Hephzibah Anderson reviews the latest paperbacks, including Marjane Satrapi's spirited, quietly subversive follow-up to Persepolis.
Embroideries Marjane Satrapi Pantheon Books Dh62
This slender graphic book was first published in hardback three years ago, but at the start of the summer a story broke in France that has lent fresh relevance to its new paperback edition. A court in Lille controversially annulled the marriage of two Muslims on the grounds that the groom had been led to believe his bride was a virgin. She was not, and when he found out he announced his discovery to their remaining wedding guests, then had his wife of mere hours dumped back at her parents' home. According to the court, the deception was a breach of contract. But in a country that insists on a rigorous separation of religion and state - and prides itself on having given birth to Simone de Beauvoir and all that she stood for - the decision was nothing short of scandalous.
At the same time, it emerged that increasing numbers of Muslim women in Europe were embracing western freedoms only to undergo costly surgery as their wedding nights neared, paying for a procedure that recreates the illusion of virginity. The dainty stitches of Marjane Satrapi's title refer to that same operation. Not that the squeamish have anything to fear from this book. Though it is graphic in one sense, being told, like Satrapi's career-making two-volume autobiography, Persepolis, in a combination of bold drawings and equally bold words, it is rarely explicit.
Embroideries opens as a long lunch winds down. The men go off to smoke while the women are banished to the kitchen to do the dishes. All is not quite what it seems, however. With the washing up done, the samovar is brought out and the women sit down together over steaming tea. Now, the real fun begins, as the conversation pivots round to men and each woman in turn tells her story of love or marriage (in these terse tales, the two rarely coexist).
Many of the women from Persepolis feature, including the author herself, her mother and her glamorous, spirited aunt. There's also her grandmother, an opium addict who's cranky as anything first thing in the morning, but a shrewd sweetheart once she's had her daily fix. "To speak behind others' back is the ventilator of the heart," she declares, throwing open the floor. One woman has a husband who turns out to be gay, another is jilted when her groom runs back to Switzerland with all the wedding gold and a third tells of falling for a communist just as the Shah returned to power in 1953. They had barely consummated their marriage before he had to flee to safety in Germany. She wrote him long letters, but he didn't write back. Instead he called once a week to offer a new promise while simultaneously delaying her journey to join him. "I'm finding a nice apartment soon. I don't want you to live uncomfortably. I'm furnishing the apartment soon, I don't want…" After a year, she had heard enough. Finally arriving in Germany, she found a husband who smelt of other women, and was eventually driven to seek solace in the arms of a man named Herbert, her waltz partner from dance class.
Though it seems slight set alongside Persepolis, this spirited book captures a hidden and quietly subversive world in which ellipses and exclamation marks say plenty even while faces remain blank. The woman with the unfaithful husband, for instance, still carries with her a photograph of her wedding day, "the most beautiful day of my life". When Satrapi asks her why she would keep a photograph of her cheating ex, her reply encompasses volumes. "It's not his photo I'm keeping! It's my wedding photo…"
Thames: Sacred River Peter Ackroyd Vintage Dh102
Peter Ackroyd is such a prolific author, it's easy to take his talent for granted. But whether he's writing fiction or non-fiction, he answers to the call of just one muse: London. Few cities are as fortunate in their chroniclers. A native born and bred, Ackroyd has plumbed its ancient, fetid depths, animating its ghosts and amplifying the echoes of its rowdy past. London, his bestselling biography of the city, is beloved by its best-informed denizens, the cabbies. The city is a memorable character in even the weakest of his generally excellent novels. Now comes Ackroyd's biography of the waterway that has shaped his obsession. The Thames is England's longest river, but, as Ackroyd notes, with a length of just 215 miles (346 kilometres), "it must be the shortest river in the world to acquire such a famous history". Tracking it from sea to source over thousands of years, he describes the fish that swim in its waters, the workers who have toiled on its surface and its banks and the artists who've been inspired by it. The river is haunted and haunting, has its own laws and legends and has borne both life and life-snatching diseases. This swift-flowing, poetic elegy doesn't quite match the verve of Ackroyd's best books, but it's nevertheless teeming with ideas and curiosities.
Confessions of a Falling Woman Debra Dean Fourth Estate Dh54
This punchy collection of nine short stories and one much longer tale follows a first novel that fused an array of book-group-friendly topics like Alzheimer's and immigration with the tale of a woman who decades earlier helped to hide the Hermitage's priceless art collection from Nazi troops. The burden of the past weighs heavy in these new stories, many of which pivot on themes that would seem clunky in less deft hands. The title story tells of a seriously ill woman writing to her ex-husband years after the death of their young daughter and the end of their marriage. She craves not forgiveness but merely to be heard. Elsewhere, another woman unexpectedly falls for her ex all over again; a prodigal daughter returns home to help her domineering alcoholic mother; and an insomniac actor-slash-bartender scares off an armed burglar then watches his life unravel. Short stories are too often viewed as warm-up exercises for longer works, but their execution requires subtly different skills. Dean pulls off the transition with a blunt kind of grace. As one narrator says of her garden, "It's not ambitious, but things grow in it". Though Dean's editor is doubtlessly hoping that her next work will be heftier, each of these modest tales has plenty of weight.
The Ghost Agent Alex Berenson Arrow Dh48
John Wells is a CIA agent without a mission. At the climax of Alex Berenson's debut thriller, Wells foiled an al Qa'eda attack on New York's Times Square. Though his physical wounds have healed, he's reluctant to acknowledge his psychological scars. Rather than confiding in his girlfriend and sometime boss, Jennifer Exley, he slips out of bed at night, leaving her sleeping to go on "joyless joyrides", pushing his motorcycle to death-defying speeds out on the motorway. Luckily for their relationship, his-and-hers missions soon materialise: in Afghanistan, a marked improvement in the Taliban's military tactics hints at foreign assistance, while in North Korea, an American mission to extract a mole has gone wrong, suggesting an informant at work somewhere in Washington. As Wells heads back to the mountain caves that haunt his nightmares, Exley leads the hunt for the double-agent. Of course, the two briefs turn out to be intimately connected, with roles for Russia, Iran and the novel's real villain, China. Berenson's day job as a New York Times reporter simultaneously accounts for the novel's flaws and strengths. The sophisticated plot is uncomfortably credible, though he tends to over-explain the technicalities. But what prevents this good thriller from being excellent is the skimpiness of its characters.
