ophelia

• Rated 5 stars

“This is a marvellous tale, a true story, and one which reads like a novel.
It is a translation from the French because the author, Kenize Mourad, was born in France and lived there for many years. It is the story of her parents: her mother Selma was a sultana from the Ottoman royal family; her father was the rajah of Baldapur. Incredible as it may sound, it's all true.
If you are bored by the beginning which describes life in a palace in Istanbul, just skip a few pages (I found this first part more interesting when I read the book for the second time.)
It's an engaging story and you also learn a lot of things: I found out for example that Instambul and what has now become Turkey had been occupied by French and British forces in 1918 (as the Ottoman Empire had been the ally of Germany in World war I). We get a glimpse of what this meant for the population and the rersentment that it caused.
Then the story takes us to Beirut, India, and Paris, and by then it has become a page-turner.
The English version is out of print but there are cheap second-hand copies available on the net. Enjoy!”

ophelia wrote this review Tuesday, June 24 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“I am as enthusiastic as the other Shelfarians who wrote reviews about this book.
The "Indian Writing and Indian Literature" group will be doing a group read of this novel, starting on June 16th, 2008-- so very soon.
If you are interested, please join us!”

ophelia wrote this review Saturday, June 7 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“I can't remember who recommended this book to me.
After two or three pages, I felt amazed at how-well written this is. I am interested in history and civilizations, but often i buy books and stop in the middle because the writing is so dull. This was obviously going to be an exceptional non-fiction book.
I then checked who the author was, and I found that he was the same man who had written, for example "The Great Indian Novel" (which I have now purchased).
The book is captivating. It is clear and informative about evolutions in Indian politics and Indian life from Independence to the present day.
The story of Charlie the Untouchable for example is memorable. I felt it read like something from a novel, so I checked again, and indeed it is mentioned in several reviews, with nobody suggesting the author may have invented it, so I consider it is true. It is amazing because of the steady evolution over the years and because it is a hopeful story, when we are used to hearing only dreadful happenings about inter-caste strife.
This book is a pleasure, and a must if you are a non-Indian who has been wondering about things like the difference bewtween Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes, and what the evolution of the caste system (among many other topics) is.”

ophelia wrote this review Saturday, May 31 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“"The Kite Runner" is a masterpiece.

The author's second novel is also set in Afghanistan.
If you do not expect the brilliance of the first book, it is well worth reading.”

ophelia wrote this review Thursday, February 28 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“A very moving novel, which teaches you a lot about Afghanistan and is extremely well-written.
I'll copy the review I wrote at my other book club, BOOKTAKL.ORG.

I felt carried away when reading it. The style is simple, sober (even though the story may be harrowing at times; everything rings true— and yet this is the first time I have read about Afghanistan from a male perspective.



First, for those of you who studied (or are studying) literature at university level, I was taught that you do not write about your impressions or feelings when you write about novels. Nor do you write a psychoanalysis of the characters. I still firmly hold that belief in the context of university or academia.

Now, rational analysis is a hard taskmaster, but for now I’ll just have a thought for the God (Goddess) of Literature, who is perhaps looking at me from up there, and has to be pacified (with an introduction).


How wonderfully convenient it is to have a link with amazon, so that this ground need not be covered again.

How encouraging it is to think I need not cover the whole book (all the more so is as this is a non-fiction forum and this book is not even in the fiction selection.) .
I’ll just choose two points, one of which is not even central to the story.


1- The theme of betrayal.

a- Amir betrays his friend Hassan from the beginning, by taking advantage and making fun of his friend’s lack of education, for example.


b- the central betrayal: Amir does nothing when Hassan is attacked and raped by the local bullies (this is not a graphic scene in the book, but it is a turning point. It cannot possibly be taken away in the film, although we can understand why the young –afghani- actor refused to play it).


In real life one would feel disinclined to blame Amir: he was young; perhaps his intervention wouldn’t have changed anything, perhaps he would have been assaulted too…

Yet the novel has a momentum of its own: the character types were set (as they can sometimes be among groups of children: the bullies and the bullied….) Hassan was the rescuer, the risk taker, and Amir behaved according to his father’s worst expectations.


c- the worst betrayal: Amir felt he had to build on his rejection of Hassan (in b) again and again, until it was Hassan who took responsibility for breaking the bond between the two families.
This is what I remember from the book—I’ll leave it at that for the moment.


2- The hospital scene.

Amir and his father emigrated to the US. The father became very ill (from cancer), and the son took him to the hospital-- in California , yet I could have sworn this had happened in my home town in France.
X rays were taken, and the anguished son tried to get information from the intern. Amir had to fight for each piece of information, a s his questions were answered with:

“ Take this (the form) to the front desk.” (six words).

“ A referral.”

“ Pulmonary clinic.”


“He’s got a spot on his right lung.”


“Possible. It’s suspicious, anyway.”


“They’ll call you within two weeks.””

ophelia wrote this review Friday, February 1 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“This is a gripping, thought-provoking book.
I am going to copy the review I made at BOOKTALK.ORG

This novel is nothing like what you usually read about violence, about teenagers, about violent children or boys.
I found it touching, puzzling, shocking --in an unusual way (graphic violence is kept to the bare minimum).

The narrator is the mother of a teenage murderer. What feels very weird at first is that her view seems to be so much AGAINST her son, in a way which is not caricatural-- hence disturbing.

There is no easy explanation, as opposed to movies in which children are clearly born without feelings, and we are told, as in the film "Rosemary's Baby" that the child was fathered by the Devil himself.

What is it about fiction that makes it so memorable when it works?
Art. Sometimes genius. The ability to somehow condense experience in a way that no book written by, say, a journalist or an academic, can equal.

My first impression was that this was somehow breaking a taboo-- one does not, even in fiction, write a book about a child, least of all one's child, in a negative way. I am not a parent, but I wondered how parents could react to such unusual material -- I was bothered enough to check on the internet what readers and critics had written -- everything was positive.
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ophelia wrote this review Thursday, January 31 2008. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 5 stars

“I have read about half the book, found it fascinating but also depressing-- nothing to do with the title itself: in the first chapters I thought "Well, I don't think I would have behaved like this" but after a while I was really starting to lose hope in the human race...
This is a thought-provoking book, and a must.

BOOKTALK.ORG, which is another book reading group I belong to, is presently discussing "The Lucifer Effect".
I will copy some of the things I wrote in Booktalk here, and I envite you to read all the other postings at Booktalk for this book.

1- Abu Ghraib.

The amount of information and the quality of the analysis given in chapter 14 are amazing. Abu Ghraib is one of those things I never expected to see analyzed in depth.
What Zimbardo writes about pornographic sites on the net and other "trophy pictures" taken before in other war situations gives a very useful perspective.


To add to all this horror, I found that the whistleblower, Joe Darby, was given six-month round the clock military protection on his return to the States and could not return to his hometown because his life was at risk from his irate patriotic neighbours. I had no idea, I can't watch CBS here and somehow I never heard.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/07/60minutes/main2238188_page4. shtml


One thing that was mentioned regularly in France at the time was surprise and admiration for the fact that the whistleblower's information was actually investigated by the military and went up to the top.
In another case of similar abuse of prisoners in Iraq mentioned in chapter 14, military commanders found incriminating photos in soldiers' bags and simply destroyed them. This is what I, and for example two non-commissioned officers I know in the Air Force, would expect the military to do in France, and that's in peace time.

2- The Milgram Experiments.

I am going to comment on Milgram's experiments in reference to what Zimbardo writes in ch 12 and also to the wikipedia article (which I highly recommend).

[url] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [/url]

Obedience to authority.
I don't know what to think. At first I concentrated on the date Zimbardo gives, 1972: I thought (I still think) that over 30 years ago there was more readiness to obey authority (from the pamphlet the people who expemimented could not be students) than there would be today, but then wiki explains that Milgram repeated his experiements over the years, with similar results.

I can't deny that these experiments were made, and yet this contradicts what I see in everyday life. In life, people will do a lot of things to obey and please bosses, because they want to keep their jobs. Apart from that, I don't see much eagerness to toe the line. For example, if people are reminded by authority that they/ their children/ their dogs make too much noise, they are unlikely to comply with the law and change their behaviour.
If the "authority" is one degree below the police and cannot give a fine, they are likely to be insulted as well.
I also see people arguing at length when stopped by the police and they (the driver) are obviously in the wrong.

Could we perhaps argue that someone who volunteers for an experiment is not in the same frame of mind as someone who would be asked (but not told) to take part?

Then, a small point about the "experts".

Zimbardo devotes a paragraph, p 271, to questions which were asked to " a group of forty psychiatrists" before the experiment was done.
I was very surprised that psychiatrists should have beeen willing to commit themselves to answer such a question, but in wikipedia the experts become "fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors".
This version, especially in view of the answers they give, makes much more sense to me.

Responsibility: Of course, the willingness to hurt others is the most shocking aspect, but since I can't explain this, I would at least have thought that people would keep their self-interest in mind.


p 271: " when the experimenter reassured him that he would take responsibility, the worried teacher obeyed and continued..."

So, the teachers were either under shock and unable to think, or they were extremely naïve. Doing something illegal under somebody else's responsibility does not absolve you from responsibility in the eyes of the law. Even in the miltary, according to the rules it is illegal to obey an illegal order (regarding torturing prisoners for example).
To me it is amazing that hearing repeated assurances of "I assume full rersponsibility" did not send a danger signal in connection with self-preservation (again, assuming this is the only thing that could be hoped for).
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ophelia wrote this review Wednesday, January 30 2008. ( reply | permalink )