Ahdaf Soueif, the bestselling author of The Map of Love, writes poignantly and beautifully about love, and about finding one’s place in the world. Achingly lyrical, resonant and richly woven, and with a spark of defiance, these stories explore areas of tension–where women and men are ensnared by cultural and social mores and prescribed notions of “love,” where the place you are is not the place you want to be. Soueif draws her characters with infinite tenderness and compassion as they inhabit a world of lost opportunities, unfulfilled love, and remembrance of times past.
I Think of You: Stories
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Soueif (shortlisted for the Booker in 1999 for The Map of Love) serves up a mostly stale collection of previously published stories, all at least a decade old, about clashing cultures and disappointed love. The best are three stories that follow Aisha from her Cairo childhood to a rough period as a teenager in 1964 London, where, as the misfit daughter of Muslim intellectuals, she encounters boorish classmates who tease her about polygamy and camels. Back in Egypt years later, Aisha confronts sorrowful memories of her doomed marriage. Two related stories, also set in England, feature Asya, a Middle Eastern woman moving on after a failed marriage and a miscarriage. Soueif incorporates wonderfully atmospheric details, particularly in the stories set in Egypt, but the stories feel thin and are too frequently overly lyrical. Though competent, these stories comprise the early works of a writer who has come into her own in later works. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In these nine vividly rendered short stories, the Cairo-born Soueif (The Map of Love, 2000) seems equally fascinated with the tenuous situations of immigrant women living in their adopted countries and with the difficulty of sustaining love in long-term relationships. In the title story, a pregnant woman develops dangerously high blood pressure and must be hospitalized; her Western dress threatens the more religious women on the ward and draws a doctor's sexual innuendo. She takes comfort from her memories of a trusted friend sick with cancer, who defied her illness by wrapping her head in a green silk turban while lying in a "theatrical" bed "worthy of Cleopatra." The women in these stories long to be stronger than the cultural forces aligned against them but find their lovers and their confidence fading away. Still, small gestures sometimes stand in for larger acts of rebellion; the restless but timid teen in "1964" finally stops attending school, where she is the object of much ridicule. The potent themes and far-flung settings make this collection rich reading. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Collection of best early work by Ahdaf Souif,
By AA "ashour001" (Newton, MA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: I Think of You: Stories (Paperback)
Brilliant collection of Short Stories by Ahdaf Souief. I bought the book thinking it was new collection of short stories but as I read the stories felt familiar. After a while I realized this is just the American publishing of Ahdaf's short stories from her very first book Aisha and also from Sand Piper.
As I read or re-read these stories, I thoroughly enjoyed them. Most of the characters were later resurrected, or rather fully developed, in Ahdaf Souif's masterpiece "In the Eye of the Sun". What I love about Ahdaf Souief the most, is that she appear to write mostly for herself, she is not a marketing oriented author, she is not writing to be accessed by as large an audience as possible. You need to want to get into her own world; you need to try to understand her language, her pace and her approach. The reader needs to work at it to get to see the beauty of her lyrical language, the characters and ultimately the novel. I have never read anyone better than Souif when it comes to a true and genuine bi-cultural sensibility, her skill with the language and her intelligence in writing are truly remarkable.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Stories set in Egypt and the UK,
By Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
This review is from: I Think of You: Stories (Paperback)
Ahdaf Soueif's first fiction offering since The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Man Booker Prize, is actually a repackaging of nine stories originally published between 1983 and 1996.
Set primarily in Egypt and the United Kingdom, each of the stories features a female character. Throughout the collection Soueif focuses on the interior life of her protagonists and the ordering of the stories lends some sense of a progressively maturing voice. The collection, however, does seem a bit uneven. With the first five stories developing two specific characters, the protagonists of the final stories seem comparatively inchoate. The first three stories--"Knowing," "1964," and "Returning"--show three different epochs in the life of Aisha, an Egyptian woman who immigrated to the United Kingdom in her teens. "Mandy" and "Satan" feature Asya, a woman separated from her husband who is dealing in different ways with the repercussions of their broken marriage and his philandering. In the title story, which is arguably the collection's strongest, the unnamed first-person narrator has been hospitalized due to a high-risk pregnancy. With her husband in London unable to get a visa, and her family in Cairo, she is alone, the only patient not observing purdah. She survives her hospitalization by invoking an elderly friend, confidante, and role model who died of cancer. If the stories have a unifying theme it is that of estrangement; estrangement (both emotional and physical) from husbands, as well as from the homeland and the culture of one's childhood. While I think of you lacks the refinement of Soueif's later work, it is nevertheless worth reading. Her stories are touching, nostalgic, but never overly so. Soueif's prose is lyrical and this collection is buoyed by her ability to give her readers an extraordinary sense of place. Armchair Interviews says... I think of you will transport readers, but it cannot compare to The Map of Love.
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