The Lovers of Algeria

It's the long Midsummer weekend over here and I have been celebrating with enjoying the days off and, surprise, surprise, reading! :) I spent most of yesterday with one of the books from my latest library loot, The Lovers of Algeria by Anouar Benmalek.

The Lovers of Algeria is a heart-wrenching novel about two lovers separated by circumstances they could not have done anything about. It is also a novel about the insanity of war, terrorism and colonialism.

The story begins in 1955, when Swiss Anna, a former circus artist, and Arab Nassreddin have just been married in his native Algeria. Forty years later Anna returns to Algeria to visit the graves of her and Nassreddin's murdered twins. Algeria in the 1950s was not an easy place to be for a mixed race couple, and Algeria in the 1990s is a very dangerous place for foreigners. As Anna decides to try and reach Nassreddin's old homestead she employs the little Jallah, a street-urchin from Algiers to act as her "grandson". Before leaving Algiers Anna sends a telegram to Nassreddin without knowing if he is still alive or not.

Something very bad happens during Anna and Jallah's trip. Here the writer very cleverly turns the narrative into reminiscences from Anna's, and also Nassreddin's childhood and yound adulthood. We get to know how they actually met and fell in love and what happened to their children.

Well, I think I'll leave telling about the plot here. You just have to read The Lovers of Algeria yourselves to learn more about what happenes in the story! All I can say that this was a book that I did not want to put down. I started reading it on Friday and spent most of Saturday with it in order to finish it as quickly as possible. I wanted very badly to know how the story ends! And I must say that even the ending was very well written.

This is the only book I've ever read that is set in Algeria. My only critisim with the book is that it was sometimes a bit too violent for me, but I also acknowledge that the violence was an integral part of the narrative and simply had to be there.

I'm a bit behind with my participation in the Reading the World Challenge. I did not finish any book for the challenge in May, and will thus not be able to complete the challenge in time in July, but I hope it is okay to bend the rules a little. :) I will count The Lovers of Algeria as my Africa book for the challenge. Let's see if I then try and read my two remaining books (South America and Antarctica) both in July or I might also read one in July and the other in August.

Chapter 4: Great Summer Reads: Crossed Bones

Basic Facts:
Author: Jane Johnson
Book: Crossed Bones (published in the US as The Tenth Gift)
First Published: 2008
I read: The Viking Penguin Books trade paperback edition
First sentence: 'There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened before, like larks that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.'


I started my Great Summer Reads -reviews last week with The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and will now continue with another entertaining, if somewhat lighter, story: Crossed Bones by the British author Jane Johnson.

The book starts in contemporary London, where Julia Lovat, craft-shop owner and embroidery expert is going to meet her lover Michael, who she describes on the first page of the book as

"...a lecturer in European literature, on which he took an uncompromising post-structualist stance, as if books were just meat for the butcher's block, mere muscle and tendon. bone and cartilage, which required flensing and separating and scrutiny." [p. 1.]

Ugh! Add to that the fact that Michael is also the husband of Julia's friend from university Annie, and you know from the start that he is bad news! I kept thinking why an earth had Julia fallen for him in the first place. Obviously there is something about him, as Julia explains:

"Women loved Michael. We couldn't help ourselves. Whether it was his saturnine features... the louche manner or the look in those glittering black eyes, the cruelly carved mouth or the restless hands, I didn't know. I had lost perspective on such matters long ago." [p. 2.]

Julia and Michael's meeting in a fancy Italian restaurant does not go to Julia's liking. Michael has decided to break up with her and try to patch up things with his wife. As a parting gift he gives the devastated Julia an antique book of embroidery patterns called The Needle Woman's Glorie.

Michael has, in fact, found two copies of the same book, one ordinary, and the other full of markings in archaic hand. It was his intention to give the marking-less book to Julia and sell the other one for a good price. By mistake he gives Julia the book with handwritten notes, and we will soon learn that he is ready to do almost anything to retrieve it, thus adding a sinister thread to Julia's storyline.

While reading the markings on the Needle Woman's Glorie, Julia becomes more and more interested in the story behind those notes, for they have nothing to do with embroidery. They are, in fact, a kind of diary written by certain Catherine Anne Tregenna starting in May 1625.

From there on the book moves between the 17th century story of Catherine 'Cat' Tregenna, a young servant girl, and the story of Julia as she starts a journey to forget Michael and to find out what happened to Cat, who in the summer of 1625 was among a group of villagers taken from a church in Penzance on the Cornish coast by Barbary pirates and taken to Morocco to be sold into slavery.

Johnson has weaved an intriguing tale of adventure and romance with interesting historical facts behind it. In the Author's Note at the end of the book she writes that the attack in Penzance is based on an actual event in July 1625 mentioned in the state papers. Johnson has used various studies on Barbary pirates as well as first hand accounts of English captive's experiences as source materials. She lists the most important sources on the last page ot the book.

I found Crossed Bones hard to put down. At first I had some reservations about the love story developing between Cat and her captor, simply because the captive maiden and the pirate captain falling for each other is such a cliché and exploited to no end in cheap romantic novels, but Johnson manages to pull it off. She portrays the changing emotions between Cat and Sidi Qasem convincingly and beautifully.

"One day, after Catherine had passed almost seven months in the house of her new master, the raïs appeared unheralded and found her sitting in the courtyard with her eyes closed, her broom at her feet, her face upturned to the sky.
'You look like a rose,' he said softly, 'with its petals drinking in the sun.'
Her eyes flew open in shock. She stood up, caught her foot on the broom and almost fell. The corsair caught her neatly and sat her down again. 'Thank you, Sidi Qasem,' she muttered, discomforted.
'Just Qasem is enough.'
'Qasem.'
...
He held the rose against Cat's cheek for a moment so that she smelled its aroma and felt its velvet texture brush her skin, and, although no part of him had touched her, she felt something burning in her nerves, as if a great fire had engulfed the pair of them and she could not breathe. Then the raïs crushed the flower in his had so that its scent filled the air, and walked to the fountain to scatter the petals in its pool.
Cat closed her eyes. When she opened them again, he was gone.' [p. 336-338]

I enjoyed both women's tales, but Cat Tregenna was undoubtedly my favorite character in the book. She has to live through terrible events, but she surely is no fainting damsel in distress! She is strong, opinionated, and she has a good head on her shoulders.

"They say God made mankind from clay. He make the djinn from fire. The djinn very dangerous, they have power to possess a man.' He pulled a strand of her red hair loose from the cotton wrap and ran it thoughtfully through his fingers. 'Which are you, Cat'rin: a woman or a djinn?'
'I am a flesh and blood woman,' she said sharply.
'I think maybe that is most dangerous thing of all.' [p. 274]

Crossed Bones is, what I call, a complete story. The stories of Cat and Julia twine closer and closer together until the satisfying happy end, when we will finally learn what connects them.
Highly recommended summer reading!

To learn more about the author visit her official site.

Chapter 2: Great Summer Reads : The Time Traveler's Wife

Basic Facts:
Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Book: The Time Traveler's Wife
First published: 2003
I read: The Vintage paperback edition, published in 2004
First line: It's hard being left behind.

I first read The Time Traveler's Wife in 2004 pretty soon after the paperback version was published, and I just loved the book! It made quite an impression on me. I still remember thinking that it was the best, most interesting book I had read that year, and it was a year when I read rather many novels! After rereading it now, I am able to say that I 'm still very much impressed by the story. I am a sucker for great stories :), and The Time Traveler's Wife truly is A Great Story! It is also very much current at the moment. The movie based on the book, and starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, is going to be released in August 14th in the USA, and also in the UK and Canada. And even without the movie, it simply is such a great summer read!

The Time Traveler's Wife tells the story on Henry, a librarian, and Claire, an artist, who meet (from Claire's point of view) for the first time in 1977, when Claire is only 6-years old, and Henry is 36. Henry, on the other hand, meets Claire for the first time, when she is 20 and he himself 28. How is this possible? It is possible, because Henry suffers from a rare genetical condition that makes him travel in time. He explains how that feels in the beginning of the book:

"It feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet home."

When travelling in time he cannot bring anything with him from the present time. Thus he always arrives naked, and often has to succumb to crime in order to survive in the past or the future.

"When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true."

Despite the time travelling aspect of the story The Time Traveler's Wife is not science fiction or fantasy. It is a gripping tale of sickness, sorrow, and loss, but above all it is a story about love. It is the extraordinary, and very touching love story of Claire and Henry, two ordinary people living in very extraordinary circumstances.

"I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow", laments Henry, and Claire's thoughts echo his:

"I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way."

The truth is that as the story progresses is seems more often than not that Henry is not okay, when he returns to present time, and the reader starts to feel, actually quite early on, that maybe there will not be a happy end in store for Henry and Claire. And yet. Audrey Niffenegger has weaved a beautiful tale, a well-rounded story that makes you laugh and cry in equal proportions. I did shed a few tears, when I first read the book, but many lines also brought a smile on my face, like when Henry teaches Claire how to cook.

"Henry holds up an onion and looks at me gravely and says, "This...is an onion." I nod. "Yes. I've read about them."

The author has managed to take a complex story that could be very incoherent, and tell it in a very coherent, easy-to-follow way from the start to the very touching, very bittersweet end. All in all this is a book you will not want to put down!

Audrey Niffenegger's new novel Her Fearful Symmetry will be out in the autumn.

More info:

• Audrey Niffenegger's official site
• The Time Traveler's Wife movie site