Customer Reviews

The End of Manners: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Unpretentious and powerful, Marciano's novel is painstakingly honest and revelatory. Not just a frightening foray into a part of the world few experience, the author conveys a sense of urgency, coupled with the real horror of war, the daily battering of a country that endures a concentration of violence as various factions fight for ascendancy. Two important characters drive the narrative: the relentlessly curious journalist for London's "Observer", Imogen Glass; and the more circumspect and emotionally vulnerable Italian photojournalist, Maria Galante. In what would seem the perfect pairing of Western aggression and natural sensitivity, the two women's temporary intrusion into Afghanistan is but another wild story for the worldly Glass, life-changing for the Italian who is charged with photographing the suffering faces of females in a culture that rigidly defines their roles in a manner that outrages Western sensibilities.

Retreating from the demands of photo-journalism after the demise of a long love affair, Maria has contented herself in a less demanding niche, photographing food for specialized magazines. Offered a unique opportunity to travel to Kabul with the larger-than-life Glass, Maria is at first reluctant to accept the assignment: a growing percentage of Afghan women have been self-immolating rather than submit to arranged marriages with much older men. The plight of Afghan women long a subject of interest to the public, it is Imo's task to write the back story and Maria's to capture the images of desperate women who would rather die than accept their fate. Fine on paper, the real time consequences of the assignment are daunting. Not only is Afghanistan dangerous, but to photograph such women is to court reprisal, dishonoring the victims in a culture as foreign to Imo and Maria as are the primitive conditions of this part of the world. Centuries-old traditions do not fall easily to the demands of journalistic curiosity, often heedless and disdainful of a way of life they cannot fathom.

Even after an intensive week of survival training, Maria is intimidated by the daily brutality of a country overrun with journalists, mercenaries, NGO workers, international contractors and the usual parasitic opportunists who descend on Afghanistan with various agendas, most of them lucrative. Their "fixer", Hanif, is critical to the success of the women's venture, not to mention their security. Without Hanif the women would be lost, but his very commitment to his obligations costs this man dearly. In a rapidly disintegrating arena, where expedience dictates most critical decisions, Imo imposes the entitlement of her profession on the task. Galante is at first dwarfed by her companion's personality; yet it is Maria who finds her voice in a frustrating and humiliating experience where priorities are skewed at best, mostly tragic. A nightmarish wartime landscape is illuminated in this powerful novel, small pearls of wisdom brilliantly inserted where least expected. In a moment in the grand scheme of a mad world, the essence of humanity is captured in this remarkable, devastating novel: "I had found her gift hidden in the fold of my own fear." Luan Gaines/ 2008.

Francesca Marciano has taken her readers to Kenya in Rules of the Wild, and to Italy in Casa Rossa; this time, she takes her readers to the blighted, thrilling country of Afghanistan. The End of Manners is a captivating story of a mismatched pair of women journalists covering what they soon realize is an impossible assignment in a place most Westerners visit only through the morning headlines and the evening news.

The narrator of the adventure, food photographer Maria Galante, is hand-picked by confident and successful journalist Imo Glass, to report on Afghan women who attempted to commit suicide to avoid arranged marriages. Maria leaves for Afghanistan prepared only with a brutal survival training course in England, and equipped with her camera and a series of ill-chosen articles of clothing.

Maria's time in Afghanistan is a series of tedious and futile interviews with NGO workers who refuse to risk exposing women, men firmly rooted in tradition, and women who know the consequences of sharing their stories. Maria and Imo confront the complex dynamics with which Afghans grapple against the startling backdrop of a war-torn country decorated with cell phone advertisements.

The End of Manners is a poignant depiction of Afghanistan as experienced by Westerners not entirely unlike ourselves. The beauty of the novel is in how easily and readily readers are caught up wanting the heroine to be braver, before realizing that they also would not be braver. Thus you are able to identify with the heroine, in contrast to familiar characters in similar novels that are too strong and too resilient to be real to Western readers. By making Maria real in this way, Francesca Marciano also makes Afghanistan real.

This stunning novel takes Western readers behind our headlines and news clips to a place that does exist, that is not easily understood, and that, as Maria accepts, cannot be condensed into our photographs and articles.

Armchair Interviews says: Up close and personal look at Afghanistan

I loved this book. Marciano has a facility with language that is truly poetic. The author quietly captures a feeling, something like two rattlesnakes locked in mortal combat during a tea party at the end of the world. The only criticism I have is that it wasn't long enough. Not because the story felt incomplete, but more because, as the character of Maria developed, I found myself wanting her to stay in Afghanistan, so I could be part of her ongoing observations and adventures. Lyrical, truthful, and personal -but never confessional and self-regarding- The End of Manners reads like a prose poem on the importance, the value, the absolute necessity of being with the Other, of being face to face, free from the prejudicial falsehoods that blur individuals.

I love everything Francesca Marciano writes - her work is engaging and informative - check her out!

Francesca Marciano's latest book is set in Afghanistan which most of us only know through the news media. The story is plausible, powerful, poignant and insightful. And in her poetic and elegant writing style she paints a vivid picture of this sad, haunting, strangely beautiful and often frightening land, located at the far end of the earth and with a culture lost in time.

The story is simple. Maria, a shy Italian photographer, still emotionally fragile after the breakup of a long relationship, reluctantly accepts an assignment outside her normally safe line of food photography. After first completing a mandatory and grueling survival course, she joins Imo, a successful and intimidating magazine journalist, who unlike herself, brims with self confidence and ambition. Their mission in Afghanistan often appears poorly planned. The task is to do a story on Afghan women who, rather than be forced into arranged marriages with much older men, are willing to attempt suicide. As narrow as this subject is, it is hard for them to succeed as they find out in several attempted interviews with the locals who are very reluctant to open up to, or be photographed by foreigners. Against the harsh backdrop of a war-torn land, complete with mercenaries, arms dealers, NGOs, foreign contractors, journalists and an array of locals, an unlikely friendship develops between the two women and also with their guide on whom they are very dependent. The contrast in cultures and values is glaring and the moral dilemmas that are thrown up cannot be ignored.

To me, 'Rules of the Wild' was brilliant, but then I was disappointed in 'Casa Rosa'. This is a thoughtful, informative and beautifully written book.

The thing that makes this novel really work is its limited ambition and I don't mean that in a negative sense at all. It describes a photojournalist's trip to Afghanistan to cover a story about women choosing to take their lives rather than be forced to marry men much older than them. The novel covers just this limited period of time spanning the trip and a week or so leading up to it and the few story lines from the past that are included are so uncomplicated that they seamlessly blend in with the present tense. This feature of the novel--that it is uncluttered by too many fancy writing devices like competing subplots or too much jumping around in time or the presence of too many secondary characters--is what makes this book succeed. Although the book is of average length, the feeling I was left with after reading it was that I had just finished reading a short story.

Marciano uses a very sparse and clean writing style which accentuates the book's resemblance to a short story. But clearly, these very things that work so well for this novel can so easily fail if the plot itself is somewhat lacking. In this case, however, it is plausible, and fast paced, and, despite the several novels having been written about the devastation in Afghanistan, also seems very original. And even the people described in the novel, even the ones the author does not give too many paragraphs to, seem drawn--and drawn well--from real life. No effort is made to mask the grim situation in Afghanistan and this honesty only adds to this book's worth. Not a groundbreaking work of fiction, this, but well worth your time.

Powerful and unassuming, "The End of Manners" has an exotic locale and nail-biting suspense but is the polar opposite of your everyday genre thriller.

With a tangibly authentic premise, well-drawn characters, evocative sense of place and deeply affecting point of resolution and redemption, there are plenty of ways to celebrate Francesca Marciano's latest novel.

With two critically acclaimed novels ("Casa Rossa"and "Rules of the Wild") and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay ("Don't Tell") behind her, Marciano has here taken on the complexities of today's Afghanistan and succeeded with grace and heart.

Two women, an English journalist and an Italian photographer, go to Kabul, Afghanistan for a magazine story about young women who have attempted suicide rather than submit to arranged marriages in which they are sure to live lives of abuse and servitude.

The journalist, an experienced but flighty war-zone careerist, pushes ever forward in the quest for a possible Pulitzer, but the photographer has second thoughts about the cultural appropriateness of their quest.

Maria Galante had long ago left behind the sad dramas of crisis reportage for quiet assignments photographing food for cooking magazines in Milan. She knows she is wildly out of her element in dangerous and chaotic Kabul, yet for a time she gamely trails along behind the effusive and charismatic reporter Imogen Glass.

Maria is the narrator of "The End of Manners," and she filters her experiences, first in a "hostile environments" survival training camp, and then in Kabul and its outlying village, through the lens of her tender, recently broken heart. She yearns to move past her break-up funk and reclaim a sense of adventure and dignity in her life and work, but she eventually realizes that using Imo Glass as a role model might not be the best option after all.

Of her first meeting with Imo in London, she notes, "She wore an oversized cashmere cardigan with rolled-up sleeves that could've been left behind by a lover (she didn't look like the marrying kind). Thick Indian silver bracelets clinked at her wrists and as she hugged me I caught a whiff of patchouli. Imogen Glass emanated body heat, female humors and fluids. She appeared to be someone who loves to walk barefoot and doesn't burn in the sun."

Maria's week at survival camp , meant to prepare her for the dangers she most likely would encounter in a war zone, leaves her feeling even more vulnerable. It doesn't help that the larger-than-life Imo Glass, who appears to be in charge, has the unsettling habit of downplaying their circumstances. Satellite phones are left uncharged, flak jackets are forgotten in the hotel.

Imo has hired a fixer, a Kabul television reporter named Hanif who moonlights as a guide, an arranger, someone who can be counted on not only to drive them around but make payoffs, navigate mine fields and checkpoints and make himself available for whatever increasingly dangerous or culturally insensitive plan Imo or Maria comes up with, including those that wind up being of extreme personal hardship. Skillfully drawn as a man of dignity and honor, Hanif is as much a gounding presence for Imo and Maria as he is a symbol of the best of Afghanistan to the reader.

Marciano's descriptions of the rugged beauty of Afghanistan are startling; in the midst of danger and chaos, there are still blue skies.

"I got out of the car and felt the dry gravel crunch under my shoes. The effervescent air, as light as a wisp, caressed my neck. I looked around. Three hundred and sixty degrees of azure and earth, mountains and valleys, blue morphing into purple, then strips of green, yellow and ocher. I started taking pictures, it didn't matter really where I pointed my camera."

Best of all, perhaps, is Marciano's careful handling of the culturally insensitive Westerners who expect to show up in a remote tribal village for a magazine story about women's rights--with photos!

"I saw Zuley's image through the lens: her jutting shoulder blades, her bandaged arms, as she pressed her face against the wall. An oblique ray of light picked out the pale blue of her veil, the flaking, faded moss green of the wall, the russet blanket. They were velvety, powdery hues, already discolored like the pigments of frescoes of the trecento. Even though you couldn't see her face, it would be a magnificent photo. A dying Madonna, shot from the back."

The opportunity for redemption in this situation is clear, and it is no spoiler to the plot to say that Maria makes the right choice.

I enjoyed this book. It was informative and descriptions took me directly to the scene and involved with the characters. I recommend reading it and I may even purchase it to keep.

In Italian novelist Marciano's novel of European journalists delving into the hidden lives of Afghan women, narrator Maria Galante is a shy photojournalist. Having abandoned award-winning stories for food photography after a debilitating break-up, Maria reluctantly teams up with loud, outgoing Imo Glass, an ambitious British writer, to do a story on attempted suicides by Afghan girls trying to avoid forced marriages. They plan to interview and photograph the family and friends of a hospitalized girl in an isolated village who had attempted to burn herself.

Initially bowled over and captivated by Imo's charm, attention and friendliness, Maria's spirits lift. "Essentially, I realized in a flash that anything done in Imo's company would take on a whole new light."

But in the harsh glare of Afghanistan Imo seems more pushy, ambitious and focused. She will do anything, Maria realizes, even sacrifice others, to get the story.

Marciano deftly portrays the gulf between cultures, the precariousness of life in war-ravaged Afghanistan, the fierceness of patriarchal culture and the isolation of tribal women. From physical danger and intimidation to a vulnerable woman's momentary recklessness, and the nightmarish isolation of finding oneself stranded alone in a hostile land, Marciano explores emotional nuances and moral choices that can in such extreme circumstances mean life and death.

The inner landscape is as convincing as the lawless and unsympathetic countryside.

I liked her other books much better, but this book was a fascinating glimpse into the struggle for any kind of normal life in Afghanistan. The story powerfully illustrates that the definition of normal in the USA has no relation to normal in other cultures - which Americans have great difficulty accepting.