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EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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Look," Frances said, "there are two kinds of cheese in Botswana, cheddar and sweetmilk. They are imported from South Africa, which makes any number of kinds of cheese, but they only import two; they realize that people must have cheese, but to have too much of it might seem to condone apartheid. You're with me?" When a crime does occur, the expat advice is not to call in authorities, because often it’s the witnesses who end up in gaol and the crime is never solved anyway. Frances struggles with this cynicism: she doesn’t want to make judgements about Saudi society and she cringes when her oblivious fellow expats cross the line into cultural superiority and racism. But she is caught in a bind: hypocrisy and corruption is everywhere, and she is not able to ignore it because she is repeatedly warned by her husband’s employers, colleagues, and their wives, that she must be aware of it and yet act as if it doesn’t exist. It is (literally) dangerous to do otherwise.

I didn't like the characters in this book and they didn't like themselves either. There was reflexive disparagement of Saudi society without knowing anything about it which was poor. I think this just reinforces negative Western ideas about this society. I would have been interested to see how Ernest Hemingway would write about this country. My last house was outside the city. I felt less scrutinised, more desolate. I remember the hostile sunshine, the barren line of hills, the absence of birdsong and the distant line of the freeway: the tiny, silent cars moving from somewhere to somewhere, leaving me behind with my journal. down from the terrace and out into the street. Across the road, the nation's only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and Mary Poppins. Andrew stood in the dusty thoroughfare known as the Mall, gazing into the window As this occasion will pass, she thought; and in time, this flight. "More brandy?" the steward inquired.

We're relinquishing this route next year," he said. "Give it to British Caledonian and welcome, that's what I say. No more to drink then?" He prepared to abandon her, move away. Sleeping executives stirred Left alone, she closed her eyes. She was apprehensive, yes. She turned over the steward's comment in her mind, because she was not one to let flippancies go unexamined; it paid to examine them, as there was so little, she always thought, in what people said when they were trying to be serious. You could only describe the future by exclusion; say what will not occur. Say what you will not be: an ice dancer, a cosmonaut, a mother of twelve. Much less easy to make a single positive prediction even for the coming week; much less easy to say what, in a month's time, you will have become.

The stoical Frances, not quite the naive protagonist who usually features in fictions of this type, gives little away; even her diary is uninteresting. Everything is withheld. This tightness of control is perhaps the novel's eeriest feature." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator Well, it can't be such a grand life, because he's just signed up with Turadup himself. He's going to manage their Jeddah business; he's had experience out there, of course."Though all Mantel's novels illumine societal evils -- be it the British class system in An Experiment in Love, the malevolent interplay between personality and public events in A Place of Greater Safety or colonialism in A Change of Climate -- Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is perhaps Mantel's most overtly political work. Her outrage against a society that virtually imprisons women, mutilates thieves, stones adulterers and disappears over-curious intruders is palpable." - Charlotte Innes, The Los Angeles Times Mantel builds up the tension slowly but surely, revealing Frances’ increasing sense of foreboding through diary entries that are interspersed throughout the third-person narrative. It’s a highly effective device. He believes that his choices have been the right ones, that this is where he wishes to be. . . . If his choices have led to this, have brought him to this moment, they have an intrinsic rightness; as for those other worlds, the alternative

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