Ghada Abdel Aal: The comic tragedy of getting married

It's not the first time I feel disappointed by the lack of curiosity and the poor feeling for new literary tendencies on the German book market when it comes to the "minor" languages, as publishers call them, i.e. practically all foreign languages besides English and (maybe) french. Several years ago I have spent a lot of energy trying to rise some awareness of contemporary greek literature, but invane, from my translations into German were published only two books with novels - by a publishing company from Switzerland.
Thanks to another Swiss publisher we can read the shooting star of the Egyptian blog scene - Ghada Abdel Aal.

Ghada works as a pharmacist. She introduces herself on her blog as: ... a representative of 15 million females from 25 to 35 years who are pressured by the society everyday to get married even though this matter is out of their hands. (Reference here).
"In a blog and now a top-selling book, both called, "I Wanna Get Married," Abdel Aal lifts the veil on the demure role young women are expected to play in these encounters -- which often bring on gawaaz al-salonat -- living-room marriages. Not so much arranged marriages as suggested ones, they involve a potential groom, nominated by family or friends, meeting a prospective bride and her family in their home over awkward rounds of tea." (Read more here).

What attracts me most is the humourist approach to a very complex theme that affects young women as much as men not only in Egypt, but in many Arabic societies. Not only girls suffer from the strict rules of how to set up a family - also young men have to wait for a very long time until they can afford a marriage.
Ghada recounts from her own experineces and those of blogging friends, many stories are funny and, but the reader can grasp the tragedy of a whole generation behind.
Translated into German and Italian, an English translation will be available in october from the University of Texas Press.

Liza Dalby: Hidden Buddhas

Browsing around looking for material to use in my post on Liza Dalby's books I noticed that she had published a new one in 2009. This time a novel. Of course I had to read it immediately and finished it in a few nights - a rare phenomenon right now; as a working mom I have only a few hours before dawn to spend on reading...

"Hidden Buddhas" is a modern detective story that crosses the borders of time, culture and continents. At the same time it is a very touching romance embedded in a tale on Buddhism in Japan. We encounter buddhist monks with a faible for culinary delights, an American student on pilgrimage in and a maverick professor breeding honeybees. The book with many turns is absorbing from the beginning to the end, full of bizarre events in disparate environments such as Japan, France and the US, which give us a different insight in what is familiar and what is exotic. A young American student experiences the attraction of an esoteric Japanese tradition and a buddhist funeral ritual is performed in a catholic family - nothing is impossible in a world where love and enthusiasm transcend every border.

From a literary point of view the novel has maybe a few weak points; the author seems more comfortable with the charakters that cross the borders of traditions and culture than with the "pure" Japanese ones. The story of Mayumi remains somehow a draft, even though the whole novel culminates in her - a little bit too hasty for me. But maybe this will be the next book!

Nevertheless "Hidden Buddhas" was probably the novel I enjoyed most this year. As I already mentioned I adore all the other books of Liza Dalby and I admire her capability to integrate her deep knowledge of Japanese culture in her fictional and essayistic prose. The spiritual dimension of Japanese Buddhism was completely new to me, but I was also happy to recognize elements from her former books in digressions on Kimono fabrics or the ancient Chinese almanachs.

A wonderful book for rainy days and sleepless nights!

Spring Corner and Japanese Inspiration

It is still extremely cold here these days, icy wind stirs up snow, but my heart longs for blossoms and fresh green... Sigh... To beat my lingering sadness I decided to bring spring into our bedroom.

It all started with the inspiring books - I featured one of them in a previous post - of the anthropologist and writer Liza Dalby. She is the first foreigner to study the ancient Japanese art of being a geisha. Liza Dalby's experiences inspired several books on Japanese culture. "The Tale of Murasaki" was the book I read first; a novel on the life of the world's first novelist, a court lady in the 10th century. I had found it by chance on a rummage table of a local bookstore - or should I say the book found me? In any case I couldn't resist the charme of the refined Japanes court culture since then and have read avidly everything I could find.
I admire most the connection between poetry and observation of nature and the beauty that lays in the changing of seasons.
This inspired me to create a spring corner with a runner of vintage kimono silk on a bamboo tea table, matching tulips and some of Liza Dalby's books...

... in the original and some in german translation...

Next came a kimono scroll mural with lovely handpainted blossoms again on vintage kimono silk.



Now I feel much better :-)
In her recent book, "East Wind Melts the Ice" she creates a diary of the seasons divided into the 72 five-day segments of an ancient Chinese almanac. Today belongs to the second section: "dormant creatures start to twitch" (february 10 through14). I try to imagine little animals deep in the earth of my backyard starting to move unter the white snow. And, was it a dream or did I really hear small birds singing when I woke up at dawn?

Reading Afghanistan: Atiq Rahimi's "The Patience Stone"

For his first novel in French (his former works have been written in Persian) Afghan author and filmmaker Atiq Rahimi received the Prix Goncourt in 2008, France's most important literary prize for fiction.
The setting is a room where a woman cares for her war injured, paralyzed husband. Although he lies motionless in a coma, his wife not only nurses him, but addresses her long soliloquy to this half-dead man, opening up her heart and speaking frankly of her married life.
In his writigs emerges a unique kosmos with motives from the experiences of Afghan people, but in the same moment transcending it's historical context assimilating symbols and narratives from Persian sufi literature.
Read an excellent review of the German version here and a beautiful article about the author in French here.
The English translation will be published in January, 2010. Stay tuned!

A book like a jewel - Ariake

Don't you cut the brush
Growing on the riverbank
High above Saho River;
Leave it as it is,
So when spring comes araound
We'll have a place to hide.

Lady Ôtomo of Sakanue

While I asked myself

Whether you might be coming
Or I might go there,
The hesitant moon appeared,
And I slept, the door unlocked.

Anonymous

More than the color
It is the fragrance I find
A source of delight.
Whose sleeve might have brushed against
The plum tree beside my house?

Anonymous

Pictures and poems are taken from the book Ariake - Poems of Love and Longing by the Women Courties of ancient Japan, San Francisco 2000. Illustrations by Rae Grant, foreword by Liza Dalby.

A New Chapter?

In this somehow challenging period of my life - I lost my job a big international company after going in maternity leave - I now constantly try to reinvent myself, not only professionally. I think I found an excellent hint on decor8 (thank you!!) and ordered Lisa Sonora Beam's amazing book. It arrived a few days ago and I am sooo happy about it! Here I found exactly what I needed: Step-by step instructions how to put together my scattered business ideas, how to improve them, and everything in a creative, humorous and feminine way. I already had attended highly complex workshops on entrepreneurship before I started to work as a freelancer translator, but with all the excellent explanations I got I ould not overcome my fears - of not being able to do this on myself (after all I have no economic formation at all being maybe an excellent scholar, but not a businesswoman), fear of not being qualified to do exactly this because my academic degree of Classical Studies is of no help if I interpret a court case or a police questioning, fear of exposing myself trying to get noticed on the market, fear of getting stuck, because I work from home with all the family around me, and so on. But this book provides a lot of extreme useful hints how to manage these "weak points" people generally have if they enter business world from another direction, and, most important of all, I gained the comforting insight that I am not the only one batteling the monsters of new challenges!
And, last not least, I gained something else, too, which maybe is even more important than anything else: I retrieved a part of myself that has been buried for a long time - the joy of painting, of creating moods with colours and to experiment with forms. I used to do this a lot in my teens (alas, it's almost 20 years!), it was a sacred activity then for me, but somehow I got trapped between too many books and lost the key to it. Following a sudden impetus I unearthed a box that had survived miraculously half a dozen relocations:

Look what I found! Water colours, calligraphy ink from red to sepia, pens in all sizes and shapes, charcoal crayons, gold and silver finish a a set of tempera colours and paint brushes from Prague - I had lmost forgotten this strange trip with my first boy friend only 2-3 years after the collapse of the iron curtain, where there was nothing to buy except from musical notes (for him) and art supplies (for me). It were times when I used to get deeply immersed into painting, experiencing wonderful bliss while trying to capture this fugacious beauty I felt watching a landscape or visualizing images from books I had read.
I had almost tears in my eyes from the emotions that arose in me and I was really exited when I decided to try using them again - would there still be usable colour in the tubes? Would I still be able to hold a brush? Would the result communicate anything at all to me? What a flurry in my head and my heart!
On the pic there is also an old novel from Soviet times - I chose it as the raw material for my new journal I want to keep from now on because of it's "oriental" content...
Yes, the path is steep, icy and slippery - but the light I'm following is so beatyful and encouraging!

Istanbul delights

Today I have prepared something special for you ;-)
It is a rainy german fall day and I was re-reading the wonderful novel "Loxandra" from Maria Iordanidou, a greek writer with roots in Istanbul, or "Poli", as the greek community there used to call its hometown until the early 1920's. The central figure, Loxandra, is a warm-hearted, gay person, loves her family, the beauty of Istanbul and cooking... I wanted to recommend this book, but again an English translation doesn't seem to exist :-( For everybody who is not reading greek at least some impressions from Old Konstantinople with a beautiful melody from Eleni Karaindrou, one of my favourite contemporary greek composers. She combines eastern and western musical heritage in the Greek tradition.
But now I want you to taste a greek-turkish cake called "Revani".
Ingredients for the cake:
140g of semolina (coarsly ground, if possible; what you use for Italian pasta or gnocchi)
130g of wheat flour
1 pckg of baking powder
200g of butter
6 eggs
125g of sugar
some vanillin sugar

for the sirup:
500ml water
200g sugar
100g honey
rosewater
cinnamon
pistachios

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Butter and flour a big, flat baking tin.
Mix wheat, semolina and bakingpowder, separate eggs (yolk from the white), stir the yolks with the butter and half of the sugar and vanillin and beat the whites with the secong half until stiff. Add the whites carefully, not beating them, and distribute the dough on the baking tin. Bake 40 min, until the cake is goldbrown.
Prepare now the sirup boiling water with the other ingredients for a minute. When the cake is ready, cut it into rhombs or quads and spill the sirup all over the cake. Decorate with pistachios.
Serve cold with vanillia ice cream or whipped cream.
Yummy!

Some more words ....

....about the first picture I posted yesterday.
The doormat you see is a reminescence of the most famous citizen of Weimar, the town where I live. A similar decoration you can see in the house of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - he had it made after he returned from his visit of Pompei. One of the many things he studied was oriental poetry. He read everything available in translation at that time (mostly the Persian poet Hafez) and finally published a collection of his own poems in oriental style called "West-östlicher Diwan" (unfortunately it is difficult to get an English translation). This means that one of the first and most important pieces of German "Orientalism" in literature has actually been written here... One of the many reasons why I chose to live in this lovely province town ;-)