Book Review: The Silence and the Roar (2004) by Nihad Sirees

In a recent article in the Guardian, British novelist Will Self proclaimed that the "serious" novel is dead. If the chewy prose style and rambling arguments in the article are any indication of what his novels are like, Self is his own worst enemy when it comes to putting literature on life support. Perhaps if Self had looked outside the Anglo-American axis of novelists he might have realized that serious novels are very much alive. In particular, he should look towards Syria where a trio of novelists, Rafik Schami, Khaled Khalifa and Nihad Sirees, show that "serious" novels are alive and well and terribly important. The novels these three have produced are deadly serious in that they deal in their separate ways with the cruelties inflicted on the Syrian people by the state and by a society riven with injustices based on religion, class and gender. These writers have chosen novels instead of non-fiction because only the novel can capture the psychology and emotion of terror and oppression in a way that newspaper articles and histories can't. Rafik Schami's The Dark Side of Love (review here) is an epic novel that X-rays Syrian society from top to bottom, and Khaled Khalifa's In Praise of Hatred (review here) shows how gender discrimination and persecution can produce a religious fanatic.

The Silence and the Roar follows a writer named Fathi Sheen as he runs afoul of the state security services over the course of one day. The country and its "Leader" aren't named, but it's very clearly Syria. Sirees' novel is an exploration of the mass psychology used by the state to keep its citizens both loyal and fearful. The character of Sheen is a special case for the state because as much as it dislikes his seditious writing, it badly wants one of the country's most prominent writers on its side. So while Sheen is being harassed and threatened by the state, he's also being courted by them with promises of a prestigious job.

Sirees' novel is short but brutally effective in describing the hysteria, fear, and violence that attends any kind of political personality cult. The feverish mass street demonstrations in praise of the Leader that begin the story are strikingly described, and become a counterpoint to Sheen's intensely sexual relationship with his girlfriend; Sheen's only escape from the impersonal roar of the crowd is to turn to the intimacy of lovemaking with his girlfriend. In tone the novel is reminiscent of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and structurally it borrows from Ulysses, with Sheen traipsing around the city trying to hold his life and career together, and map out some kind of future for himself. I'm not entirely sure what Will Self's definition of a serious novel is, but if this isn't it then there really isn't any future for literature.

Book Review: In Praise of Hatred (2008) by Khaled Khalifa

The setting for this novel is Syria during the early 1980s when the Assad regime cracked down on rival sects and political protestors with mass killings, political assassinations, and large-scale arrests. It was a brutal time in Syria's modern history, although now dwarfed by the current civil war. The conflict of the '80s has no name to fix it in history, but tens of thousands were killed by the government before the protests died down.

The central character in Hatred is an unnamed teenage girl living in a typical upper-middle-class Aleppo household who becomes radicalized and joins an underground group distributing anti-Assad leaflets. Khalifa is writing about a violent political upheaval, but he hasn't written a political novel. Taking a page from fellow Syrian writer Rafik Schami's playbook, Khalifa has written a novel about the psychological underpinnings and motivations of the troubles that afflict the Arab world. Khalifa also follows Schami's lead in creating a multiverse of stories that weave in and out of the central story, in this case the progress of the heroine from troubled teenager to political prisoner. Khalifa is nowhere near as good a writer as Schami. His prose isn't as magical or imaginative, and at times his writing is more polemical than literary. Like Schami, however, he argues that Syria's tragedy (and that of other Arab states) is a reflection of suffocating traditions, tribal loyalties, sectarian hatreds, and a political class that sees self-aggrandizement (for the individual and his clan/tribe/family) as the raison d'etre of political power.

Khalifa, Schami and Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz have used the role of women in Arab society to symbolize and explain the anxieties and injustices of their respective countries. In Schami's The Calligrapher's Secret (my review), the calligrapher of the title wants to modernize the Arabic language but fails spectacularly due to his brutal, and traditional, treatment of his wife. In Hatred, the heroine's drift into fundamentalism and loathing for other sects and those she sees as being insufficiently pious, is clearly shown to be a symptom of her sexual frustration and sense of confinement as a female walled in by restrictive customs and a savagely patriarchal culture. This point is made very clear in a section of the novel called "Embalmed Butterflies", which is a neat description of the kind of life lived by the novel's female characters, almost all of whom suffer from the cruelties of gender slavery. Novelists like Khalifa, Schami and Mahfouz show that the gender slavery imposed on women in some Muslim countries has an equally pernicious influence on the overall health of the country. In their novels we can see that all the tyrannical orders and blind, spiteful crimes of tradition and honour that women suffer within the four walls of their fearfully guarded homes, are transferred to the population as whole, only with far more devastating effect. The protests in Egypt's Tahrir Square are a neat example of this: the authorities responded to protests against the old order with brutal violence, and both sides took advantage of the chaos to sexually assault women participating in or covering the protests. It seems that democracy and equality needs to begin in the households of Syria and Egypt before it can spread to the body politic.

Book Review: The Dark Side of Love (2004) by Rafik Schami

By the time I finish writing this post, or by the time you finish reading it, the odds are good that President Assad of Syria will have fled his country or will be swinging from a lamp post. Syria looks certain to be joining the lengthening list of Arab countries that have shown their dictators the door and/or the business end of a Kalashnikov. One of the best ways of understanding how all this has come to pass is to read the works of Rafik Schami, a Syrian-born writer living in exile in Germany since 1970. Schami, an Arab-Christian, writes in German and has scooped all the major German literary prizes. Only a few of his novels have been translated into English, and the finest of them is The Dark Side of Love. It's also the novel that does the best job of giving some cultural background to the so-called Arab Spring. I first read it just before I started this blog, but now seems like a good time to review it.

The Dark Side of Love is a multi-generational saga of a blood feud between two Christian families in Syria. The story begins in the early 1900s and ends in the late 1960s, and along the way Schami introduces dozens of characters and almost as many sub-plots. If this sounds dense and daunting, it isn't. Schami is a storyteller in the same class as Dickens. He can create memorable and interesting characters with no apparent effort, and their stories, all looped around the central theme of the feud, are never less than fascinating. Schami's story is basically serious and, in parts, tragic, but the novel is also shot through with moments of beauty and humour. Schami is also unafraid to send his story off in some unusual directions, most notably, for example, when one of the major characters has a sexual interlude with a donkey. That's right, a donkey.

The Dark Side of Love is nothing less than a combination MRI, X-ray, and CAT scan of life in Syria, from high to low, in the 20th century. What we learn from this is that Syria, like many other Arab countries, is a  country in name only. People in Syria take their identity from, and are only loyal to, their family, clan, tribe, religion and sect, roughly in that order. The state falls into the same category as the weather: unpredictable, frequently unpleasant, and beyond the influence of man. Until lately. It's clear that these scabrous regimes have lasted as long as they have largely because the citizenry have tried to live their lives without being noticed by or involved with the powers that be. It's always been the safest way to go through life. Once the state goes too far, however, tribe and clan loyalties provide a powerful rallying point for revolutionary forces.

Don't give a toss about Syria? That's fine, because this novel can be enjoyed entirely without any knowledge of the history or politics of Syria. My only problem with the book is the title; it sounds far too much like something Danielle Steel might have written. For my reviews of Schami`s other novels, The Calligrapher`s Secret and Damascus Nights, click here and here.

Book Review: Damascus Nights (1989) by Rafik Schami

In One Thousand and One Nights, the great Arab classic of fantasy and adventure, Scheherazade tells 1,001 stories to her husband King Shahryar. The king has killed every one of his previous wives after one night of marriage. Clever Scheherazade keeps herself alive by telling the king a new story every night but leaving it unfinished by dawn. The king keeps her alive in order to hear the end of the story the next night. In this way Scheherazade keeps herself alive until the king eventually realizes the error of his ways and agrees to spare her life.

Rafik Schami takes the basic concept of this classic of Arabian literature and sets it in Damascus in 1959. Salim the Coachman, a famous storyteller who has spent most his life driving a coach between Damascus and Beirut, is visited in a dream by his good fairy. The fairy tells him that she's the one who's helped make him a great storyteller, but now she's retiring and he will lose his voice. She's asked the king fairy for a favour on Salim's behalf: if he receives seven unique gifts within three months he will regain his voice and once again be a great storyteller. Salim has seven friends who gather at his house once a week to listen to his stories. They try everything to bring back his voice, but nothing, not special food or trips away, works to return Salim's voice. Finally, the friends get the idea to take it in turns telling a story to Salim, and, after he's been told seven stories, Salim does get his voice back.

On one level this novel is a celebration of the Arab tradition of storytelling. Schami effortlessly constructs all kinds of stories, from the traditional featuring demons and fairies, to contemporary tales highlighting the character of Damascus and Syria in 1959. Schami has an amazing ability to craft story after story without repeating himself or sounding formulaic. And both his traditional and contemporary stories are equally strong. His later novels, The Dark Side of Love (review here) and The Calligrapher's Secret (review here), also demontrate this ability, but the storytelling, in both cases, is part of broader and more ambitious novels.

The political aspect of Damascus Nights is not hidden in any way. In 1959 Syria had joined with Egypt in the United Arab Republic, a short-lived attempt to create a pan-Arab nation. Not only had Syria lost its political independence, the age of the secret police and the midnight knock on the door was in full bloom. The fact that Salim and his friends get together for traditional storytelling is clearly shown to be a result of other kinds of speech having become so dangerous. For every traditional story in Damascus Nights we get another that shows the cruelty and injustice of contemporary Syria. Like Scheherazade, Salim and his friends are telling tales to stay safe; any other kind of conversation can lead to prison.

If you've never read anything by Schami before, this novel, as excellent as it is, is only a hint of the creative heights he reaches in his masterpiece The Dark Side of Love. Unfortunately, Schami, who lives in Germany, has done all of his writing in German and not enough of it has been translated into English. I'm sure, however, that when he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature translations of his other works will immediately follow. That's right, the Nobel Prize, and don't forget that it was me that said it first.

Book Review: The Calligrapher's Secret (2011) by Rafik Schami

Rafik Schami

In this year of the Arab Spring, there's no better guide to the discontents, the tensions, and the psychology of the Arab world than the novels of Rafik Schami. Schami, an Arab-Christian, fled his native Syria in 1971 for Germany. After working in menial jobs he got his degree in chemistry and began working in the chemical industry. In the early '80s he became a full-time writer, writing in German. Since then he's won virtually every German literary prize there is, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English. That's a tragedy because Schami has to rank as one of the world's great novelists.

Schami's previous novel, The Dark Side of Love (my review here), was a multi-generational saga about forbidden love and clan feuds that covered Syrian history from the early 1900s to 1970. It was a brilliant effort, filled with dozens of memorable characters, a plot that skipped back and forth across the decades, and a breathless mix of tragedy, violence and earthy humour.

The Calligrapher's Secret is almost a scaled-down version of The Dark Side of Love.  The story is set in Damascus from 1947-58 and tells the tale of how the calligrapher of the title loses his wife, Noura, to his apprentice Salman. Although this novel doesn't have an epic scope, Schami has the epic ambition to try and explain what it is that keeps the Arab world stuck with one foot in the modern world and the other a thousand years in the past. In Schami's view the problem is that Arabs are unwilling to accept change on a personal or cultural level.

Hamid Farsi, the calligrapher of the title, has the ambition to reform Arabic so that it becomes a more modern language, a language that can be used for more than just poety and religious writings. Naturally enough, Farsi faces opposition from religious fanatics who don't believe that the language of the Koran can be altered in any way, and conservative politicians who can only contemplate change that takes place at a glacial pace. What makes Farsi a tragic figure is that as much as he's a radical in his professional life, in his private life he is cursed with all the sexism and misogyny of the most traditional Arab male. He marries the beautiful Noura while she's still a teenager and treats her like dirt from the word go. This drives Noura into the arms of Salman, and it's this event that brings about Hamid's ultimate downfall.

This bare bones synopsis only gives a hint of the plots within plots in this novel. Schami structures his novels like folktales, in which even the most minor of events or characters can have a profound influence on the plot, and people can wander in and out of the story almost at will. And Schami loves creating characters. Even the most minor of figures is given a backstory, and Schami often tells us what happened to these people long after they've had any influence on the plot. The main characters are superb, particularly Farsi who is largely despicable, but is wholly believable and, to a degree, pitiable.

The only misstep Schami makes is to squeeze much of Farsi's story into the last quarter of the book. By that point we have quite a hate on for him and the most likable characters, Noura and Salman, have left the scene for good. This almost makes this last section of the book feel like an appendix rather than an organic part of the novel, but it's really only the most minor of flaws. Here's hoping that more of Schami's novels are made available in English.