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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A multi-layered novel about the difficulty of self-forgiveness., February 24, 2008
This review is from: The Cry of the Dove: A Novel (Paperback)
As a professor of English in a state university and teacher of Middle Eastern Women Writers I am always looking for novels that will challenge my students. I have used Faqir's second novel Pillars of Salt on several occasions. I was eager to assign The Cry of the Dove this semester. I had never read it before and I read it along with my students. Our first reaction to Salma's inability to forgive herself and to "get over it" was based on the idea that she wasn't trying hard enough to settle into her new life in Exeter. However, after completing the novel my students and I came to understand the difficulty she had in adjusting to the country that was now to be her home. Her landlady lives a parallel life, the shop keeper across the road lives as an outsider, her Welsh friend lives with a sense of distrust for the English. How, we concluded, could we expect Salma to behave much differently than she did. Her early sexual experiences were brutal and abusive, her pregnancy blamed entirely on her, her protective custody, flight to the convent and eventually England did nothing to encourage her to forgive herself for her moment of adolescent indescretion. My students and I predicted the conclusion but wanted to avoid reading it. We knew what would happen.
This novel continues Faqir's theme of womens' lack of power in the face of the male establishment, specifically, male relatives. The author clearly follows the themes of immigration, empowerment, personal power and cultural tradition. Pillars of Salt is, I believe, more powerfully and skillfully written. But The Cry of the Dove tackles the harsh realities of a woman who cannot escape her past and the damage it has done to her.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliantly written but missing something., January 8, 2008
This review is from: The Cry of the Dove: A Novel (Paperback)
Having a passion for all things Middle Eastern and reading everything I can get my hands on, I did find this interesting - but it was not particularly pleasant reading. It was sometimes very hard to follow the memory sequences interspersed with the current life sequences (although the challenge was a little menatally apealling). Many characters weren't developed fully, or rather they were vague in a way that was possibly intended, but also left me a bit wanting. The culture of the main character was also very vague. After doing a search on "The Levant" I am still no clearer as to where this character was from...if it is a real location the author had in mind, or rather a general cultural ideal. In any case, I don't believe I have ever read a book that so impressively tied together the past and the present - from a writing stand point, It was quite pleasurable to see what the author was capable of doing. The ending came a bit quick and failed to win my compassion, due to the fact that the character essentially chose her own fate at the expense of all those that had worked so hard to free her. Perhaps that was the point, but it didn't totally work for me. If you are fascinated by the mental workings of immigrants I highly recommend this - if you are wanting a clear picture of Middle Eastern/Muslim culture, I would recommend many books over this one.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lost in the Middle, October 21, 2008
This review is from: The Cry of the Dove: A Novel (Paperback)
I was seduced into reading this book by the lovely cover picture of a blue mosque by a reflecting pool. The actual locales, however, are far from such splendor. The protagonist, Salma, comes from a Bedouin tribe that punishes premarital sex with death. Fearful of her life, she escapes to police custody and is imprisoned in a sordid jail for her own protection. Rescued by nuns after several years, she finds asylum in England, living near the tracks in Exeter while she scrapes a living in low-level immigrant jobs and tries to improve her English.
All this is conveyed in outline in the first few chapters of the book, whose short sections read like picking through a pile of picture postcards spanning twenty years and two continents. Many of the descriptions are moving and effective, lyrical and stark by turns, and the jumping around in time should be familiar to all but the most literal readers. The real problem of the book is the lack of a consistent voice for Salma herself. Partly, this is a matter of language. We see Salma struggling to learn her first words of English; we see her later with enough knowledge to take an Open University course in literature; but the book is very vague about what happens to her in the middle. The flowing language of the first-person narrative clashes with the elementary mistakes that Salma makes in speaking, giving us little sense of her painful progress from one tongue to another.
In terms of factual description, though, the account of Salma's years in Exeter working as a seamstress and barmaid does have a certain grim realism, but it is rather stagnant. By contrast, Salma's memories of her early life begin to seem too impossibly idyllic, and she takes to romanticizing her future in a series of make-believe letters to various unreachable recipients, inventing a wish-fulfillment version of her life. The things that presumably really do happen in the last few chapters are scarcely more believable, unprepared and coming out of nowhere. And the very end of the book is like a slap in the face of the reader.
This is one of a number of recent novels dealing with the situation of Islamic immigrant women in Britain and the irresistible pull of the home country; some are even listed among the suggestions for further reading at the back of the book. In my personal order of preference, I would cite THE TRANSLATOR by Leila Aboulela, SWEETNESS IN THE BELLY by Camilla Gibb, THE SAFFRON KITCHEN by Yasmin Crowther, and BRICK LANE by Monica Ali. Despite its many incidental pleasures, I am not convinced that THE CRY OF THE DOVE adds enough to works like these to make it worth buying.
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