Atlantic Monthly Press

The Memory of Love

gwen — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

The Memory of Love is a slow and beautiful book. I'm not the biggest fan of art that proceeds at such a deliberate pace, but this is definitely at the top of the heap for such books; the descriptions are lovely and precise, every detail picked out with absolute care. I loved the representations of African life, which felt honest and authentic. Having recently spent a year in Africa, I had lots of moments of recognition—for example, the racism of many international aid workers is often well-depicted (although it’s carefully not attributed to the “good” expatriate characters, which struck me as simplistic). The author—who is biracial and was raised in the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone—also includes some good post-colonial critique, but it rarely feels like the critique overpowers the narrative.

The book is set mainly in 2001 in Sierra Leone, with three main characters (all male): a dying university professor, a brilliant young surgeon, and a British expatriate psychiatrist. They're complex characters with intriguing perspectives—particularly the professor, who survived very un-heroically through turbulent times, and is not painted in a sympathetic manner at all. The whole story forms a vivid, touching portrait of war—its devastating, multifaceted effects on human beings; its numb aftermath.

It seems like an odd choice for a female author to tell a story primarily through male characters, however, and it's a little bit difficult to know how to review such a book as a feminist. Interestingly, The Memory of Love fails the Bechdel test (to pass, it would require "at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man"). There are at least two women in the book, but I can't think of a scene offhand in which they talk to each other. Of course, the main characters are male, so how could there be such a scene?

Perhaps it's more relevant to discuss how the female characters are portrayed. There are definitely women in this book to equal the men; I particularly liked the psychiatrist's close female friend Ileana, a brusque psychologist and likewise European, whose narrative function is usually to call him out for his assumptions or stereotypes. He also has a female patient with a sad and stirring story. The book's two most important female characters are quite mysterious, though.

Those two female characters are the major love interests—and the two scenes in which we see men fall in love with them depict love at first sight. The women's personalities usually seem incidental to the passion of their lovers. In fact, I would go so far as to call both women ciphers. I never felt like I had much idea of what they were thinking. The male psychiatrist also has a wife and daughter back home, who (in the rather rare instances that they appear) are similarly opaque.

In general, I liked The Memory of Love, especially as a delicate description of a war-ravaged country. But—oddly for a book whose title implies that it's mostly about love—though I enjoyed the portrayals of the men’s emotional experiences throughout their difficult romances, I closed the book feeling somewhat dissatisfied, because I felt so little connection to the female characters.

Written by: Clarisse Thorn, December 19th 2010

The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Jeff Leen

Atlantic Monthly Press

One of my most irritating memories of the early and mid-1980s is my younger brother's insistence on having TV wrestling in the background on Saturday mornings. Even at age nine, the “sport” seemed staged, hokey, and fake. But imagine a time when wrestling was based on skill as much as show, when young American women saw it as an escape from poverty as much as a pass into celebrity. Author and Washington Post editor Jeff Leen skillfully transports readers back to the period when wrestling had a cult following in his biography of the most famous female wrestler in America.

Exhaustively researched, The Queen of the Ring, Leen's biography of Mildred Burke, who helped shape the world of American and, later, Japanese women's wrestling, is a fast read. With an engaging writing style and a sympathetic voice, Leen chronicles the surprising rise and equally devastating fall of a tough, beautiful, and gullible Burke.

Drawing heavily on her unpublished autobiography, Leen shows the many sides of Burke. She was arrogant and grasped for the riches she never had, but also generous to those down on their luck. A savvy marketer who crafted an image, Burke was also innocent and all too trusting. A woman of many contradictions, Burke became a champion in professional sports, but she was almost always down for the count in her personal life.

Burke's success in a sport that was openly hostile to women—some states outright banned female wrestling competitions, considering it immoral—was no small feat in an era when women were largely seen and not heard, if they were seen at all. But with her manager and husband Billy Wolfe (if there's ever been a villain in black, it's this guy), she endured humiliation, emotional and physical abuse, and financial setbacks.

As a picture of the times, it's hard for the reader not to be outraged by the way women athletes were treated by managers, promoters, and their own husbands. It's equally telling that Burke eventually opened a school to train housewives to "fight back." What we now call domestic violence was still largely acceptable.

Whether or not you're interested in sports, The Queen of the Ring is an interesting look at both the woman and the era she helped define.

Written by: M.L. Madison, November 11th 2009

Confessions of a Mullah Warrior

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:53:00 +0000

By Masood Farivar

Atlantic Monthly Press

“History is full of great men,” Masood Farivar declares as a young man, about a third of the way into his memoir, Confessions of a Mullah Warrior. Luckily, Uncle Jaan Agha rhetorically slaps him on the back of the head, half a page later. The topic is dropped then, and for the remainder of the narrative. Confessions of a Mullah Warrior is full of Farivar’s mostly unintentional awkwardness with women, which is at times induced by modesty, at times total miscommunication, and mostly, it is innocent.

Farivar tells the story of his maturation, even though he seems to continually avoid growing up. Focusing on incidentals and plot rather than personal details, the book leaves the reader with a greater sense of Afghan customs and heritage than of the man who is Masood Farivar.

Farivar surveys his past longingly, abashedly, and ashamedly. Longing for the sense of homeland lost, he emigrates from Afghanistan to Pakistan and finally to the U.S., seemingly moving farther in body and spirit from a sense of belonging. All the while, Farivar seems to yearn more to fit into his environment than to be himself, and he seems a bashful adolescent well past the age. Farivar shamefully reproaches himself for trying to fit—and then for fitting in too well.

Farivar’s concerted attempt at placing himself in the center of world events and of using his life as a metaphor for every other mujahideen, martyr, and bystander causes him to be lost in the narrative. This is especially true as Farivar allows himself to indulge in some of the more irritating themes of the genre. There is also a constant need to find humor in a naive attempt to reclaim ownership of one’s past, and the memoir is replete with retrospective irony, which is pointed out to the reader each and every time.

Overall, while Confessions of a Mullah Warrior gives the reader a greater sense of the Afghani experience of repetitive conflicts and exile, it does not give the reader a sense of Masood Farivar.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, June 5th 2009