Customer Reviews

Gazelle

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

 

 

13-year old Elizabeth lives with her parents, a bumbling professor father and an exquisite, hot-blooded beauty of a mother, in Cairo of the 1950s. When Elizabeth's mother leaves the family, for sexual excitement, Elizabeth finds that she has to care for her father's increasing mental and physical deterioration. At the same time, she finds herself drawn to the beauty and mystery of Egypt, embodied in the "gazelle" man, her father's friend Ramses, who is a perfume-maker. It's a languid, episodic brief novel, with slight detours into the occult, reminiscent of the work of Jeanette Winterson. Like Winterson, Ducornet creates postmodern philosophical fables that masquerade as novels. With painterly precision, and a certain word-sorcery, "Gazelle" muses on the nature of love and sexual awakening; memory; perfume making; illness; and mother-daughter, father-daughter relationships. The reader is well served by just immersing themselves in the rich and quirky prose, and the exotic scents and smells of Egypt. The scenes with Elizabeth's cold and glamorous mother provide much needed tension in this vaporous, attar-scented novel.

During the 1950s Egypt was a totally different place and the era of the unwanted American had not yet appeared. Pre-teen Elizabeth goes to Cairo with her parents when her father, a professor, on a Fulbright scholarship Elizabeth's father transported his wife and child to Cairo, Egypt for one year.

It is here in the turbulent, yet quiet of exotic air that young Liz finds herself stuck with her ailing father when her mother (an Icelander) decides to leave. She doesn't go far just moves out of their abode and proceeds to demoralize her husband and shake her daughter's life.

I love the prose of this novel. Ducornet's ability to draw the reader into the scene is wonderful. Recommend this book to anyone who likes good prose, and family life abroad - albeit with stress.

i loved this book with every fiber of my being!! i would have read it again and again but a couple months ago i lent it to a friend and havent seen it since. maby my love for it was partialy because i was in egypt when i read it. this book was very poetic and went indepth about the emptions of sexually frustrated young girls. i recomed this book to anyone who would take the time to read it!
PS
forgive any spelling mistakes you might find, i cant spell to save my life!

As other reviewers have noted, Gazelle is the story of Elizabeth, a 13-year-old American girl who has been brought to Egypt because of her father's Fulbright scholarship. Her father is a professor, quiet, subdued, obsessed with things of the past, especially wars. Her mother is originally from Iceland, and is a large personality, uncontrollable by her husband and daughter. Crisis occurs when Elizabeth and her father surprise her mother during one of her affairs, after which her mother relocates to a series of hotels, so she can more freely conduct her love affairs. Elizabeth is caught in the middle. Her father spends most of his time pining, playing chess, and playing war games, most notably with his friend, Ramses Ragab, a gentle perfumemaker. Elizabeth's mother soon reenters her life, and Elizabeth is caught between her father's retreat into himself, her mother's escapades, and her own obsession with Ramses Ragab, which signals her sexual awakening.

Ducornet does many things well in this slim novel. Although sometimes like a woman who has overdone her perfume, her prose is mostly fragrant, spicy, and exotic. It is vibrant, and the reader is transported to this lost world, and views it with the same passion that Elizabeth does. She also portrays Elizabeth's mother and their relationship extremely well, although I found myself wondering why her mother would be in her daughter's life so half-heartedly, as if she was there only to cause her child pain. In the midst of this relationship, there is one scene in this book that is incredibly memorable, when Elizabeth subtly takes off her green socks, balls them up, and kicks them across a room in a restaurant after her mother chides her for wearing them.

Although I felt that the main lines of storytelling (Elizabeth's relationship with her father, her father's downfall, her relationship with her mother, her obsession with Ramses Ragab) were well done, when Ducornet deviated from these lines, I felt less immersed in the story and simply wondered what the purpose was. This was the case for the glimpses into Elizabeth's adult life (which all seemed lonely, dull, and desperate, like her childhood left her unable to live fully; it seemed for all accounts that she was "coming into her own" at 13, but this doesn't seem to be the case), as well as for the sub-plot of Ramses Ragab's female assistant, who is Elizabeth's age.

Overall, Gazelle is a nice trip into an exotic, lost world through the eyes of a girl who is a most empassioned guide.

Gazelle is a first person account by a 13 year old of the summer in which her mother finally decides to leave her father, and herself. The novel is psychologically true, and one can observe the change in the girl as this event, and puberty alter her, but that is not the primary reason for reading Gazelle. The book is set in Egypt in the early 1950's, but it is a timeless Egypt that is evoked, the days of ancient Egypt as well as the bazaars of the 1950's.. The writing captures the impressions on all the senses, and has as a major character a seller/producer of perfumes whose ambition it is to rediscover some of the perfumes of the ancients. I recommend Gazelle especially to those readers, like myself, who have struggled with any of the novels of the Alexandria Quartet and found it mostly inaccessible. Where I feel Gazelle fails is in the character of the father. He just doesn't add enough to the novel for a character who is on stage so much.