book review?
well, not really.
spent some memorable hours this weekend in new york with one of my dearest college friends and her absolutely edible one year old son - it was so exciting to see some of the things that musa will be doing in just a few months! keith vikram - half scottish, half south indian - is already cruising, tentatively, and even doing things on command - he'll even breathe in and out like a little yogi in imitation of his momma, and can pick out the "eight" shape from his foam floor mat on demand. he says "mm-BAAA!!" to mean a number of things, and even though he isn't recognizably identifying anything or anyone with words it's so amazing to see how much he understands of words he hears.
anyway, so my dear friend, who shares the edinburgh connection with me (she studied there in 96-97 as an undergrad, i was there in 97-98 for grad school while she was in her senior year back home, and then she went back in 98-99 for the same grad program i had done) gave me a gift of two alexander mccall smith books. not the no. 1 ladies' detective agency series, for which he is apparently most well-known, but two light-hearted fiction books on life in edinburgh. just finished 44 Scotland Street, will continue with Espresso Tales, probably tonight.
so this isn't really a review, because i read through it too quickly to assess it with confidence. so i'm really just reacting when i say reading 44 scotland street was like savoring a... napoleon, maybe? something crispy and light and delicious, maybe frosted or at least cream-filled, with some layers to it, some depth of flavoUr, a delicate sweetness, a lingering pleasant aftertaste.
there was enough of edinburgh familiar to me to be delightful, a sense of both the old, ordered beauty and almost-pretentiousness of the place (it would be sacrilege for me to say actual pretentiousness), but enough of what i did not know to make me see that there is a sense of the city i will never get... basically the part of it that is, well, white, and goes out to bars with casual acquaintances and whatnot. which is a lot of it, i know. but i was too busy pretending with my good friend there to be the Fundamentalist Lassies of Bonnie Scotland (this was before fundamentalist became such a bad word in both muslim and non-muslim circles that even i couldn't play with it anymore). so i got to know the side of edinburgh that could get a free piece of burfi in bismillah grocers, that scoffed at the edinburgh uni MSA and its problems, that actually volunteered to give tours to visitors when the new masjid finally opened even though i was supposed to be finishing up my dissertation (don't worry, i finished it in the end anyway).
still, mccall smith was a very fun read... very fun... ya allah, was i really an english major, or was that all a dream??
it's funny, the things that struck deeper chords in the book rang from the characters themselves... well, that's not funny, really, that's the way it should be, isn't it. but even though pushy irene and her precocious son bertie are a bit exaggerated for comic effect, i recognize their situation so well... and i like that some of the characters have moral conflicts over something like a little lie. halfway through the book i came to expect that any character in the middle of an act of deceit or furtiveness would be immediately caught out, and that was kind of fun too... those are the kinds of scenes in movies i can't bear watching. something about moral suspense is just difficult for me. it would be so much easier if everyone just didn't do things they weren't supposed to do.
alright well, time for maghrib, and musa is well into the books on the bottom of the bookshelf now... currently eating a humprhey carpenter book instead of the squash i pureed so beautifully for him just an hour or so ago...
spent some memorable hours this weekend in new york with one of my dearest college friends and her absolutely edible one year old son - it was so exciting to see some of the things that musa will be doing in just a few months! keith vikram - half scottish, half south indian - is already cruising, tentatively, and even doing things on command - he'll even breathe in and out like a little yogi in imitation of his momma, and can pick out the "eight" shape from his foam floor mat on demand. he says "mm-BAAA!!" to mean a number of things, and even though he isn't recognizably identifying anything or anyone with words it's so amazing to see how much he understands of words he hears.
anyway, so my dear friend, who shares the edinburgh connection with me (she studied there in 96-97 as an undergrad, i was there in 97-98 for grad school while she was in her senior year back home, and then she went back in 98-99 for the same grad program i had done) gave me a gift of two alexander mccall smith books. not the no. 1 ladies' detective agency series, for which he is apparently most well-known, but two light-hearted fiction books on life in edinburgh. just finished 44 Scotland Street, will continue with Espresso Tales, probably tonight.
so this isn't really a review, because i read through it too quickly to assess it with confidence. so i'm really just reacting when i say reading 44 scotland street was like savoring a... napoleon, maybe? something crispy and light and delicious, maybe frosted or at least cream-filled, with some layers to it, some depth of flavoUr, a delicate sweetness, a lingering pleasant aftertaste.
there was enough of edinburgh familiar to me to be delightful, a sense of both the old, ordered beauty and almost-pretentiousness of the place (it would be sacrilege for me to say actual pretentiousness), but enough of what i did not know to make me see that there is a sense of the city i will never get... basically the part of it that is, well, white, and goes out to bars with casual acquaintances and whatnot. which is a lot of it, i know. but i was too busy pretending with my good friend there to be the Fundamentalist Lassies of Bonnie Scotland (this was before fundamentalist became such a bad word in both muslim and non-muslim circles that even i couldn't play with it anymore). so i got to know the side of edinburgh that could get a free piece of burfi in bismillah grocers, that scoffed at the edinburgh uni MSA and its problems, that actually volunteered to give tours to visitors when the new masjid finally opened even though i was supposed to be finishing up my dissertation (don't worry, i finished it in the end anyway).
still, mccall smith was a very fun read... very fun... ya allah, was i really an english major, or was that all a dream??
it's funny, the things that struck deeper chords in the book rang from the characters themselves... well, that's not funny, really, that's the way it should be, isn't it. but even though pushy irene and her precocious son bertie are a bit exaggerated for comic effect, i recognize their situation so well... and i like that some of the characters have moral conflicts over something like a little lie. halfway through the book i came to expect that any character in the middle of an act of deceit or furtiveness would be immediately caught out, and that was kind of fun too... those are the kinds of scenes in movies i can't bear watching. something about moral suspense is just difficult for me. it would be so much easier if everyone just didn't do things they weren't supposed to do.
alright well, time for maghrib, and musa is well into the books on the bottom of the bookshelf now... currently eating a humprhey carpenter book instead of the squash i pureed so beautifully for him just an hour or so ago...
posted by Ayesha | 5:17 PM
2 Comments:
now i have to read that one if only to share a piece of what you love so much
I love Edinburgh but I love Glasgow more for her people. I miss home now :-( Thank you for this wonderful post. Inshallah we plan to be in Glasgow for Christmas. I can't wait!
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