First up, I read From a Crooked Rib by Nuruddin Farah. It’s the story of a young Somali woman from the countryside, Ebla, who runs away from her community because she is being given in marriage to a much older man. As the novel progresses she gets thrown from one situation into another exercising her (limited) agency where she gets the chance but always, of necessity, dependent upon men.

In many ways, this was a fascinating book. The story is strong, and while it’s a slim book, the structure of it and the events that take place enable Farah to make a strong comment on the position of women, as well as indicating through Ebla’s eyes the gulf in lifestyle, habits and access to technology between the countryside and the towns even while some the restrictions on women remain constant.

What turned this from a success to a disappointment for me was the characterisation of Ebla herself. A good portion of the time she seemed to be a two-dimensional canvas onto which Farah could project his own views. Her musings and thoughts on the issues raised by the book often felt to me to be Farah’s words unconvincingly grafted on to her. This left the character feeling somewhat hollow and robbed the narrative of some of its potential meaning. A little more character-driven and this would have been a stronger book, I think. Having said that, it is still interesting, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to pick up a copy.

This will count towards the Global Reading Challenge as my book from Africa.

Far higher on the scale of disappointment was Sheila Jeffreys’ Beauty and Misogyny. I read this for the London Feminist Network book group, and was quite eager to pick it up as I enjoyed Jeffreys’ other book, The Industrial Vagina.

Unfortunately, Beauty and Misogyny is very unlike the last book I read by her. Real research and compelling arguments were scant in the extreme, and it spiralled downwards in several places into thinly veiled trans-bashing, which turned me off the book fairly swiftly. Many times I grew frustrated with rudimentary arguments and conclusions that didn’t rest easily on top of them. It didn’t go far enough in some directions which would have been interesting, and when there were interesting sections it didn’t take long to start back on a really negative tangent again.

I did manage to finish it, but grudgingly. Its flaws were too major to really permit any enjoyment. In fact, I was so upset by it in places that it made me want to reject out of hand any of the comments that I actually did agree with, which is pretty spectacular. After the passage where she insistently referred to transgender as a ‘hobby’ I did have to put it down and take a few deep breaths. I like my non-fiction to be closely argued and thoughtful, not just unpleasant.

Although I did take from the book some prompts for my own thoughts, such as the concept of the ‘makeover’ in popular culture as an initiation, of sorts, of young women into beauty culture (think Clueless, She’s All That, The Princess Diaries, Miss Congeniality, Grease, etc). This being portrayed as the beneficial act of shaping the young women into a more socially and culturally acceptable mode of being. That could have been an interesting avenue for discussion in a book of this nature! Alas, t’was not to be.

While I think that there is a place for an analysis of beauty practices within a strong feminist framework, this isn’t it. A major disappointment for me.

I read this as part of the Women Unbound challenge.

I confess that I’d never heard of Herta Muller before she recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I read about her then, and when I saw The Land of Green Plums in my local bookshop, I thought it looked interesting, and I decided to give it a go.

I’m very glad I did, although it’s a book I find quite hard to write about. It’s narrated, in the first person, by a student who has moved from the countryside to the city, seeking an improvement in living situation. She and a group of fellow students spent time together, trying to find a way to survive, identity intact, in Ceaucescu’s Romania. A difficult prospect.

From reading around a little, I’ve found out that the book is semi-autobiographical and incorporates many of Muller’s own experiences. Which doesn’t change how I feel about the book or interpret it, but does perhaps make the choice of first person narration particularly interesting.

Stylistically, I found it initially somewhat hard to get into. It’s a hard thing for me to explain and I’m not sure I’ll get this across properly, but I think it seemed almost as if, because the characters themselves found it hard to be other than detached (from their lives, from each other) and because of the style in which it’s written, the reader is looking on the ‘action’ with a bird’s-eye-view of the narrator engaging in her bird’s-eye-view of her own surroundings.

What I took away from the novel was less a highly detailed account of what life in Romania would have been like in Ceaucescu’s ‘reign of terror’ (as the back of the book states), but a hazy-yet-cutting evocation of the mood of the period, and the feeling of living where you are being watched, and controlled, and threatened from all angles. In this way, it managed to be a really very powerful book.

What you shouldn’t expect from it is a history book. It’s not a fictionalised history of the period, and you won’t really learn anything about Ceaucescu or anything particularly specific about Romanian history. That’s not really what the point of the book is, though. Where Muller excels is in the sense of threat; the difficulty of sustaining relationships where state control was everywhere and freedom of speech nonexistent; and the corrosion of the possibility of constructive interpersonal relationships under such a regime.

Challenges for which this book is applicable: the Global Challenge (Europe)

Alphonse’s Analysis

Ah, a good solid European novel for the Global Challenge, and I’m glad to see that these challenges haven’t been forgotten about. Let’s have a brief round-up:

Women Unbound challenge – 1 book out of 5
Global Challenge – 1 region out of 6
Short Story Challenge – 0 collections out of 5
Bibliophilic Books Challenge – 0 books out of 3
Essay Reading Challenge – 0 essays out of 20
Chunkster Challenge – N/A (commences in February)