#ownvoices

The Occasional Virgin is an unusual novel that focuses on the, frankly, odd choices made by two outwardly successful women. Both are originally Lebanese, but emigrated in adulthood to Toronto and London respectively. The novel felt as though it naturally fell into three sections of which I loved the first. Muslim Huda and Christian Yvonne are holidaying together in a wonderfully evoked Italian seaside town. We see their reminiscences about their Lebanese childhoods which are dominated by similar repressive outlooks towards women - regardless of their families' differing religions. We also get to join the women simply enjoying the prospect of a holiday romance and eyeing up the local talent. Up until this point, I was happy reading and felt I understood the characters well. I didn't necessarily agree with all their decisions and opinions, but I had settled in for a good read.

When the action switches to London however, I soon felt as though I must have accidentally picked up a different book. There's a convoluted scene set in Speaker's Corner which starts out making some excellent points about tolerance and people's right to make their own lifestyle choices. This leads into a weird triangle with both Huda and Yvonne narrowing their sights towards the same man. Don't be fooled by the synopsis though - this isn't love. One is driven by spite and the other by a blinding desire to get pregnant. I was disappointed that the interesting, rounded characters from Italy were abruptly flung into quite bizarre situations and I struggled to understand their decisions - particularly Huda's - due to a lack of realistic motivation. Would a woman really go through such a lengthy charade?

Possibly if I were Lebanese myself, or at least had a strong understanding of Arabic upbringings for girls, I might have made more sense of what happens. I look forward to reading some #OwnVoices reviews in due course which might help me. In the meantime though, I would highly recommend reading this book as an Italian holiday novella, but maybe then let Huda and Yvonne go on their way without following them!

I was drawn to Entangled Lives by the ambiguous expression in the eyes of the man on its cover and when I discovered that this is an #ownvoices novel written by a Pakistani author, I knew I wanted to read it. Omer has made one of his protagonists a Taliban soldier which I felt was a brave step in the current political climate, especially as this soldier, Raza, tells us his story unapologetically. We follow his life from young orphaned child to American prison camp and so see the realities of life for poor families in Pakistan. Raza's family were Afghan refugees reduced to the most basic existence within Pakistan. And theirs is by no means an isolated case. Over decades from the partition of India in the 1940s to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and beyond, the waves of migration from people seeking to escape conflict is overwhelming. Poor people of all faiths in this part of Asia have seemingly become so inured to growing up without hope of much more than simple survival that for Raza, as the example in this story, although he has some awareness that perhaps he shouldn't blindly believe everything he is taught in the madrassah, the reality is that he has no choice other than appearing to do so.

After we have learned much of Raza's life, the viewpoint switches to Rachael's story which, I admit, did briefly annoy me because I was so engrossed in reading about Raza. I initially didn't think I wanted to read about yet another entitled American journalist sweeping untouched through a poorer nation's civil war. As it turned out however Rachael's role is deeper than showing us Afghanistan from a Western perspective. She does travel more widely across the country than Raza can do and imparts an overview that helped with my understanding of the politics. She is also an interesting character in her own right so I revised my preconceptions there too!

I liked the ways in which Raza and Rachael's stories do become entangled. Omer's is deft yet with a nice delicacy that means he never hammers home his ideas or feels as though he is trying to hard to educate his readers. Instead I appreciated feeling as though I had space to make up my own mind. I am sure that some Western readers will look away from Entangled Lives because it doesn't neatly fit with the lines we are fed about good and evil, culpability and guilt. While we see the actions Raza has taken in his life and his own sense of shame, can we actually say he had free choice? If our rich nations have historically engineered so much of the destruction and despair 'over there', should we not also shoulder at least some of the responsibility for the current chaos and violence? There are absolutely no easy answers, but Entangled Lives is a powerful opening question especially for someone like me who wants to expand my knowledge of what is happening in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. A thought provoking novel and a brilliantly uncomfortable read.

I bought six books at the excellent Hope Association book fair back in May last year and Minaret is one of two that I hadn't got around to reading until now. I was attracted to the story by the Ali Smith quote on the front cover: "Minaret is a wonderful book ... readable, subtle and ambiguous, with a shocking clarity of voice" and by Aboulela being an #OwnVoices Muslim Sudanese author in London. It's depressingly uncommon to actually hear about women's experience of Islam directly from the women themselves so I was keen to read this positive portrayal.

The novel is indeed very readable and the font size in my paperback edition meant I zoomed through the pages faster than I had expected to do. Minaret isn't a light read though. It could simply be a story of lost privilege and thwarted love - a poor rich girl finding a new place for herself in a completely changed world - but also works on a deeper level to explore our need for spiritual identity and a sense of belonging. Despite not having any religious inclinations, I could feel myself drawn to the solidarity of the women's group at Najwa's mosque and could easily empathise with her rediscovery of childhood ritual and faith. Aboulela presents women well although I couldn't understand what Najwa saw in either of the men to whom she is attracted!

I don't often read John Steinbeck but always love his books when I do. I think Cannery Row is still my favourite so far, but there's still lots of his books I haven't read. I bought Tortilla Flat straight after finishing La Perle with the intention of making a slightly bigger dent in the Steinbeck back catalogue this year. Tortilla Flat predates Cannery Row by about a decade and, without being too sniffy I hope, this does show. The novels are geographically very close to each other and their central characters share strong resemblances too. It feels almost as though Cannery Riw is a matured Tortilla Flat. Basically, a group of deadbeats and drunks are scraping by, sometimes by legal means and sometimes in a more shady fashion. I loved the relationship dynamics between the group of friends. They share a convoluted code of ethics where crimes such as theft can be considered beneficial or heinous, usually depending more on the perpetrator's professed motivation than anything else.

Steinbeck presents Danny and his friends as essentially harmless and almost as overage children whose actions rarely have any real consequences. While I could enjoy this as a humorous part of the novel, their attitudes do rather date Tortilla Flat now. Women characters are only caricatures and I was uncomfortable at the repeated use of 'Jew' as an insult. It's a difficult question for me to address. While I wouldn't want to stop reading vintage and classic novels, I am not sure how strongly to criticise problematic attitudes or whether to penalise them through my star ratings.

Also, Tortilla Flat was written over eighty years ago and probably does reflect aspects of Paisano life at the time as accurately as Steinbeck could see it from his outsider's viewpoint. He writes amusing stories of the men's antics as entertainment for readers however, though the seriousness of their poverty is always very apparent. As a primarily illiterate and uneducated community, there are unlikely to have been any #ownvoices memoirs or novels of this period to counter this mythic presentation of the happy hobo trope. (Do Comment if you know of any!) So now Steinbeck's famous novel could stand as a primary record of such people and I am not convinced that Tortilla Flat does them justice.