Customer Reviews

Sandstorms: Days and Nights in Arabia

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

 

 

Theroux has a particularly valuable vantage point: he has spent more that 7 years in this region as a journalist. In this book which serves as a memoir, Theroux splendidly tells of this little understood region and its people. In an age when we hear of nothing but the fanaticism of this race of people and their intense religiosity, Theroux, I feel, manages to bridge the gap and bring a sense of humanism into his observations. Theroux systematically and humourously deconstructs our hostile stereotypes of Arabs and casts them in a light that is much more realistic and much more interesting to read. Throughout this book, which reads very smoothly and very effectively, he shows us the cultural and social elements of Arab life that few of us have bothered to considered. And, through this, one is able to understand the percieved fanaticism of the Arabs in a more appreciable way. I found that his obervations were, while precise, still very evocative. I wonder if being a journalist is particularly suited to this style of imagery.

Peter Theroux offers here an understanding of the Arab mindset not to be gleaned from any other book. In particular, of course we all know from Freud that we're all obsessed with sex. But the double standard in Arab culture was truly amazing as revealed throughout the book, particularly in the passage where an Arab, in the most vulgar terms, talks to Theroux about procuring foreign women. And, Theroux, finally fed up with his harangue tells the Arab man he has just the kind of women the women he wants....and they are Arab. The man never spoke to Theroux again.-The best part of the book is in Chapter 9 where he parodies ignorant visiting reporters' accounts of Saudi Arabia as if an Arab had come to report on New York City: I'll just quote a few lines from it "Lucy Ricardo might not recognize New York today....Business fluorishes with the intersection of Broadway("broad" signifying impure woman).(and 42nd) This district is known as Times Square, after the Jewish-owned New York Times newspaper. A few blocks away in Fifth Avenue ("fifth" is a measure of whiskey)...The officials....like many Americans whose intellectual capacity has been diminished by a diet of pork and alcohol....were sluggish and incurious when asked why a five cent piece is bigger than a ten cent piece:"-That's drollery at its best, Peter. The reason I'm only giving the book four stars is that it seems to me that Theroux can't decide whether he's reporting or writing a personal journal. He's obviously doing both. But this combination leads to some awkward transitions and not too swell writing at times. Personally, I think he should stick exclusively to the autobiographical. It's much more interesting and, in the end, tells us much more about the author AND about Saudi Arabia than mere reporting.

This book is entertaining, and also offers a different perspective about the political climate in the Middle East. It was written when the Iran/Iraq war was the big issue, before Desert Storm in 1991. Interesting to see that the Saudi attitudes toward the US haven't changed much, and a read of this book should serve to describe culture in a long-term perspective. Highly recommended for anyone that wishes to learn a little more about the differences in our modern cultures.

As I live in Bahrain I was interested in Peter Theroux's book. Unfortunately he got carried away with his name and thought he could actually write a travel book. Reading it was depressing.

Exactly how he spent the seven long years he supposedly took to write this book was never exactly described, but this book could have been written in seven weeks. His attitude is one of smirking cynicism mixed with alienation from those he seeks to emulate. I never stop halfway through a book I have paid good money for but I came close on this one. My main complaints are that he is a pretty poor writer and secondly that he had nothing to say.

I think Mr. Theroux realized he had written a dud by page 187 when he began to randomly attack other writers who had written books about the area; no doubt aware that he would be compared to them once the book was published. I was reading Jonathan Raban's "Arabia" at the same time as I was reading this book and the contrast could not have been greater. It is unfortunate that Raban was one of the writers Theroux chose to attack. "Arabia" is not only an interesting book but Raban is a good writer. One day Theroux may be, but somehow I doubt it.

Paul Cleaver Bahrain

Written and published after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and before the Gulf Wars that followed, Peter Theroux's book about working as a journalist in the Middle East seems at first a little dated, but eventually its point of view assumes a kind of currency. The political alliances of Arab and nonArab nations in the Middle East are, in his telling, like constantly shifting sands, and appearances are forever deceiving. In one form or another the past is all present anyway. Eventually, any point in time is nearly as good as any other. Or so it seems in this entertaining, informative, and sometimes confusing book.

What Theroux sets out to do is to shatter every easy Western assumption about life and history in the Middle East. With something of his brother Paul's eye for the incongruous, he tends to dwell on contradictions, ironies, and hypocrisies, and just about no one escapes being revealed as an unreliable narrator of the stories they have to tell. Most revealing in this regard is his account of working as a journalist in Saudi Arabia, a monarchy awash in oil wealth and a brand of radically conservative Islam. From this vantage point, we see the rivalries, prejudices, and grievances that characterize the Saudi view of other Middle Eastern nations. The Israelis, we begin to see, are only at the end of a sliding scale of animosity directed at everybody else in the region, including surprisingly the Palestinians. Change location to another country, as Theroux visits Cairo, then Jerusalem, then Damascus, and the perspectives are all altered again. Altogether, the book is like trying to view the Middle East through a kaleidoscope.

Some focus is gratefully achieved in the final chapters as Theroux visits novelist Abdelrahman Munif, whose classic work of fiction "City of Salt" he has translated. Ironically, in the company of a writer of fiction, he brings the reader to a clarity of vision that the earlier chapters of the book have shown to be utterly elusive. Maybe dated, but still a fascinating look at worlds that remain a mystery to most Westerners.

I knew Peter Theroux in Saudi, we worked for the same organisation, to say he was a wild card was an understatement and although the editor was interested in his stories, the amount of self promotion and self gain left us all somewhat bemused.

The book is bizarre and appears to be mostly fantasy; having worked and lived there at the same tim, for the same employer - none of rings true.

How very strange.

Peter Theroux wrote this book 20 years ago, just prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, an event which had far-reaching repercussions for the societies he depicts. I found his book quite uneven, with some solid, remarkable insights; some passages that flashed brilliance; but also some egregious errors in fact, as well as an unfocused structure that rambles over several disparate issues.

Serendipity, as in most careers, leads Theroux from Harvard, to a teaching assignment at the American University in Cairo, where he perfects his Arabic, and develops an interest in the fate of Moussa Sadr, an Iranian Shiite working in Lebanon who disappeared during a visit to Libya. Theroux decides to sign on to see the "heartland" of Islam, Saudi Arabia, by becoming a reporter for the English language newspaper, the Saudi Gazette. After a brief time in Jeddah, he is assigned to Riyadh, as a "one-man show," where he works and lives for over five years.

His witty insights into the journalism profession are one of the main strengths of the book. He has written a brilliant parody of how all too many journalists view the Kingdom by writing in a similar style an "Arab journalist's" view of New York (p155). It is a 6-star quality parody. This is preceded by a succinct summary of the various "off-the-shelf" stories that are written about the Kingdom, time and again, without originality, or insight. The problem, as he states on page 26 is: "These big issues were usually only confronted by major journalists, but they were the ones who made the shortest visits: usually five days at the most, not nearly enough time for their eyes to focus. Also, Arabs were almost never frank with foreign reporters." In another part, he does a precise dissection of a formulation used by Time magazine to describe the Palestinians (p 41). And in another section, he nailed another common problem with one's compatriots, particularly for a journalist: "...another journalist gone bush. Any defense of the Arabs, like any sign of familiarity with their history, religion, or culture, was highly suspect here, not only for its obvious effeteness, ... but because of its innate poor taste."

Another valuable aspect of the book is his discussions with AbdulRahman Al Munif, who, thanks to Theroux, who translated him, is the best known Saudi novelist in the West. (His novels are widely circulated within the Kingdom, but are officially banned there). The quintet that depicts the arrival of American oilman in the `30's, and the impact on the pre-industrialized nomads, commences with the epic work, "Cities of Salt." Theroux deserves solid accolades for his translation work.

Without any sense of irony however, Theroux skewers Jonathan Raban's book, "Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth," primarily because he left Saudi Arabia out of the book, visiting only the surrounding countries. He makes the valid analogy about a book on America, by someone who had only visited Canada, Belize, etc. But what of Theroux own book, also with "Arabia" in the title? Less than half the pages cover his stay in the Kingdom, the rest are in New England, Egypt, Israel, Syria and Lebanon. Unlike Raban's book, these countries are not even in the peninsula.

But even in the less than half of the book that is centered in the Kingdom, I found myself shaking my head repeatedly. The most egregious error, and it definitely is an error, and not a misprint, is on page 198, where he says that the new airport is WEST of the city. He says that development was pushed WEST, and makes the point a third time. How could anyone live in Riyadh for five years, and not realize that the airport was NORTH, and the development went NORTH? The reason he makes this mistake is that there was a map of Riyadh at the time that inexplicably placed north where west is on most maps, but SURELY, in five years of living there, one should realize where the sun is rising and setting!

OK, so he doesn't have a clue in terms of directions, but I felt this mistake underscored so much of what was missing from the book. The missing sense of place, a feel for its topography, the thrill of looking over the escarpment west (yes, west) of the city. There is no indication that he ever left Riyadh or Jeddah during his entire five years. The essence of Arabia, its desert is missing. And so much more: the Saudi middle class, the economics of daily life, the rush to urbanization, agricultural policies. Did he talk with a Saudi woman, even once? He is wrong on the authors of the excellent "The House of Saud" (p190). The 1979 attack on the mosque in Mecca, by fundamentalists, did not occur during "the height of the Haj season" (p 90). The amputations of hands for theft, which rarely occurred, were NOT carried out in hospitals, as he claimed they were (p 108). And I thoroughly cringed when I read the labels on Donna's wine, which he admits were thoroughly blasphemous. Why do expats feel compelled to be so insulting? In general, during the five years, he stayed within that very narrow circle of Westernized Saudis, those in the American Embassy and media quote circles. The one exception seems to be the befriending of a Lebanese Shia male nurse who worked at King Faisal Specialist Hospital, and that seemed to have been done mainly to obtain more information as to the fate of Moussa Sadr.

So, there was the element of his brilliant parody of American journalistic accounts, as described above, in his own account. But there were numerous mistakes and exaggerations of the cultural differences. And `Tis a pity, that, since Theroux has substantial empathy for Arabs, could see the "Orientalism" in many a western report on the region, and could change his perspective by saying: "I would have jeered, if I were Saudi -- was nothing compared to the glass house America lives in. There was no ridiculous or unfair aspect of life in any Arab country that could not be trumped ten times over by some detail of American life or history."

There are over 18,000 Saudi students on government scholarships currently studying in the US. They understand us much better than we understand them. They too must shake their heads, and ponder why we can't do better than this. The airport west of Riyadh! But for Thoroux's ability to at least compare our own shortcomings with theirs, and his translation of Munif, I raise a stricter evaluation to 3-stars.

I enjoyed much of the book until the end when I became fed up with Theroux's endless ruminations about the whereabouts of Moussa Sadr. I began to feel that since the author was unable to gleam anything new, he threw together some anecdotes because he still had to write a book.

Wonderful book. I lived for several years in Saudi Arabia but Theroux offered many insights which gave me an even more in-depth understanding of this fascinating country and its people.

Riyadh had a throng of foreigners in it. There are alien confrontations. Saudi Arabia has never been colonized. The author, serving as a reporter in Riyadh, wrote about business, oil, and official visits.

Previously he had pursued a Masters Degree program at Cairo. Richard Pederson, President of the American University in Cairo, had been a diplomat. In the beginning Theroux considered having a career in diplomacy, but as time passed he realized that he could not see himself explaining to others the deeds and misdeeds of a very large country, the United States.

After the peace accords President Carter was scheduled to visit Sadat. (Egypt truly was made to feel like a pariah by the other Arab countries.) Theroux taught English to a group of teenagers. Half the faculty at American University was American. The students were Egyptian, African and American children of diplomats, wealthy Arabs, and two dozen students on their junior year abroad from the University of California. The university had been founded in 1919. AUC was a serious, neutral, clean-cut college.

Refugees from the American University in Beirut arrived. Their stories were sickening. The Lebanese groused about the absence of croissants and having to live in an Arab city, Cairo. Next came refugees from Iran--the era of the hostage crisis. They were not as adamant about seeking employment since they had been well-paid under the Shah. Cairo's winter had bitter cold and rain. There was a community of Gulf Arabs in Cairo.

Seeking adventure, Theroux traveled to Saudi Arabia. Reporters on English language publications in Saudi Arabia were generally American or British because it was believed bilingual Arabs would stir up trouble. On the author's paper, the head office was at the port of Jeddah. Theroux was assigned a job at the Riyadh Bureau. Most of the royal family lived there. It was the center of political power. The founder of OPEC was from Riyadh. The Saudis banned foreign news bureaus. Reporters were allowed only the briefest of visits. The overseas publications had to rely upon local stringers.

Peter Theroux lived for one year at the Riyadh Intercontinental Hotel. His privacy was compromised by the Interior Ministry. In 1980 Iraq was preparing for war with Iran. After the passage of several years Saudi Arabia was less flush since the price of oil had declined. It became a pattern after the early 1980's to hire foreign menial workers from non-Arab countries since they were deemed to present fewer political difficulties.

After five years in the country, the author decided to leave. First he went to Iraq and then returned to Egypt. He was there when he learned of the kidnapping of Terry Anderson. Later he went to Jerusalem. Returning to the United States, he translated volume one of the trilogy, CITIES OF SALT, by Abdelrahman Munif, and relates how he went to Damascus to visit Munif. The metaphor of cities of salt refers to cities in the American West that became ghost towns after the exhaustion of the gold rush. Munif, a recipient of a PhD in petroleum economics, (he had studied in Belgrade), fears the exhaustion of the black gold, so to speak, of the Middle East.

In the Arab world there is no institute or study group focused on the United States and the US is absent from Arab novels. Theroux's way of keeping up with the Arab world is to serve as Munif's translator. During Theroux's visit with the Munifs he noted the teenagers wore jeans and spoke French with each other, the family having spent the previous year, it seems, in Paris. Munif's father was Saudi and his mother Iraqi. The Munifs and Theroux visited Maaloula where Aramaic is spoken, and the church there, St. Sarkis, although Munif doesn't much like visiting churches.