Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground [Paperback]

Ahdaf Soueif (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Anchor; 1st Edition edition (Oct 11 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400096634
ISBN-13: 978-1400096633
Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 1.9 x 13.2 cm
Shipping Weight: 249 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,615,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

When Booker Prize finalist Soueif (The Map of Love) moved from Egypt to London in 1984 to live with her husband, she became one of thousands of "people with an Arab or a Muslim background living in the West and doing daily double-takes when faced with their reflection in a Western mirror." Her sense of the disconnection between Arab life as she knew it and its portrayal in Western media only deepened after the Persian Gulf War began, the second intifada erupted and America invaded Iraq. For the past four years she has found "the situation so grave [that she has] written hardly anything that does not have direct bearing on it." The 38 pieces collected here—some are works of reporting; most are essayistic book reviews—establish Soueif as the intellectual heir to Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar who was a personal friend of hers until his death in 2003. Like Said, Soueif insists that "the discord between the Arab world and the US is entirely to do with Israel." She speaks longingly of the 1960s, when, she says, political tensions were low enough that Arabs and Westerners could meet on common ground and "differences were interesting rather than threatening, because they were foregrounded against a backdrop of affinities." Though she sometimes appeals to emotion over hard facts, her prose reads smoothly and her observations on the misery inflicted by recent conflicts are thoughtful indeed. (Oct.)
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Review

“Soueif is a political analyst and commentator of the best kind.” –London Review of Books

“Marvellous. . . . A writer of special importance. . . . Her combination of centred gravity, minute precision and insistent humanity generates highly clarified truth.” –The Independent

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Amazon.com: 2.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

2 of 8 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Odd collection of essays, May 3 2007

By Blue in Washington "Barry Ballow" - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (Paperback)

Ahdaf Soueif is an Anglo-Egyptian novelist of deserved reknown. However, her collection of some 20 years of newspaper commentaries, published as "Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground," does not enhance her writing reputation by much, in my opinion.

Apart from the opening essay in this book, which explains her theory of "mezzaterra," and one or two of her pieces on modern life in Egypt, most of the collection goes from one angry rant to another. Soueif's indignation is mostly aimed at Europeans, Israelis and Americans who have, in her opinion, abused and disrespected Islamic nations and Islamic people over a long period of time. She launches some vitriol toward the recently ousted Mubarak n government as well.

While her complaints are not unfounded, her voice is so shrill and her moral authority compromised by her self-imposed isolation from the Middle East and its manifold problems. This made me less sympathetic to her perspective. In fairness to Soueif, she was ill-served by a negligent editor at the publishing house who allowed these essays to be pulled together in a haphazard fashion. Overall, I think Soueif's works of fiction are a better investment of the reader's time.

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