have known Peri even went to Oxford. Her daughter mentions it at the party while everyone is arguing about East and West and politics and who has the most money and how they acquired it. Peri tries to deflect questions, changes the subject, and keeps remembering her past: her parents, a father quite irreligious, her mother a devout Muslim, their endless arguments and hostility, her brothers, her childhood and her stint at Oxford.
Through the story of Peri’s life, this novel explores personal identity, East-West history and politics, the meaning of marriage and friendship.
This book contains 20 fantastical and dystopian short stories. I found them fascinating with topics ranging from selkies to ogres to ghouls to jinns to witches (in this case positive ones). The settings range from US to Africa to a settlement in outer space (the story “Fallow”). Divided into two sections, Tender Bodies, Tender Landscapes, these stories address human frailty, anger, greed, extreme religions and how humans treat each other (both good and bad) and what might occur in the future if people do not behave better. “Fallow” is a sort of handmaid’s tale where instead of being on Earth–which has been basically destroyed–a group of extreme religious folks have made a place for themselves on another planet after escaping Earth. If anyone from Earth accidentally shows up, they are in big trouble unless they become just like the people already there. Otherwise, they do not kill them–that is wrong–but just sort of let them slowly die. These stories, both brutal and lovely, display an incredible imagination.
While a lot of the world is focused on Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, since April 2023, two groups, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, have been fighting for control of Sudan. 11.1 million people are displaced and more than 17,000 killed, mostly civilians including children. Currently, for the second time since 2003, famine lurks at the door of Darfur state. Although I wrote the poem thinking about Sudan, a lot of the same conditions apply to Congo.
Amidst the denuded trees along a wide
boulevard walked a tall, dark-haired girl
carrying a large basket filled with a few
deep red pomegranates, two brown
eggs and three delicate pastries
filled with pineapple, cinnamon, and
guava, her favorite. She felt lucky.
Her mother sent her to the market, her mother
ill with ague, shivering, fevered,
jaundiced, too young to be dying, her father
killed in the endless wars which had
leveled so many cities and villages.
Men filled with the desire for revenge, for power,
never thinking how forgiveness and love could
overcome the endless devastation.
People plagued by angry men, men so
quick to condemn all not their tribe, their own,
retribution driving them week after week.
Some lay dying on the streets or dead as
the girl walked around their bodies
under the relentless, tropical sun.
Void of relief, fearful but determined, she
walked on toward the remains of her home.
Xenophobia once again stalked the streets,
young men brandishing assault rifles. Animals in the
I waited for more than a year to get this book via the library. It stayed on the best seller lists for months and months and has been translated into more than twenty languages. It is the saga of one family from 1900 to 1977. The setting is the Kerala area of India (I have been to India but not this area). It is unique compared to much of India in that Christians, Muslims, and Hindus live in relative peace with each other. Unlike the more arid parts of India, this is a place dominated by water which is a major theme in the book. Several of the main characters in the book suffer from an inherited Condition, as they refer to it. In every generation, at least one person dies from drowning.
The book begins with a 12 year old girl being married off to a 40 some year old widower. She has to travel far from her family via water. He is kind and patient but unlike her, who loves the water, he will travel many extra miles to avoid even traveling by water. He is terrified of water because he has the Condition. Eventually, she becomes the family matriarch, Big Ammachi. This is her story and the story of her descendants, the Christian community in Kerala, and the fate of one British man who remained in India after independence. It is also the story of the progress of medicine (Big Ammachi’s granddaughter is determined to become a doctor and find what causes the Condition) and how one family experiences many hardships to further future generations.
The author, Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford, details this fictional family’s history for several generations in 715 pages. It sounds daunting but I kept reading because I wanted to know what happens to all the people. At the same time, I found this to be one of the saddest books I have ever read. Due to the Condition and leprosy, for which there was no cure at the time, many people’s lives are horrendously affected. I did learn a lot about medicine and medical advances, how leprosy destroyed lives, Kerala and, much to my amazement, that many Christians in Kerala continued to follow the Hindu caste system.
A tale based on a Bengali legend about a merchant called the Gun Merchant, Bonduki Sadagar, this novel not only takes place in the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans but also in Venice. It has nothing to do with guns but demonstrates how differences in language use among languages and translations can lead to total mistranslation. The narrator is an older, male, Bengali, rare book dealer who grew up in Kolkata but now lives in Brooklyn most of the year and goes back “home” occasionally. When he meets a distant relative by chance at a party, he finds himself enmeshed in the Gun Merchant tale and finds himself in search of a remote shrine where a king cobra lives. His adventure leads him to meet two young men and reconnect with an old friend, an Italian woman who is a famous historian.
What fascinated me most about this novel was learning all about the immense number of historical connections between the Bengali part of India and Venice especially related to trade and persons of Jewish descent. It is also filled with lessons in relationships among languages and history. For example, I learned the origin of the word ghetto. During the 17th century a part of Venice, Getto, was where their large and prosperous Jewish population was forced to live, Venice being one of few European cities where Jews were safe. Thus the word designating a part of the city became the word ghetto.
It is also a story about the risks and dangers of immigrants trying to get to Europe. I learned many Bengalis, mostly from Bangladesh, live in Venice and the numerous historical connections between the Bengali speaking areas of the world and Venice.
Rio, a young Black woman, and her husband, Gibraltar, academics living in Boston, become concerned and disillusioned with their current lives. She finds an abandoned restaurant on top of a hill in western Massachusetts. Heartbroken after the death of her newborn, she is determined to create a safe, new, underground society beneath the restaurant. She finds a benefactor and her dream begins to take place. Via word of mouth, others hear about this safe place for the “lost” and disillusioned and head there. These include two homeless men from Chicago, a successful, young journalist, and a former soccer player.
Can such a society work? What happens if they run out of money? Regardless, can the care individuals have for each other save them?
Note: Depending on what kind of novels you prefer, this may or may not be a book for you. Several of the characters have serious mental issues, some think it is ok to resort to violence to save what they believe in and find ways to justify their actions, some seem very, very “lost”.
writingontherim 