EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

Product Information

Mantel's third novel, published in 1988 in England and now being issued here (along with her sixth—see above—also previously unseen here), splendidly evokes the constrained life of the expats in a feudal Islamic society where boredom is endemic, rumors of rebellion commonplace, and the police feared. The reader sees immediately that this will not be a good situation for Frances when her husband, who had arrived earlier, locks her into the apartment her first day there, for her own protection. The British expats discuss some of the more famous customs of the country, like cutting off the hands of thieves, by noting in passing that they use anesthetic and have doctors standing by to bind up the wound. She brings her considerable literary gifts to bear in a fictional account of her stay that makes you understand why.

As time goes on, you meet people and develop a life, but underneath is the arbitrary and Kafka-esque nature of expat life in Saudi Arabia, where rumor runs rife in the absence of real information.Additionally, I didn’t know if the narrator was a genuine alter-ego of the author (whose experiences the book mirrors) or if she was meant to come across as a self-righteous snob. There is a reason diplomats must stay with their own–the cannot afford to have their allegiance weakened by contact with “the locals. Perhaps it's asking too much to yearn for lip-licking, hip-thrusting, transcendent prose that forces you to believe that there is a writing god. He is then offered a post in Saudi Arabia with a firm building, amongst other things, a new government ministry building. A really interesting read and, as is so often the case, based on Mantel's experience - apparently she did the same.

The setting is super fascinating to me but I felt as if Mantel was just zooming in and out with the binocular without ever losing the blur.Their complicity with the ruling regime and the subtle idea of vast salaries as a form of bribe to mind their own business, even turn a blind eye when necessary, implicates capitalism and those who benefit from it. I remember the hostile sunshine, the barren line of hills, the absence of birdsong and the distant line of the freeway: the tiny, silent cars moving from somewhere to somewhere, leaving me behind with my journal. First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. We all know this backward desert of Wahabism is terrible, but just how offensive it is to Western sensibilities, how hypocritical the royal family is to commit every sin in the Koran while inflicting this puritanical code on its citizens, and how corrupt this combination of hypocrisy and wealth can be is -- painfully -- drawn with Mantel's gifts of description and characterization. Yasmin and Samira, western-educated but strong defenders of Islam, tell her the apartment belongs to a powerful Saudi man who's installed his mistress there.