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The protagonist of this meditative and elegantly written novel represents an unusual demographic. White, English, and orphaned at eight, Lilly grows up in Morocco as a Muslim, moves to Harar, Ethiopia, for five years and settles in London after political upheaval makes her vulnerable in Harar. A stranger everywhere, she has a knack for making homes and building communities anywhere: as a valued teacher of the Qur'an to Harari children, and as friend and nurse to Ethiopian exiles in London. "You put roots and they'll start growing," her bohemian parents told her to justify their nomadic ways. But grown-up Lilly actively seeks roots and relationships, agonizing over the uprootings that famine, corruption, and political instability made inevitable for Ethiopians in the 1970s and '80s. Her narrative shuttles between two cosmopolitan cities, two tumultuous decades, and two significant others. Aziz is an Ethiopian doctor she falls for in Harar but is wrenched away from literally (perhaps too literally) after giving him her virginity. Dr. Gupta is an Indian whose courtship of her in London is handicapped by the flame she still holds for Aziz. Not knowing if the latter is alive or dead, Lilly has remained suspended in a 17-year limbo between grief and desperate hope.
Sweetness in the Belly is obviously not your average doctor-and-nurse story. Indeed, Gibbs's aim is to portray a largely invisible society. Ethiopia, Lilly says, is just "a starving impoverished nation ... of famine and refugees" in the Western imagination. Steeped in research but wearing it lightly, the novel renders a culture and dozens of people convincingly (though the parallel story lines make keeping characters straight a challenge). Lilly, with her religious fervour, multiple languages, and basic decency, is a believable insider and appealing consciousness. The self-protective emotional coolness of her London self, however, casts a shadow over the Harar narrative, where a contrasting tone could have conveyed her youthful optimism and passion. One might also wish the political back-story of famine and Haile Selassie's fall were more integrated into the plot; Gibb seems as keen to protect characters as they are to protect each other, sacrificing opportunities for drama and suspense. But these are small flaws in a precise, textured, suitably bittersweet novel. --John C. Ball --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
With sure-handed, urgent prose, Gibb (The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life) chronicles the remarkable spiritual and geographical journey of a white British Muslim woman who struggles with cultural contradictions to find community and love. Lilly Abdal, orphaned at age eight after the murder of her hippie British parents, grows up at an Islamic shrine in Morocco. The narrative alternates between Harar, Ethiopia, in the 1970s, where she moved in pilgrimage at age 16, and London, England, in the '80s, where she lives in exile from Africa, working as a nurse. Ignoring the cries of "farenji," or foreigner, she starts a religious Muslim school in Harar. Later, in London, along with her friend Amina, Lilly runs a community association for family reunification of Ethiopian refugees. Each month, she reads the list of people who've escaped famine and the brutal Dergue regime, hoping to find Dr. Aziz Abdulnasser, her half-Sudanese lover who chose Africa over their relationship. Despite some predictability of plot, the novel fluently speaks the "languages of religion and exile," depicting both the multifaceted heartbreak of those lucky enough to escape violent regime changes and the beauty of unlikely bonds created by the modern multicultural world. (Mar. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A joy to read!,
By Serendipity (Toronto) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Sweetness in the Belly (Paperback)
I loved this book. It's become one of my favourites, easily so, and - strangely enough, given the subject matter - I would even call it a comfort read. It's a dark story yet I did not find it depressing for a second, due to the quality of the writing. Gibb has a light touch, and holds back from telling us what to feel or how to react: reading this book was like feeling a breeze against your cheek. Even brutality is rendered bittersweet through the light touch of Gibb's word choices. It is never saccharine, never melodrammatic, and opens a door into a world few of us have any idea or understanding of.PLOT DESCRIPTION (no real spoilers, but please skip if you prefer not to know!): Lilly is the only child of a couple of wandering, hippy English parents: "born in Yugoslavia, breast-fed in the Ukraine, weaned in Corsica, freed from nappies in Sicily and walking by the time we got to the Algarve." In Morocco, she's left in the care of the Great Abdal while her parents go jaunting, only to learn she is suddenly an orphan. Raised by the Great Abdal, a muslim Sheikh, and Mohammed Bruce Mahmoud, a "fiery-haired" ex-British Muslim convert, she found that "once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qu'ran, something troubled in me became still." When she is 16, she and her friend Hussein make a pilgrimage to the city of Harar in Ethiopia, to the compound of Sheikh Jami Abdullah Rahman, direct descendent of a saint. On route, they stay at the Emperor of Ethiopia's palace, courtesy of a letter of introduction from Mohammed Bruce. Because Lilly is farenji, white, and the Sheikh is very racist (as is everyone else she encounters there), she is separated from Hussein and sent to live with the sister of the Sheikh's third wife, Noura, an Oromo, while Hussein stays to be one of his disciples. Lilly learns the language of the Hararans, who are not black but consider themselves Arab, who use the local Oromo population as serfs and combine old tradition with Islam. She falls in love with Aziz, a young local doctor, half Hraran, half Sudanese, almost an outcast because he is black. He introduces her to a less all-pervasive interpretation of Islam, and politics. Famine strikes the north while the Emperor has cavier flown in from Europe for his own dinner. Unrest stirs, the soldiers take over in the name of communism and quickly put in place a military dictatorship. Lilly escapes being rounded up with anyone else who has ties to the Emperor, though she never met him, and makes it to London where she becomes a nurse and, with her friend Amina, sets up an office to keep track of all the refugees, uniting them with family members, all in the hope of finding Aziz's name on a list. A couple of things I didn't understand: why did Lilly and Hussein stay in Ethiopia, and how did she manage to get through nurse training in England when she'd had no formal education? Minor quibbles... There are some brutal moments in the story. Most especially disturbing is the scene of female circumscion, which did make me turn green, riveted though I was. I'd seen it on an SBS documentary years ago, the first time I learned that it happened at all (it is illegal, but still practised in many places). The Ethiopan sections are set in the 1970s (Lilly is 19 when she flees), which is not so very long ago. They believed it made women pure, that it kept them from being "on heat", and that they would never get a husband if they weren't infibulated. It's quite terrifying. As Aziz points out, though, it's not actually an Islamic tradition. But there is a beautiful, delicate balance between the more horrific traditions and superstitions, Islam and a more modern way of thinking. Lilly, as narrator, is never shaken from her beliefs, though she has occasion to question her own nature. She shows a human side to Islam, a side as familiar as Christianity - what I mean is, her religion never comes across as weird, scary, alien etc. The similarities between Islam and Christianity come through clearly. I also liked the "truer" understanding of jihad, as an inner struggle with the flaws of your own nature, not with another person, country or culture. It is the way this book is written, and Lilly's voice, that make it strangely warm and comforting, as well as humorous (at times), philosophical, world-weary, honest, enlightening, touching. It is such a human story, and I especially find it interesting that it closely follows the lives of women - in Africa and the refugees crowded into the council estate flats in London. It is through the daily lives of women, who worked and cooked and sang and found husbands for their children and kept the old traditions alive, that the city of Harar really comes alive. There is also insight into the world of refugees and the communities they establish in other parts of the world. While the author confesses she took some liberties with geography and history, still this book fleshed out a country and a people who were only ever, in my mind, images of black skeletons staggering through a desert, thanks to the News. Despite the uglier moments, the uglier side to their world and way of life, the characters were so well drawn that I felt like I knew them personally. I think that this quality, above anything else, is what makes this a "comfort read" for me. I could easily read this many more times, and get more out of it each time.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bittersweet in fact,
By Significant other (Finger lakes district) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Sweetness in the Belly (Paperback)
I was reminded more than once of the novel KITE RUNNER while reading this. Of course, they're totally different books--dealing with totally different themes, but something about the underlying culture and movement of this novel kept bringing me back to that book.SWEETNESS is not your run of the mill book, being a more meditative look at orphaned Lily, the novel's protagonist. With the books different settings and different takes on religion and their effects, the author has woven a tale that will keep you captivated for hours. I read somewhere that this is Gibb's third novel and I can't wait to read the others---if they're anywhere as good as this she's bound to become more and more successful. I highly recommend this book along with two others I've recently read that I loved: Brick Lane, and the novel Bark of the Dogwood---both are great, though the settings and ideas are totally different.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Important subject matter, but...,
By Ballymuck (Ottawa) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Sweetness in the Belly (Paperback)
This is the sort of information we in the West need to know; we're woefully ignorant about the history, culture, and politics of most areas of the globe but particularly those regions we can't exploit somehow - like the Horn of Africa.Unfortunately this book is much more a work of history and social anthropology than a work of creative fiction. Few characters compelled and the plot creaked along at a very slow rate. Do publishing houses employ actual editors anymore- the kind that can recommend substantial culling or improvements to bland passages? Somewhere inside this book there could be a great story; think what Rohinton Mistry and Zadie Smith do with narratives of dislocation and cultural loss. Gibb's intention is spot-on -- I blame her publishers for not allocating the resources to make sure the story lived up the material.
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