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Triple Time
For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place-“sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it. Others don't know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own. And to those who were born there, the changes seem to come at warp Thurayya, the daughter of a Bedouin chief, later finds herself living in a Riyadh high-rise where, she says, there are “worlds wound together with years.”
The characters in the linked stories in Triple Time are living an uneasy mesh of two divergent cultures, in a place where tradition and progress are continually in flux. These are tales of confliction-of old and new, rich and poor, sexual repression and personal freedom. We experience a barren yet strangely beautiful landscape jolted by sleek glass apartment towers and opulent fountains. On the fringes of urbanity, Bedouins traverse the desert in search of the next watering hole.
Beneath a surface of cultural upheaval, the stories hold deeper, more personal meanings. They tell of yearnings-for a time lost, for a homeland, for belonging, and for love. Anne Sanow reveals much about the culture, psyche, and essence of life in modern Saudi Arabia, where Saudis struggle to keep their traditions and foreigners muddle through in search of a quick buck or a last chance at making a life for themselves in a world that is quickly running out of hiding places.
The characters in the linked stories in Triple Time are living an uneasy mesh of two divergent cultures, in a place where tradition and progress are continually in flux. These are tales of confliction-of old and new, rich and poor, sexual repression and personal freedom. We experience a barren yet strangely beautiful landscape jolted by sleek glass apartment towers and opulent fountains. On the fringes of urbanity, Bedouins traverse the desert in search of the next watering hole.
Beneath a surface of cultural upheaval, the stories hold deeper, more personal meanings. They tell of yearnings-for a time lost, for a homeland, for belonging, and for love. Anne Sanow reveals much about the culture, psyche, and essence of life in modern Saudi Arabia, where Saudis struggle to keep their traditions and foreigners muddle through in search of a quick buck or a last chance at making a life for themselves in a world that is quickly running out of hiding places.
168 pages, Paperback
First published August 28, 2009
4 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Anne Sanow
3 books44 followersAnne Sanow is the author of the story collection Triple Time, winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the 2010 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for fiction.
Her work has been published in Dossier, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Malahat Review, and elsewhere. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and the winner of the 2009 Nelson Algren Award for the short story from the Chicago Tribune, she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently lives on Cape Cod.
Her work has been published in Dossier, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Malahat Review, and elsewhere. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and the winner of the 2009 Nelson Algren Award for the short story from the Chicago Tribune, she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently lives on Cape Cod.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 7, 2010
I liked these stories and this book. The two are not the same. Each story stands alone, but the book as a whole has some affinities with a novel and reached me in a way that no single story did.
The book interested me for contradictory reasons – first, of course, because of what I got out of it, including secondary reactions like admiration of Sanow’s ability to feel the lives of both men and women, Arab and American, young and old; but, second, because it left me feeling I wasn’t quite adequate as a reader, that I wasn’t getting all Sanow had to give.
Any summary will point out that Triple Time involves Americans and other ex-pats in Saudi Arabia, the constraints of Arabian culture and the conflict of cultural ideals. It might also point to the appalling emptiness of lives for many of the ex-pats. True and interesting, as are the individual stories; but I won’t talk about story lines. (Hillary Mantel, the Booker award winner, also spent four years there and talks about what freedom means on coming back to it. tp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/21/...).
Sanow’s stories did not always grab me by the shirt-front to get my attention with the first words. Sometimes they seem to be touring at leisure through the landscape, shifting narrators, shifting tenses, even nesting tenses, as where they use present tense accounts devoted to remembering the past (sometimes with past perfects thrown in). Don’t be misled by this meander through the physical and emotional deserts. If there is anything you can be sure of, it is that Sanow knows where she’s going and how she wants to get there.
And any story that didn’t grab me by the shirt-front at the beginning was apt, at the end, to hit me on back of the head, either with the ending scene itself or with the accumulated impact of the small sights and feelings as finally understood in the story’s last lines. More than once, the end of the story brought me to complex emotions– two or more distinct emotions or feelings, what a character feels about an event, subsumed in what a character feels about the cause of it, all overridden by my own feelings about the same event. “The Date Farm” had that effect on me. I was impressed, but I know for me that it may not be possible to accommodate all those feelings at one moment or even to separate them in every case; it may take retrospection.
The individuals in these stories, as expected, come into conflict with each other or themselves, but their conflicts do not seem mainly to result because of the strength or uniqueness of of the individuals; with a few exceptions, their unique strengths contribute more to their survival than to the creation of conflict. The conflicts are generated instead by cultural norms of the Muslim world, especially Saudi Arabia, and the different cultural norms of western ex-pats living there. Direct conflicts aside, there is impact, the enormous impact of the enforced ideals of Saudi Arabia on western ex-pats and sometimes vice-versa. And yet another impact– Saudi culture’s constraints operating directly on Arabs themselves, particularly Arab women.
One of the things I like most in fiction is the exploration of individual relationships, including flaws and small perfections of character that are played out in those relationships. Even if the emphasis of a story line is on striving and overcoming something, it is most interesting to me when individual character determines human relationships of a one-to-one kind.
But Sanow is writing in part about culture as well as about individual human beings. In some of the stories the constraints imposed by one culture–or the difference between the Arabian and western cultures–makes individual relationships impossible, or possible only at prices we’d all like to avoid paying. This is so, even though we understand that the cultures also adopt things from one another and that individuals do sometimes transcend cultural constraints.
Not only the constraints of the culture but its ephemeral qualities are in play here. Sanow likes the settings and I think she feels in a way that the setting is the story, or a big part of it. The flaws or strengths or even neutral characteristics of cultures, rather than individuals are often central. Meaningful relationships are created or destroyed by the culture, or the clash of cultures, not by the culture-independent qualities of individual human beings. (If, as our culture likes to believe, there is such thing an individual with culture-independent qualities.)
This is not to say that Sanow’s individual characters don’t interest us; they certainly do. But the individualized relationships and the struggles to create, maintain or alter relationships that we might expect in American life are largely missing in these stories. “We are constructed,” Thurraya says– not “we construct.”
Maybe it’s partly the pace of the culture; perhaps one doesn’t struggle to build a relationship but rather accepts a culturally imposed obligation, from which, over many years, with luck, a subtle but meaningful relationship grows, even between the most unlikely people. At least two stories strongly present this kind of touching possibility, an idea not unknown even in an older America with mail-order brides on the frontier ranches and homesteads.
As all this implies, Sanow gives us human interaction, sometimes dramatic and life-changing, but the absence of human relationships constructed by the individuals involved leaves Sanow without much human development and interaction that turns on the unique blend of personal flaws and accomplishments of her characters.
Not with none, however. The relationships may be tiny and nuanced, but still dramatic, as we find at the end of “Grand Tour,” which probably should be read in sequence.
The isolation and de-naturing of westerners (and to some extent of Arab women) is a strong theme. In “Pioneer” the Americans are isolated, not only from the Arabs, but from their own culture; they are condemned to a hollow world that seems meaningless to me and probably was meaningless to them. The individual we see closest in “Pioneer” is a nine-year-old boy, who has no friends his age and cannot leave the ex-pat compound to explore the world as he might have done in America, although the story ends on a strangely touching and perhaps hopeful note.
Many details throughout the book make me think that Sanow is a meticulous writer who pays a great deal of attention to– well, I don’t know the vocabulary of criticism, but I’ll say formal matters. I mean things like parallelling stories, large and small, like repeating patterns in lives, like matching form and substance, like using a grammar or syntax that matches mood or feeling, like shifting and nesting tenses; like structural organizing.
The first words in the book took me aback until I began to laugh. The core of the grammar in the first sentence is: “There is a tail.” Could I expect to enjoy a book starting with a lame “there is” instead of an active Somebody Does Something to Somebody
Else? By the time I finished the second sentence I knew (and was later confirmed over and over) that Sanow has carefully crafted this sentence.
I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I speak abstractly. The sentence begins in static description of a setting that is, like much of the social world we are about to encounter, a Given, not changed by individual initiative; the “there is” locution confirms it; it is given, there it is. The rest of the sentence is a delight. It is another of Sanow’s double whammies where she hits us with two distinct feelings or ideas at once. In this case, one of them more or less symbolized in the inactive formal core of the sentence, the other, though, tucked away in what are formally participial clauses, houses the real action of the sentence, straight-faced and funny.
Another example is the first sentence in “Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time.” “Looping the loop, 1946.” I was irritated. Sanow chooses sentence fragments to disguise something she’s not ready to reveal (a tense or time shift, maybe), and while I now trust her, I didn’t back on page 37. If you remember to connect back as you read through the story you see once again that she made a careful choice with those words, beginning the job of setting up not only “Triple Time” but the next story, “Grand Tour,” as well.
The ex-lawyer in me, though, still often yearns for basics at the base – who did what to whom. And the story title, “Triple Time,” defeated me. According to the web, this could refer to a tap dance routine, and maybe that’s what Sanow meant, since the routine seems to repeat itself (loop?). Or maybe not.
I had more difficulty with some of the fragmentation in presenting the stories. Two kinds of fragments: the sentence fragment which gives you no idea what is being referred to and the scene fragment that is not located in time or specific place, sometimes without characters clearly identified. Sometimes, with patience, I got it by the end of two paragraphs or even one. Other times I wasn’t sure at all. Sometimes those fragments included ambiguities and became a conundrum that removed me from the action, not bright pieces in the larger story’s puzzle.
Advisors to writers say writers should trust their readers to get what is not explicit. I take the real point to be that writers of fiction should find the most effective way of telling their story, whatever it is to them, and thus to avoid telling when showing works better, and to get their story into immediate scenes readers can feel, as long as that comports with other demands of their writing goals. But advice to trust readers to get what is demonstrated in the story is not the same as advice to obscure the story. I see no reason to be obscure about which character is speaking, for example. In the end, it was hard for me to be sure whether I should have more readily or fully understood some of the things that were unclear to me, or whether Sanow might have given me a bit more to work with. At the very least, I wish I had a review of this book by my daughter Kate to illuminate what I missed.
What really interests me at this point doesn’t belong, much less permit development in a review. What I’d like to know, though, is the role of the puzzle element in fiction. Shouldn’t readers access the drama, the emotions and the meanings of a story in real time, as they read it? Or should they be forced to study fiction like a puzzle or an elaborate code? I myself want immediate access to what’s going on and what feelings are involved. Depict it clearly and I will get it.
The trouble with my feelings of that kind is that I also believe that it’s often possible to get a better and deeper understanding in the middle of the night or next week, emotion recalled in tranquility, or at least sometime after you read the first paragraph that puzzles you.
How can I resolve these disparate feelings about what I want in reading fiction? Would it do for writers to let the reader have the information one would have if present in the scene? One present in the scene might have long-delayed epiphanies in which “true” meanings appear much later, but would ordinarily at least know at the time who was speaking and what the setting was.
Is Triple Time a novel? Characters in one story not only appear in another, but we learn a good deal more about them as they appear in new relationships. A different comparison to many novels is that some of Sanow’s stories, and the book as a whole, takes place over a very long period of time, so that you get perspectives, insights or access to emotions that you might not get from a short piece set in a relatively compact time frame.
Once a writer decides to cover wide swaths of time, she can write a hefty novel and play out her story scene after scene, or she can write a shorter piece and cover the vast inter-generational deserts by fragmenting the story– omitting large chunks of time between scenes– by telling and summarizing, or by blurring time and events. Sanow probably does all these things, certainly the first two. She may have reasons unrelated to the large span of time she covers, but the fragmentation, summarizing and telling, make it seem un-novel-like to me.
She does the summarizing and telling with grace and style (and always, I think, with purpose), proving that good writers need not always follow the dogmatic and unnuanced rules of writing gurus. (A writer must show, not tell; a writer who “tells” is lazy, I’ve read more than once.)
In fact, a certain amount of telling is not only a pragmatic choice, to cover time; it can speed the story and more importantly can even work like shadows in a painting or like a simple beat in fiction itself. Sanow is choosing carefully how her story is presented. The bottom line is that even when telling not showing, she’s not boring.
Telling not showing does tend to entail losses of immediacy in the scene, its dramatic impact, and emotional connection to it. This is not the case, however, with a character’s meditations that reveal the character, even if they also reveal other meanings to the reader. Don’t read it in advance, but when you get to it, near the end of the book, you may enjoy the aging Thurraya’s meditation on life.
In any case, every sentence chosen excludes its alternatives and is necessarily a tradeoff, something lost and, if the writer’s judgment is good, something gained. May writers always be allowed to maintain some of their individuality and make their own conscious tradeoffs, including telling and the use of past perfect tenses. Sanow’s tradeoffs are conscious. Hooray for intelligent, nuanced fiction--even if, woe! I don't always get the nuances!
My favorite story might be the last one, “Rub Al-Khali.” It may work so well for me because it is the last story and builds on others, or because it is told by an aging woman (I’m not a woman, but am highly qualified for the aging part), or because Sanow seems closer to this Arab woman than to any of her other characters, many of whom she writes about with great distance.
The distance from her characters may itself be a function of the fact that things happen to them, I’m not sure. In any case, with Thurraya, a tribal woman from the desert who is the narrator in “Rub Al-Khali,” Sanow is close up and personal and we do see an individual taking action, not simply being acted upon. A companion character, Kimberly, seems to have a biography like Sanow’s in its high points– moving to Saudi Arabia as a young high school graduate. Sanow empathizes with all her characters barring a couple of really bad guys, and you might expect her to feel closest to Kimberly. But her real affection, or at least the affection she induced in me, was for the older Arab woman, Thurraya. Maybe in a culture of such thoroughgoing constriction on human relationships and needs, to find a real individual who maintains something of herself in spite of the constraints is the greatest joy.
Finally, I do wish I could have read more from Sanow exploring the feelings generated in some of these stories. But while a novel could perhaps parse and then open out these feelings, it would lose the lasered concentration of the short story – more tradeoffs, and I guess Sanow is another writer who knows when to stop. Still, I find myself hoping she will undertake a novel if it isn’t foreign to her nature.
The book interested me for contradictory reasons – first, of course, because of what I got out of it, including secondary reactions like admiration of Sanow’s ability to feel the lives of both men and women, Arab and American, young and old; but, second, because it left me feeling I wasn’t quite adequate as a reader, that I wasn’t getting all Sanow had to give.
Any summary will point out that Triple Time involves Americans and other ex-pats in Saudi Arabia, the constraints of Arabian culture and the conflict of cultural ideals. It might also point to the appalling emptiness of lives for many of the ex-pats. True and interesting, as are the individual stories; but I won’t talk about story lines. (Hillary Mantel, the Booker award winner, also spent four years there and talks about what freedom means on coming back to it. tp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/21/...).
Sanow’s stories did not always grab me by the shirt-front to get my attention with the first words. Sometimes they seem to be touring at leisure through the landscape, shifting narrators, shifting tenses, even nesting tenses, as where they use present tense accounts devoted to remembering the past (sometimes with past perfects thrown in). Don’t be misled by this meander through the physical and emotional deserts. If there is anything you can be sure of, it is that Sanow knows where she’s going and how she wants to get there.
And any story that didn’t grab me by the shirt-front at the beginning was apt, at the end, to hit me on back of the head, either with the ending scene itself or with the accumulated impact of the small sights and feelings as finally understood in the story’s last lines. More than once, the end of the story brought me to complex emotions– two or more distinct emotions or feelings, what a character feels about an event, subsumed in what a character feels about the cause of it, all overridden by my own feelings about the same event. “The Date Farm” had that effect on me. I was impressed, but I know for me that it may not be possible to accommodate all those feelings at one moment or even to separate them in every case; it may take retrospection.
The individuals in these stories, as expected, come into conflict with each other or themselves, but their conflicts do not seem mainly to result because of the strength or uniqueness of of the individuals; with a few exceptions, their unique strengths contribute more to their survival than to the creation of conflict. The conflicts are generated instead by cultural norms of the Muslim world, especially Saudi Arabia, and the different cultural norms of western ex-pats living there. Direct conflicts aside, there is impact, the enormous impact of the enforced ideals of Saudi Arabia on western ex-pats and sometimes vice-versa. And yet another impact– Saudi culture’s constraints operating directly on Arabs themselves, particularly Arab women.
One of the things I like most in fiction is the exploration of individual relationships, including flaws and small perfections of character that are played out in those relationships. Even if the emphasis of a story line is on striving and overcoming something, it is most interesting to me when individual character determines human relationships of a one-to-one kind.
But Sanow is writing in part about culture as well as about individual human beings. In some of the stories the constraints imposed by one culture–or the difference between the Arabian and western cultures–makes individual relationships impossible, or possible only at prices we’d all like to avoid paying. This is so, even though we understand that the cultures also adopt things from one another and that individuals do sometimes transcend cultural constraints.
Not only the constraints of the culture but its ephemeral qualities are in play here. Sanow likes the settings and I think she feels in a way that the setting is the story, or a big part of it. The flaws or strengths or even neutral characteristics of cultures, rather than individuals are often central. Meaningful relationships are created or destroyed by the culture, or the clash of cultures, not by the culture-independent qualities of individual human beings. (If, as our culture likes to believe, there is such thing an individual with culture-independent qualities.)
This is not to say that Sanow’s individual characters don’t interest us; they certainly do. But the individualized relationships and the struggles to create, maintain or alter relationships that we might expect in American life are largely missing in these stories. “We are constructed,” Thurraya says– not “we construct.”
Maybe it’s partly the pace of the culture; perhaps one doesn’t struggle to build a relationship but rather accepts a culturally imposed obligation, from which, over many years, with luck, a subtle but meaningful relationship grows, even between the most unlikely people. At least two stories strongly present this kind of touching possibility, an idea not unknown even in an older America with mail-order brides on the frontier ranches and homesteads.
As all this implies, Sanow gives us human interaction, sometimes dramatic and life-changing, but the absence of human relationships constructed by the individuals involved leaves Sanow without much human development and interaction that turns on the unique blend of personal flaws and accomplishments of her characters.
Not with none, however. The relationships may be tiny and nuanced, but still dramatic, as we find at the end of “Grand Tour,” which probably should be read in sequence.
The isolation and de-naturing of westerners (and to some extent of Arab women) is a strong theme. In “Pioneer” the Americans are isolated, not only from the Arabs, but from their own culture; they are condemned to a hollow world that seems meaningless to me and probably was meaningless to them. The individual we see closest in “Pioneer” is a nine-year-old boy, who has no friends his age and cannot leave the ex-pat compound to explore the world as he might have done in America, although the story ends on a strangely touching and perhaps hopeful note.
Many details throughout the book make me think that Sanow is a meticulous writer who pays a great deal of attention to– well, I don’t know the vocabulary of criticism, but I’ll say formal matters. I mean things like parallelling stories, large and small, like repeating patterns in lives, like matching form and substance, like using a grammar or syntax that matches mood or feeling, like shifting and nesting tenses; like structural organizing.
The first words in the book took me aback until I began to laugh. The core of the grammar in the first sentence is: “There is a tail.” Could I expect to enjoy a book starting with a lame “there is” instead of an active Somebody Does Something to Somebody
Else? By the time I finished the second sentence I knew (and was later confirmed over and over) that Sanow has carefully crafted this sentence.
I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I speak abstractly. The sentence begins in static description of a setting that is, like much of the social world we are about to encounter, a Given, not changed by individual initiative; the “there is” locution confirms it; it is given, there it is. The rest of the sentence is a delight. It is another of Sanow’s double whammies where she hits us with two distinct feelings or ideas at once. In this case, one of them more or less symbolized in the inactive formal core of the sentence, the other, though, tucked away in what are formally participial clauses, houses the real action of the sentence, straight-faced and funny.
Another example is the first sentence in “Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time.” “Looping the loop, 1946.” I was irritated. Sanow chooses sentence fragments to disguise something she’s not ready to reveal (a tense or time shift, maybe), and while I now trust her, I didn’t back on page 37. If you remember to connect back as you read through the story you see once again that she made a careful choice with those words, beginning the job of setting up not only “Triple Time” but the next story, “Grand Tour,” as well.
The ex-lawyer in me, though, still often yearns for basics at the base – who did what to whom. And the story title, “Triple Time,” defeated me. According to the web, this could refer to a tap dance routine, and maybe that’s what Sanow meant, since the routine seems to repeat itself (loop?). Or maybe not.
I had more difficulty with some of the fragmentation in presenting the stories. Two kinds of fragments: the sentence fragment which gives you no idea what is being referred to and the scene fragment that is not located in time or specific place, sometimes without characters clearly identified. Sometimes, with patience, I got it by the end of two paragraphs or even one. Other times I wasn’t sure at all. Sometimes those fragments included ambiguities and became a conundrum that removed me from the action, not bright pieces in the larger story’s puzzle.
Advisors to writers say writers should trust their readers to get what is not explicit. I take the real point to be that writers of fiction should find the most effective way of telling their story, whatever it is to them, and thus to avoid telling when showing works better, and to get their story into immediate scenes readers can feel, as long as that comports with other demands of their writing goals. But advice to trust readers to get what is demonstrated in the story is not the same as advice to obscure the story. I see no reason to be obscure about which character is speaking, for example. In the end, it was hard for me to be sure whether I should have more readily or fully understood some of the things that were unclear to me, or whether Sanow might have given me a bit more to work with. At the very least, I wish I had a review of this book by my daughter Kate to illuminate what I missed.
What really interests me at this point doesn’t belong, much less permit development in a review. What I’d like to know, though, is the role of the puzzle element in fiction. Shouldn’t readers access the drama, the emotions and the meanings of a story in real time, as they read it? Or should they be forced to study fiction like a puzzle or an elaborate code? I myself want immediate access to what’s going on and what feelings are involved. Depict it clearly and I will get it.
The trouble with my feelings of that kind is that I also believe that it’s often possible to get a better and deeper understanding in the middle of the night or next week, emotion recalled in tranquility, or at least sometime after you read the first paragraph that puzzles you.
How can I resolve these disparate feelings about what I want in reading fiction? Would it do for writers to let the reader have the information one would have if present in the scene? One present in the scene might have long-delayed epiphanies in which “true” meanings appear much later, but would ordinarily at least know at the time who was speaking and what the setting was.
Is Triple Time a novel? Characters in one story not only appear in another, but we learn a good deal more about them as they appear in new relationships. A different comparison to many novels is that some of Sanow’s stories, and the book as a whole, takes place over a very long period of time, so that you get perspectives, insights or access to emotions that you might not get from a short piece set in a relatively compact time frame.
Once a writer decides to cover wide swaths of time, she can write a hefty novel and play out her story scene after scene, or she can write a shorter piece and cover the vast inter-generational deserts by fragmenting the story– omitting large chunks of time between scenes– by telling and summarizing, or by blurring time and events. Sanow probably does all these things, certainly the first two. She may have reasons unrelated to the large span of time she covers, but the fragmentation, summarizing and telling, make it seem un-novel-like to me.
She does the summarizing and telling with grace and style (and always, I think, with purpose), proving that good writers need not always follow the dogmatic and unnuanced rules of writing gurus. (A writer must show, not tell; a writer who “tells” is lazy, I’ve read more than once.)
In fact, a certain amount of telling is not only a pragmatic choice, to cover time; it can speed the story and more importantly can even work like shadows in a painting or like a simple beat in fiction itself. Sanow is choosing carefully how her story is presented. The bottom line is that even when telling not showing, she’s not boring.
Telling not showing does tend to entail losses of immediacy in the scene, its dramatic impact, and emotional connection to it. This is not the case, however, with a character’s meditations that reveal the character, even if they also reveal other meanings to the reader. Don’t read it in advance, but when you get to it, near the end of the book, you may enjoy the aging Thurraya’s meditation on life.
In any case, every sentence chosen excludes its alternatives and is necessarily a tradeoff, something lost and, if the writer’s judgment is good, something gained. May writers always be allowed to maintain some of their individuality and make their own conscious tradeoffs, including telling and the use of past perfect tenses. Sanow’s tradeoffs are conscious. Hooray for intelligent, nuanced fiction--even if, woe! I don't always get the nuances!
My favorite story might be the last one, “Rub Al-Khali.” It may work so well for me because it is the last story and builds on others, or because it is told by an aging woman (I’m not a woman, but am highly qualified for the aging part), or because Sanow seems closer to this Arab woman than to any of her other characters, many of whom she writes about with great distance.
The distance from her characters may itself be a function of the fact that things happen to them, I’m not sure. In any case, with Thurraya, a tribal woman from the desert who is the narrator in “Rub Al-Khali,” Sanow is close up and personal and we do see an individual taking action, not simply being acted upon. A companion character, Kimberly, seems to have a biography like Sanow’s in its high points– moving to Saudi Arabia as a young high school graduate. Sanow empathizes with all her characters barring a couple of really bad guys, and you might expect her to feel closest to Kimberly. But her real affection, or at least the affection she induced in me, was for the older Arab woman, Thurraya. Maybe in a culture of such thoroughgoing constriction on human relationships and needs, to find a real individual who maintains something of herself in spite of the constraints is the greatest joy.
Finally, I do wish I could have read more from Sanow exploring the feelings generated in some of these stories. But while a novel could perhaps parse and then open out these feelings, it would lose the lasered concentration of the short story – more tradeoffs, and I guess Sanow is another writer who knows when to stop. Still, I find myself hoping she will undertake a novel if it isn’t foreign to her nature.
September 22, 2009
I am just so thrilled to have received through GoodReads a personalized autographed copy directly from the author of such a wonderful book. (I was also a little nervous -- what if I hated the book?! Luckily, not a problem.) I will treasure it for a long time to come.
This book explores life in modern Saudi Arabia, both for foreigners and for natives. For most of the book, I thought it was a book of short stories, but eventually the stories are all woven together so that you realize that they all tell a coherent story.
"Sheltering Sky" is one of my favorite books, and this book captured much of the same fatalistic, nihilistic atmosphere. In the book, the foreigners working or living in Arabia all experience almost a suspension of life-- they all live in the present, without really embracing the present. While traveling, I met several people who had either lived in the foreign compounds in Saudi Arabia or had visited friends on them. They all expressed a feeling that while there, reality was suspended. They just "were" rather than trying to "be" anything.
Excellent story telling that stays with you. Highly recommended.
This book explores life in modern Saudi Arabia, both for foreigners and for natives. For most of the book, I thought it was a book of short stories, but eventually the stories are all woven together so that you realize that they all tell a coherent story.
"Sheltering Sky" is one of my favorite books, and this book captured much of the same fatalistic, nihilistic atmosphere. In the book, the foreigners working or living in Arabia all experience almost a suspension of life-- they all live in the present, without really embracing the present. While traveling, I met several people who had either lived in the foreign compounds in Saudi Arabia or had visited friends on them. They all expressed a feeling that while there, reality was suspended. They just "were" rather than trying to "be" anything.
Excellent story telling that stays with you. Highly recommended.
September 16, 2009
"I think that the beginnings of so many stories set in countries unfamiliar to Westerners bombard the reader with sights and smells and sounds to emphasize that 'foreign' quality, what I call the Exotic Cataloguing Effect," Anne Sanow writes in the introduction to her short story, "Pioneer." "I'm drawn to a more in media res effect, and prefer to let the characters lead. Here, I decided to begin with a small and specific view: in the opening paragraph we see what Chris, a nine-year-old boy, sees as he watches wildlife in the Saudi escarpments."
Read Sanow's outstanding short story, "Pioneer," from the new collection Triple Time (University of Pittsburgh Press, 978-0-8229-4380-8) at the Book Club. Download to your computer or mobile device. Available for one week only at ForeWord Reviews.
Read Sanow's outstanding short story, "Pioneer," from the new collection Triple Time (University of Pittsburgh Press, 978-0-8229-4380-8) at the Book Club. Download to your computer or mobile device. Available for one week only at ForeWord Reviews.
March 15, 2020
I'm fascinated by the idea of a short story collection where all the pieces are interconnected yet can be read independently. There were a few stories I could have read by themselves and enjoyed, but reading them together allowed me to appreciate the characters and setting more. It took me three years to actually read Anne's collection, and I'm glad I finally got the chance!
March 31, 2024
The writing is wonderful and the stories connect in clever, moving, and unexpected ways; I really loved this book.
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September 15, 2010Update, Sept 15. I'm afraid that I've decided to abandon this. I enjoyed the first story with the nine year-old boy but beyond that have been feeling quite disconnected from the characters which is in turn depressing me. Maybe it's my current state of mind, I don't know...
Sept. 7, 2010
I saw that the author will be reading at Porter Square Books at the end of the month and luckily my local library had a copy of her book. I am pretty curious about this collection of stories. I was born in Saudi Arabia and lived in Kuwait, and remember all too well the interminable stretches of monotonous, isolated existence.
Sept. 7, 2010
I saw that the author will be reading at Porter Square Books at the end of the month and luckily my local library had a copy of her book. I am pretty curious about this collection of stories. I was born in Saudi Arabia and lived in Kuwait, and remember all too well the interminable stretches of monotonous, isolated existence.
July 3, 2011
Interesting to read this after having attended the "craft" lecture in which the author explain how she developed the interlacing structure that connects the stories in the collection. My far and away favorite was the last story, not only because it united so many of the pieces and themes of the earlier stories, but also because it was just simply lovely.
I may have done this book a disservice by reading it so soon after the two Amy Bloom collections, but I have a feeling that some of it will haunt me enough to be drawn back to reading it again under different circumstances. Perhaps even after my own trip into the area or other exposure to the culture.
I may have done this book a disservice by reading it so soon after the two Amy Bloom collections, but I have a feeling that some of it will haunt me enough to be drawn back to reading it again under different circumstances. Perhaps even after my own trip into the area or other exposure to the culture.
June 1, 2010
I tend to stay away from books of short stories as I prefer to really get into a book and read one story for longer than 10-30 minutes. This was a bunch of short stories that sometimes were related and sometimes weren't -- but everything was written so well that they all worked together and also were able to stand on their own.
I think the author did an excellent job in capturing the conflicting feelings of being an expat, either by choice, by force (your parents brought you along) or by necessity. There are so many other stories there just waiting to be written.
I think the author did an excellent job in capturing the conflicting feelings of being an expat, either by choice, by force (your parents brought you along) or by necessity. There are so many other stories there just waiting to be written.
September 8, 2009
I thought it was pretty cool. A different perspective on life in Saudi Arabia which was nice. The stories were really interesting, too. I liked that there was a lot of description, it was easy to visualize and imagine. I would definately read it again, and recommend it to anyone looking for a great book.
December 5, 2009
This is truly an amazing book. The writing is well crafted, the stories so intricately interwoven-as if they are threads in one of the rugs in the souk-and the surprise ending is as if a veil is suddenly pulled off by a playful desert wind. All of the characters are compeling, and the details of place conjure pictures, sounds, and scents.
October 11, 2009
I won this book from Goodreads! When it comes, I'll read it and let you know more. :)
December 11, 2010
I liked reading about a different culture. I liked her writing, but at times it felt a little too "workshopped."
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