Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 4 October 2013

The opening scene of Swell takes place five days after New Year 1997. A couple of seamen watch a white cat balancing recklessly on the railing of a Greek merchant ship anchored off the South Australian coast at Port Pirie. The cat called Maritsa is the constant companion of Mitsos Avgustis, the vessel’s seventy-five-year-old captain who has passed virtually all his life at sea. He’s a very skilled mariner and highly revered by the entire crew made up of Greeks, Russians and Romanians, but his family and the owner of the ship want him to retire. His wife Flora, his two daughters and his son haven’t seen him once in twelve years and reproach him with disinterest in the family. His lover Litsa has kept waiting for Mitsos Avgustis in her house in Elefsina in vain for just as long as his family and yet she doesn’t hold it against him. When Captain Flora travels to Kobe to persuade her husband to come back home to Greece with her, she makes a revelation which gives his actions and his stubbornness an unexpected dimension. It needs a new crew member and an almost disaster in the middle of the Indian Ocean to make him rethink his attitude towards family and life on land.

Swell is an impressionistic novel with many flashbacks and recurring changes of perspective. In addition, Ioanna Karystiani unfolds the story of Captain Mitsos Avgustis and the people who are a part of it either in fact or in memory at a slow pace putting together seemingly unrelated episodes and memories. As the story progresses with the rolling swell of the oceans, it fuses and reveals a complete picture. The plot makes think of Homer’s Odyssey with two Penelopes doomed to staying at home and waiting, one cold and nagging, the other warm and loving.

For me Swell by Ioanna Karystiani has been a pleasure to read. It’s literary fiction as I like it – thus I recommended it.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.

The Calligrapher’s Secret by Rafik Schami

Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 20 September 2013

Rafik Schami (رفيق شامي) is a friend of Damascus and also a friend from the Syrian capital as his Arabic penname proves when translated into English. He loves telling stories and taking his readers to the Damascus of his childhood and before. Consequently his novel The Calligrapher’s Secret is set there.

The Calligrapher’s Secret begins in April 1957 when rumour spreads in Damascus that Noura, the beautiful wife of the famous and rich calligrapher Hamid Farsi, has run away. In an Arabic, more precisely a Muslim environment this is a life-threatening crime for a woman to commit, even more so in the novel’s time period. People say that Noura felt insulted by the ardent love letters from Nasri Abbani which the womanizer known all over town and almost illiterate had ordered from her unknowing husband to seduce her, but there’s much more behind it. Her fairly modern education and a strong will to take life into her own hands play an important role just like her encounter with her husband’s Christian apprentice and errand-boy Salman. And then there’s Hamid Farsi’s passion for Arabic calligraphy and his attempt to reform the script which leads to his disgrace and subsequent fall.

It’s a complex and interlocked story which Rafik Schami unfolds in The Calligrapher’s Secret. The book is a little different from what we are used to today, since its author isn’t just a novelist, but a story-teller who combines the best of Arabic oral tradition and western literary skill. Language and style are modern and accessible. The setting gives the novel the touch of a fairy-tale from the Arabian Nights. At the same time Rafik Schami isn’t sparing of criticism.

I passed a good time reading The Calligrapher’s Secret. For me it has been a very enjoyable read which helped me to understand the Arabic mind a little better. Highly recommended.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.