Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This short, interesting collection of stories by Libyan author Ahmed Fagih is thoroughly enjoyable.My only complaint is that it is riddled with spelling and punctuation errors.Normally I overlook that sort of thing, but here it was so prevalent as to be seriously distracting.
I'm not exactly sure how to review this book.I got it more for historical/cultural reasons than for literary ones.I believe that fiction is the best way to supplement historical study, because it breathes life into the skeleton of dates and facts.A writer like Fagih, by describing the stuff of life in contemporary Libya, can give an important perspective, one that can't be found in a simple history book.What I discovered is that these short stories don't exactly do what I was hoping.Some of the stories take place in villages.Which ones?It doesn't make any difference; it could be any village, in any country (although all of the villages have a dusty, North African feel).Some of the stories are in cities, but it's not always clear whether the city is Libyan or European.Again, it doesn't make any difference, because Fagih isn't talking about Libya, he's talking about people.The scenery, with few exceptions, is ignored in favor of the narrator's own thoughts, emotions, and insecurities.Libya as a country and Tripoli as a city are named in only two or three of the stories.
So this book missed the whole point of why I got it, but on its own terms it is still lively and very enjoyable.Fagih's career as a diplomat, a traveler in Europe and Africa, a witness to humanity in very different places and circumstances, informs his prose and his imagination.His protagonists are deeply conflicted between modernity and tradition, struggling between love and crippling bashfulness.The mood throughout is nearly always dark and pessimistic.Many of his characters go mad, or seem to, whether as a defense mechanism or as the result of a lifetime of grinding opposition.Many of the stories quickly stray into the bizarre, which I enjoy.
It is possible that these stories accomplish what I was looking for better than I realized at first blush.Perhaps the most important detail that gets left out of history books is not the landscape, the buildings, or the daily lives, but the national mood.To the extent that Fagih's perception of the Libyan psyche is correct, the book is a resounding success.It seems plausible, at least; one character boasts "Tripoli is one of the greatest cities of the world.It has witnessed successive Roman, Greek and Arab civilizations" (p. 234).But despite that heritage, Libya has been a pariah state for over forty years now, only recently beginning to emerge from a long national darkness.I suspect that kind of national alienation cannot help but cast a pall over average Libyans.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the short story as an artform, especially those who enjoy the bizarre, the fantastic, or the gloomy sides of that genre.
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