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Gazelle
As mesmerizing as a tale from the lips of Sheherazade, Gazelle traces the story of Elizabeth, a thirteen-year-old American girl whose adolescent passion is awakened in the exotic climate of 1950s Cairo. While her mother–whose beauty and sexual prowess both frighten and fascinate Elizabeth–moves into a hotel to pursue a string of lovers, her father, a historian, loses himself in a world of chess and toy soldiers. Elizabeth’s imagination, primed by an explicit edition of The Arabian Nights , leads her to fantasies about her father’s friend, a gentle, older man named Ramses Ragab, a perfume maker who visits their house regularly to play games of war and who opens her up to the mystery of hieroglyphics and the art of exotic scents.
209 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
15 people are currently reading
838 people want to read
About the author
Rikki Ducornet
65 books240 followersRikki Ducornet (born Erika DeGre, April 19, 1943 in Canton, New York) is an American postmodernist, writer, poet, and artist.
Ducornet's father was a professor of sociology, and her mother hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet grew up on the campus of Bard College in New York, earning a B.A. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1964. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe. In 1989 she moved back to North America after accepting a teaching position in the English Department at The University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the The University of Louisiana. In 2008, The American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred upon her one of the eight annual Academy Awards presented to writers.
Ducornet's father was a professor of sociology, and her mother hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet grew up on the campus of Bard College in New York, earning a B.A. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1964. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe. In 1989 she moved back to North America after accepting a teaching position in the English Department at The University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the The University of Louisiana. In 2008, The American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred upon her one of the eight annual Academy Awards presented to writers.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
August 5, 2013
When I read the final paragraph in this book, I slowly closed it and looked at the “blurb” on the back cover and also at the author’s photograph. My immediate thought was how could Rikki Ducornet possibly have had the imagination to write this sublime book?
How can I even begin to describe this stunning gem of a book? Why do I like it so much and why has it affected me the way it has? I really don’t know but what I do know is that it’s one of those serendipitous literary works that now proudly resides on my bookshelves next to my other favourite authors of all time: left of Lawrence Durrell, Umberto Eco and Khaled Hosseini. In addition, the fact that I’ve been to Cairo, and have also lived in the Middle East, also added to my anticipation and enjoyment.
First of all, I was intrigued by the title and wondered why the author had chosen it. I finally came across a reference to it within the book (I’ve noticed that many authors hide their titles within the work itself and it can be compared to looking for a clue in one of John Dickson Carr’s detective stories of the 1930s) but what is the significance of the “gazelle” and the “gazelle man”? What is the symbolism here? If there is in fact any symbolism?
I delved into books and references on Egyptian history, which are fascinating in themselves, scribbled copious notes and all I could come up with were the following:
"A typical Naqada II jar decorated with gazelles (from the Predynastic period)"
“As Strandberg (2009, 158-159) states, the gazelle is a feminine solar-daughter symbol, as well as a symbol of rejuvenation. Gazelles are shown in association with the royal princesses at Amarna, possibly as pets. They are possibly shown on the wall of the tomb of Meryre II (Davies 1905, 39, pl. XXXVII; Strandberg 2009, 30). Gazelle ring bezels are common at Amarna and some appear with the rnp branch (e.g. Stevens 2006, 58, fig. II.2.27)”.
And at the other end of the spectrum, I came across this in the Urban Dictionary:
“A good looking, yet aloof girl, who is consistently guarded when a man shows interest. She will give the impression of mild interest, even go out on dates with a man she is not that interested in, and then run at the first sign of genuine pursuit. On rare occasions, the man is able to catch her interest anyway...I thought I was getting somewhere with that girl, but turns out she was a gazelle.”
Some men are like that too, aren’t they?
This exquisite book captures the five senses and scatters them throughout the book. It’s a kaleidoscope of beauty, symbolism and magic, but also with the bitter and yet expected thrust of betrayal – betrayal of the worst kind in fact. Due to all of this I found I was questioning my own interpretation. Had I in fact got most of it wrong or was I correct?
What exotic and erotic backdrop such as Cairo in the fifties, would not affect any thirteen year old girl such as Elizabeth (known as Lizzy by her parents, who remain unnamed throughout the book, as also the narrator was in “Rebecca”)? At the beginning of puberty, she observes her parents and becomes fascinated by Ramses Ragab, a “perfume maker who visits their house regularly, and who opens her up to the mystery of hieroglyphics and the art of exotic scents.”
Cairo is just a different world for Elizabeth who has been brought up in the United States and who has come to Cairo because her father is offered a job lecturing at the university there.
“Father dwelled in a space of such disembodied quietness his Egyptian students called him His Airship, I believe with affection.”
The fragrances of Ramses are known everywhere too:
“I question travelers
from the four corners of the earth
hoping to meet one
who has breathed your fragrance.”
But in addition Ramses awakens the wonder of Elizabeth’s soul, and the discovery of her body, and who knows where that could lead. I always enjoy a book that gives a sense of anticipation…like life really.
Ramses is also the catalyst in the relationships with Elizabeth’s father; a man who has changed since he left the US and who has taken to wearing a fez to blend in with the local culture; playing chess and also war games with Ramses; suffering badly due to his wife “running off” and staying in a series of hotels in Cairo where she continuously looks for and captures men (the “gazelle”?); Elizabeth’s mother (her “acute blondness”) and also the daughter to which he gives a further shade of intimacy when he asks her to call him “Ram”.
Upon Elizabeth and her father’s departure from Cairo, Ramses comes to their home and states “The mistake I made”, he said softly, “was to love the three of you.”
The feeling of Scheherazade runs through the book, more so when Elizabeth purchases an illustrated copy of this magical book, and feels she can even understand Scheherazade’s thoughts. In addition, Rimsky Korsakov’s brilliant music in this regard springs to mind and flows in parallel.
“She has just lost her virginity to Schahriar, and in a few hours her neck will be broken. In order to survive, she needs to inebriate the king’s soul.”
Hence the subsequent rich and remarkable tales.
“It is dark, Scheherazade, recited, it is dark and my transport and my disease are excited, and desire provoketh my pain.”
Some examples of the writing style:
“Anoint yourself, my beloved,
and your flesh, your bones,
the marrow of your bones
your heart and all your vital organs
will be blessed
your body will quiver and quicken
will take on the heat of the sun
the heat of the world
the heat of the living,
the heat, O my sister
of lovers coupling…”
Some of Ramses’ views of the mother:
“These women are like lionesses. It is their nature to prowl…and this is her mystery…I like her famishment you know”….She comes from a cold country (Iceland)…Perhaps she hopes to melt that ice in Cairo…..asking for my ‘hottest’ perfumes.”
But there are also amusing parts: Elizabeth’s mother asks her “Why the green socks” when they go out for lunch, resulting in Elizabeth rather surreptitiously sliding the socks from her feet, rolling them into a ball and throwing them across the floor to the bar, when the waiter is seen to discover them later.
The mother’s thoughts about Iceland: “What happens to us girls who grow up snowbound?”
There is just so much beauty in this book that I could go on forever and so I will stop now as I’m “getting into full flight” yet again.
This book passed the ultimate reading test for me as “it smiled at me”. I'm eagerly looking forward to reading another of this author's incredible books.
How can I even begin to describe this stunning gem of a book? Why do I like it so much and why has it affected me the way it has? I really don’t know but what I do know is that it’s one of those serendipitous literary works that now proudly resides on my bookshelves next to my other favourite authors of all time: left of Lawrence Durrell, Umberto Eco and Khaled Hosseini. In addition, the fact that I’ve been to Cairo, and have also lived in the Middle East, also added to my anticipation and enjoyment.
First of all, I was intrigued by the title and wondered why the author had chosen it. I finally came across a reference to it within the book (I’ve noticed that many authors hide their titles within the work itself and it can be compared to looking for a clue in one of John Dickson Carr’s detective stories of the 1930s) but what is the significance of the “gazelle” and the “gazelle man”? What is the symbolism here? If there is in fact any symbolism?
I delved into books and references on Egyptian history, which are fascinating in themselves, scribbled copious notes and all I could come up with were the following:
"A typical Naqada II jar decorated with gazelles (from the Predynastic period)"
“As Strandberg (2009, 158-159) states, the gazelle is a feminine solar-daughter symbol, as well as a symbol of rejuvenation. Gazelles are shown in association with the royal princesses at Amarna, possibly as pets. They are possibly shown on the wall of the tomb of Meryre II (Davies 1905, 39, pl. XXXVII; Strandberg 2009, 30). Gazelle ring bezels are common at Amarna and some appear with the rnp branch (e.g. Stevens 2006, 58, fig. II.2.27)”.
And at the other end of the spectrum, I came across this in the Urban Dictionary:
“A good looking, yet aloof girl, who is consistently guarded when a man shows interest. She will give the impression of mild interest, even go out on dates with a man she is not that interested in, and then run at the first sign of genuine pursuit. On rare occasions, the man is able to catch her interest anyway...I thought I was getting somewhere with that girl, but turns out she was a gazelle.”
Some men are like that too, aren’t they?
This exquisite book captures the five senses and scatters them throughout the book. It’s a kaleidoscope of beauty, symbolism and magic, but also with the bitter and yet expected thrust of betrayal – betrayal of the worst kind in fact. Due to all of this I found I was questioning my own interpretation. Had I in fact got most of it wrong or was I correct?
What exotic and erotic backdrop such as Cairo in the fifties, would not affect any thirteen year old girl such as Elizabeth (known as Lizzy by her parents, who remain unnamed throughout the book, as also the narrator was in “Rebecca”)? At the beginning of puberty, she observes her parents and becomes fascinated by Ramses Ragab, a “perfume maker who visits their house regularly, and who opens her up to the mystery of hieroglyphics and the art of exotic scents.”
Cairo is just a different world for Elizabeth who has been brought up in the United States and who has come to Cairo because her father is offered a job lecturing at the university there.
“Father dwelled in a space of such disembodied quietness his Egyptian students called him His Airship, I believe with affection.”
The fragrances of Ramses are known everywhere too:
“I question travelers
from the four corners of the earth
hoping to meet one
who has breathed your fragrance.”
But in addition Ramses awakens the wonder of Elizabeth’s soul, and the discovery of her body, and who knows where that could lead. I always enjoy a book that gives a sense of anticipation…like life really.
Ramses is also the catalyst in the relationships with Elizabeth’s father; a man who has changed since he left the US and who has taken to wearing a fez to blend in with the local culture; playing chess and also war games with Ramses; suffering badly due to his wife “running off” and staying in a series of hotels in Cairo where she continuously looks for and captures men (the “gazelle”?); Elizabeth’s mother (her “acute blondness”) and also the daughter to which he gives a further shade of intimacy when he asks her to call him “Ram”.
Upon Elizabeth and her father’s departure from Cairo, Ramses comes to their home and states “The mistake I made”, he said softly, “was to love the three of you.”
The feeling of Scheherazade runs through the book, more so when Elizabeth purchases an illustrated copy of this magical book, and feels she can even understand Scheherazade’s thoughts. In addition, Rimsky Korsakov’s brilliant music in this regard springs to mind and flows in parallel.
“She has just lost her virginity to Schahriar, and in a few hours her neck will be broken. In order to survive, she needs to inebriate the king’s soul.”
Hence the subsequent rich and remarkable tales.
“It is dark, Scheherazade, recited, it is dark and my transport and my disease are excited, and desire provoketh my pain.”
Some examples of the writing style:
“Anoint yourself, my beloved,
and your flesh, your bones,
the marrow of your bones
your heart and all your vital organs
will be blessed
your body will quiver and quicken
will take on the heat of the sun
the heat of the world
the heat of the living,
the heat, O my sister
of lovers coupling…”
Some of Ramses’ views of the mother:
“These women are like lionesses. It is their nature to prowl…and this is her mystery…I like her famishment you know”….She comes from a cold country (Iceland)…Perhaps she hopes to melt that ice in Cairo…..asking for my ‘hottest’ perfumes.”
But there are also amusing parts: Elizabeth’s mother asks her “Why the green socks” when they go out for lunch, resulting in Elizabeth rather surreptitiously sliding the socks from her feet, rolling them into a ball and throwing them across the floor to the bar, when the waiter is seen to discover them later.
The mother’s thoughts about Iceland: “What happens to us girls who grow up snowbound?”
There is just so much beauty in this book that I could go on forever and so I will stop now as I’m “getting into full flight” yet again.
This book passed the ultimate reading test for me as “it smiled at me”. I'm eagerly looking forward to reading another of this author's incredible books.
February 16, 2013
On this day one decade ago, my husband and I married in the Duesseldorf Standesamt. At that time, we were oblivious to that juncture in our future which would bring us to Egypt, where we resided in the Western Desert on the outskirts of Cairo for three years.
This book breathes sense of place in the same way as Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet evokes an Alexandria which no longer exists - the Cairo in Gazelle is a place of memories - both the author's and my own. I read Durrell's Quartet before I ever saw Alexandria, and was both saddened that I would never walk its streets as he had, and glad that I could lose myself in the landscape of his prose and discover the Alexandria he had known.
In the same way, Gazelle does not require you to have visited a Fayoum rose field or crossed the bridge at Zamalek or hailed a taxi on 26 July - Ducornet has that effortless, flowing, dreamy style which transports you into the time and place of her story and leaves you surrounded, drowning, in tastes and sights and sounds and above all, touch and smells.
It is not a novel about this:
Here's a vagina
and here is a penis
Open the doors
and welcome to Venus
nor is it a novel that starts at A and ends at B with a "What if" as the galloping force whipping its characters along to a climactic denouement. This is a novel with a classical beginning, middle and end. It has action (of both the mind and body) and it has plot (like scent swirls from crushed petals) and it is about achingly bittersweet and gloriously doomed characters, their moods and thoughts and desires and desperations and disappointments and finally, transformation. It is a Chopin nocturne of complexity, rather than a plastic pop song of boringly repetitive refrain and rhythm. It is a five star restaurant indulgence (complete with aperitif, amuse bouche, sorbet, petit fours et digestif and accompanying string quartet), rather than a fast food takeaway. It is an immersion of your senses and it is not to be hurried, or abused by the lack of your own sensitivity to the purity of words painting images in brushstrokes at once subtle and stark, thick and thin, toned and blazing.
Interview about the book with Ms Ducornet. Worth the read.
September 22, 2013
“I imagined that here time was not counted in seconds, but in petals of roses. Each atom of air was scented with roses.”
With my overstimulated senses still reeling from the sensuous voluptuousness of the aphrodisiac scent emanating from these pages and my accelerated heart aching with piercing melancholy, I try to reconcile the unseen power and the darkish forces that lurk behind this exotic rarity of a tale.
Two undercurrent sinuous voices embodied in a single first person narrator, only separated by time, weave together in exquisite torture, giving form to the haunting story of a girl’s sexual awakening in Cairo during the fifties that will define the woman she will irremediably become.
Elizabeth, a surgical anatomist specialized in mummies, dwells in memories of the summer she turned thirteen while she dissects rusty petrified bodies. Concentrated, with scissors and saws in hand, she stares at death in the face while reasserting herself about the illusory concept of beauty and the damaging effects of the passage of time. Reminiscences of that fateful summer, full of catastrophic eroticism, bring volatile memories in which the stench of dust dissolves into the sublime fragrance of roses.
Lizzie, an American girl at the cusp of womanhood, meanders the alleys of Cairo inebriated by all its spicy and ancient scents of smoke, pepper and henna while her unconscious wantonness calls the attention of dark skinned men with kohl stares who turn their heads, following her womanly odor. Elizabeth’s mercurial mother, a breathtaking Icelandic blonde, abandons her family to lead a sexually independent life in the Egyptian city leaving Elizabeth’s father, a history professor, utterly devastated. As an attempt to flee from this unbearable reality, Lizzie’s father hides behind his intellectual obsessions involving war games and military strategies, inadvertently neglecting her daughter. When one of his friends, Ramses Ragab, the owner of Kosmétérion, a store where he creates the most alluring perfumes, comes to divert Lizzie’s father, she finds her senses awaking at the sight of this fantastic Gazelle man, whose intense gracefulness, elegance and mysticism fill all her absences. Blinded with irrepressible desire, Elizabeth gets lost in delirious reverie, giving free rein to her imagination while secretly reading The Arabian nights and taking Princess Schéhérazade as a role for feminine lovemaking.
Ducornet is a not a realist, psychological or otherwise, but a gifted fabulator who relentlessly chronicles the original motive force behind all human behavior: the unavoidable power of desire. Her spellbinding style enslaves and tantalizes stealthily, leaving heated skins, pulsating hearts and prickling sensations running all over one’s body.
Lizzie’s sexuality blossoming like moist rose petals caressed by the morning dew.
Slightly open lips brushing the soft fleshy hollow between the collarbone and the base of a silky throat.
The light touch of a finger drawing an invisible path from naked shoulder to scented wrist.
Ducornet’s words are delicately and relentlessly delivered, pulling and pushing, bending and breaking, arousing and sobering, producing alternating sensations between ecstatic pleasure and an escalating sense of foreboding and bringing them to a tearing climax.
“The beauty of absolute certainty always embraces the subversion of absolute doubt.”
But as any magician, Ducornet’s spell can be an empty one and turn into an exquisite but terrible delusion. What’s the real meaning of this story? Nameless parents without real presence: the mother’s animal sexuality only a pose, the father’s intellectual magnetism a game of hiding behind the screens. Is it all a mere game of shadows?
Being seduced by the glamour and the enigmatic tone of this modern fable can lead to misleading conclusions. This is not yet another sensual story about a young girl coming of age, but one of a middle aged woman realizing she hasn’t allowed herself to be fearlessly alive in a decaying world where she has lived in slow motion since she was thirteen, since she was a young lioness prowling the decks of a ship.
The dilemma doesn’t lie in tasting the forbidden fruit but rather in allowing it to poison one’s future. Past can’t be unwritten, but if correctly understood, it can illuminate, by way of perfume, the beautiful obscurity of one’s unthreaded path.
“I like to think that if one is attentive to the world’s wind and one’s movement through it, then the path one needs to follow will be clearly visible.”
With my overstimulated senses still reeling from the sensuous voluptuousness of the aphrodisiac scent emanating from these pages and my accelerated heart aching with piercing melancholy, I try to reconcile the unseen power and the darkish forces that lurk behind this exotic rarity of a tale.
Two undercurrent sinuous voices embodied in a single first person narrator, only separated by time, weave together in exquisite torture, giving form to the haunting story of a girl’s sexual awakening in Cairo during the fifties that will define the woman she will irremediably become.
Elizabeth, a surgical anatomist specialized in mummies, dwells in memories of the summer she turned thirteen while she dissects rusty petrified bodies. Concentrated, with scissors and saws in hand, she stares at death in the face while reasserting herself about the illusory concept of beauty and the damaging effects of the passage of time. Reminiscences of that fateful summer, full of catastrophic eroticism, bring volatile memories in which the stench of dust dissolves into the sublime fragrance of roses.
Lizzie, an American girl at the cusp of womanhood, meanders the alleys of Cairo inebriated by all its spicy and ancient scents of smoke, pepper and henna while her unconscious wantonness calls the attention of dark skinned men with kohl stares who turn their heads, following her womanly odor. Elizabeth’s mercurial mother, a breathtaking Icelandic blonde, abandons her family to lead a sexually independent life in the Egyptian city leaving Elizabeth’s father, a history professor, utterly devastated. As an attempt to flee from this unbearable reality, Lizzie’s father hides behind his intellectual obsessions involving war games and military strategies, inadvertently neglecting her daughter. When one of his friends, Ramses Ragab, the owner of Kosmétérion, a store where he creates the most alluring perfumes, comes to divert Lizzie’s father, she finds her senses awaking at the sight of this fantastic Gazelle man, whose intense gracefulness, elegance and mysticism fill all her absences. Blinded with irrepressible desire, Elizabeth gets lost in delirious reverie, giving free rein to her imagination while secretly reading The Arabian nights and taking Princess Schéhérazade as a role for feminine lovemaking.
Ducornet is a not a realist, psychological or otherwise, but a gifted fabulator who relentlessly chronicles the original motive force behind all human behavior: the unavoidable power of desire. Her spellbinding style enslaves and tantalizes stealthily, leaving heated skins, pulsating hearts and prickling sensations running all over one’s body.
Lizzie’s sexuality blossoming like moist rose petals caressed by the morning dew.
Slightly open lips brushing the soft fleshy hollow between the collarbone and the base of a silky throat.
The light touch of a finger drawing an invisible path from naked shoulder to scented wrist.
Ducornet’s words are delicately and relentlessly delivered, pulling and pushing, bending and breaking, arousing and sobering, producing alternating sensations between ecstatic pleasure and an escalating sense of foreboding and bringing them to a tearing climax.
“The beauty of absolute certainty always embraces the subversion of absolute doubt.”
But as any magician, Ducornet’s spell can be an empty one and turn into an exquisite but terrible delusion. What’s the real meaning of this story? Nameless parents without real presence: the mother’s animal sexuality only a pose, the father’s intellectual magnetism a game of hiding behind the screens. Is it all a mere game of shadows?
Being seduced by the glamour and the enigmatic tone of this modern fable can lead to misleading conclusions. This is not yet another sensual story about a young girl coming of age, but one of a middle aged woman realizing she hasn’t allowed herself to be fearlessly alive in a decaying world where she has lived in slow motion since she was thirteen, since she was a young lioness prowling the decks of a ship.
The dilemma doesn’t lie in tasting the forbidden fruit but rather in allowing it to poison one’s future. Past can’t be unwritten, but if correctly understood, it can illuminate, by way of perfume, the beautiful obscurity of one’s unthreaded path.
“I like to think that if one is attentive to the world’s wind and one’s movement through it, then the path one needs to follow will be clearly visible.”
August 20, 2013
Ducornet is the lovelist, most magical and dazzling writer on two legs. Her elements tetralogy is an essential entry in the American canon, her short fiction has inspired dozens of MFA pixie girls to take up their pens and write flotsammy flimflam about faires and pixies and sexy girly-poohs bitchslapping wizards. Gazelle is a more serious-faced novel from her less playful more sombre period, concerning the flowering of sexuality of Elizabeth in Egypt among a cast of fantastic characters with light Arabian Nights nods. Her sentences are measured breaths, softly sumptuous and tinily tremulous. One of the lesser lights in Ducornet’s formidable corpus, this novel still enraptures those who need enrapturing (me!) and captures the sweat and sumptuousness of sexy sultry Egypt and its sexy sultry cast of sexy things.
November 6, 2014
Easy to enter difficult to leave. How does one write like this, creating atmosphere so dense, precious, one enters with no assurance of return. Yet, in the end it is a book about about never returning. The past trying to claw a grip on the future from proceeding, as occurs in all times. A way of life to be wiped out. The battle field is the present. The resentful future tries to rip itself away. What may be of use from the past is gone, the present already receding.
Why have I put Ducornet off off so long after The Fountains of Neptune? A fear? Fear of so swiftly removed from my world into another dense with strangeness. It is why I read yet when done so rapid with such a completion of the stroke of the brush there is the wary sign of no guarantees, of no return. My grown daughter and grandchildren can much better help me navigate the new world than I them, my world folding into history. It is where young people begin and quickly move forward, as it should be.
And the writer? Where is she or he? Tapping on keys to report a version of what is past, has happened, to be on the cusp of change, or a seer of the future? Build a different world which rotates according to different maxims?
Ducornet understands and to tell this truth she molds her intoxicating sentences, spare without dilution of an added word, seeking the essence of their meaning while rendering an atmosphere dense with sensuality and hidden worlds. A musked world. A world which as all worlds in time is caught leaving the old trying to transform into the new.
Thirteen year old Elizabeth accompanies her frail father to Egypt. Left by his wife and in a state of perpetual mourning he watches his way of life disappearing. Elizabeth is on the cusp of time, marked by the sensual description of scents in the beauty of Ducornet's ethereal prose, Elizabeth's changing body and perceptions of herself growing from a girl into a woman marks the quickened end of the elder's generation, the present fading into the future, the painful awkwardness of the churning of this peristaltic emergence.
If you love the sound of words, the composition of spare poetic prose I would highly recommend this book. The fact that she renders these words with such dense meaning is her mystic, unique art. No one can do what Durconet does. Gazelle is a treat each of us deserves.
Why have I put Ducornet off off so long after The Fountains of Neptune? A fear? Fear of so swiftly removed from my world into another dense with strangeness. It is why I read yet when done so rapid with such a completion of the stroke of the brush there is the wary sign of no guarantees, of no return. My grown daughter and grandchildren can much better help me navigate the new world than I them, my world folding into history. It is where young people begin and quickly move forward, as it should be.
And the writer? Where is she or he? Tapping on keys to report a version of what is past, has happened, to be on the cusp of change, or a seer of the future? Build a different world which rotates according to different maxims?
Ducornet understands and to tell this truth she molds her intoxicating sentences, spare without dilution of an added word, seeking the essence of their meaning while rendering an atmosphere dense with sensuality and hidden worlds. A musked world. A world which as all worlds in time is caught leaving the old trying to transform into the new.
Thirteen year old Elizabeth accompanies her frail father to Egypt. Left by his wife and in a state of perpetual mourning he watches his way of life disappearing. Elizabeth is on the cusp of time, marked by the sensual description of scents in the beauty of Ducornet's ethereal prose, Elizabeth's changing body and perceptions of herself growing from a girl into a woman marks the quickened end of the elder's generation, the present fading into the future, the painful awkwardness of the churning of this peristaltic emergence.
If you love the sound of words, the composition of spare poetic prose I would highly recommend this book. The fact that she renders these words with such dense meaning is her mystic, unique art. No one can do what Durconet does. Gazelle is a treat each of us deserves.
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October 8, 2015The below contents of this Review Box are now available in a document assemblage entitled Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt. Some words about Gazelle and/or Ducornet may be in the offing....
Gazelle Review by Nathan "N.R." Gaddis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Gazelle Review by Nathan "N.R." Gaddis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
February 1, 2013
From then on the small pleasures of daily life took on the stench- however slight- of ambiguity or worse: deviance. And although I loved Father deeply, this secret knowledge revealed what I came to think of as his weakness.
Matthew Lillard in Scream tells Neve Campbell's grieving daughter that her adulterous mother was "NO Sharon Stone!" She pays for her crimes, the poor woman. Mother, will I be pretty? Will I be rich? Thirteen year old Lizzie grave robbed her parents. Not in the traditional sense. She doesn't stab them in the shower. But she would have shoved her in the casket and worn her clothes to the dance. Fleshpots and magazine perfume samples in pockets of dangling strips of gauze. I guess that's different than the customary knocking off the pedestal. Her mother land locks every man she meets on the street with her eyes. A bidding war commences in a Sheryl Crow-esque number. "Am I blonde enough for you to handle?" (That's not me she is that shoulder pads aggressive.) Mother, oh my god! No, you may NOT sleep with danger! Father is a fruit cake making the regifting rounds like it is Christmas twelve months out of the year. She left him. He can't believe she left him. I feel sorry for anyone who ever had to sit next to this guy at a party. Did they love her at all? Lizzie doesn't want her mother to come back other than to be locked up in her room with no dinner before dead. It's an empty socket that never really held anything to begin with. I'd get it if she just wanted her mother. But no, Lizzie and Mama have a Snow White and the Evil Queen mojo working. Will I be prettier than you one day? (The mother doesn't notice her daughter much. I could see her as one of those divorcee dads who stop showing up for visitation over the course of a few baseball games. There's nothing in the way of chemistry between her or anyone else.) I can give Ducornet credit for at least not featuring a dozen hair brushing scenes. This felt like the sort of book that would have a lot of pretty cold mama brushes her hair in the mirror a lot before going out to a date with the young man her daughter has a crush on. Maybe a shot of the girl's reflection in the mirror as she watches the pretty, pretty hair. A murderous eye glint when she return past curfew. But I saw him FIRST! It wasn't good that I had flashbacks of V.C. Andrews series read when I was a buxom lass of thirteen (that's not me. That's this cringing book). (My mother told me about her blow jobs when I was thirteen. Seriously, Lizzie was being a pussy. Suck it up! And all of that was nothing to the sexcapades my grandmother told us girls about in her campaign to win our grandfather back from the "Fat whore". The "fat whore" shared her name, uncommon spelling and all. Totally on purpose on his part. Lizzie, really, you're a pussy. I win this pity contest.) She saw her nakedly embracing a man ONE TIME! That's nothing! I'd get the sexuality lynch mob cliches if she were a prostitute. All she does is want a life of her own.
I started reading this weeks ago and had to put it down when the mother shaved her legs with caramel. What if someone wanted to eat a really good candy apple that day? Can't, it's all on her sticks.
"Who are you, today?" I asked.
"Darius," he said. "Your father is Alexander the Great. Who are you?
"I'm Lizzie," I said. "I'm staggering!"
This almost broke me for good. Any time I thought it might not be so bad Ducornet would bust out some more cringeworthy precociousness. Boring incensed rhapsodies about potpurri, shitty oracular poetry from the mouth of the "gazelle" (I don't get it. Did he have a long neck? Did he stampede Simba?). Lizzie is in "love" with Ramses Ragab who works for her father. He "teaches her" something. I couldn't tell because the child perspective switches to Lizzie as an adult who robs mummy corpses. Her lover leaves her because he wants to live with the living. What else were they getting up to with those corpses? Lizzie stays in Cairo because no one worships the body like the Egyptians. Uh huh. But then why was her mother not allowed to live in her own? Sure, Ramses can tell her that her mother is famished, trying to warm her body from its natural habitat of a cold climate. That's not good enough for me. I had enough of Lizzie as surrogate companion who plays with the adults. This is typical of divorced parents to turn their children into confidantes. It was also so annoying when my big sister acted like she was decades older than us instead of four years. Lizzie wasn't that interesting and I have a hard time believing that every adult man she meets is perfectly content to bear her company. It was believable for her lonely father and no one else. They play with her in the worst sort of dinner party precociousness. There wasn't a single character I didn't hate. They even hire am effing magician to win the mother back. Only no one ever asks wife and mother what she wants (meanwhile Lizzie is also jealous of any other female they know, particularly if they are pretty and attractive to the man she wants, much like mama dearest). Didn't any of them ever listen to Sting? If you love someone set them free. Operation close your legs didn't win me over.
The grave digging future is never heard of again. Lizzie walks the deck of a ship. Her awesome sensuousness touching every man with her hand of glory and ensaring futures of all other women with her Wonder Woman lasso. Mine, all mine. Maybe they just thought she wore too much perfume. That happens. So she won. Great. I hope she has a daughter with green eyes of jealousy who writes an irritating book as her comeuppance. That'll teach her!
Lizzie declares all her love in a (at least she got this right) stupid love letter to Ramses. There's some stupid disaster and he throws out a line that he was in love with all three of them before disappearing from her life for good. But what did he mean?! She wonders. Oh well, he taught her everything she needs to know and now she will have hot sex with a man she meets on a deck. Their sweat will mingle with the Obsession by Calvin Klein liberally applied to his nape that will pick up the faintest aroma of the Fabreeze on the mattress. I didn't care. I just hope I never have to read the word "myhrr" again. I hate perfume. I'm sure when she's a mummy they'll stuff her vagina with myhrr, curds and whey, potpurri. Maybe a festive cinnamon broom somewhere else. The three wisemen will do it. I hated this book as much as I hate it when anyone tells me about their vagina. That's a lot. Every time someone says vagina a thousand dung beetles scurry across my grave. Just like that scene in that Indiana Jones film.
January 10, 2018
Look Like An Egyptian
26 year old Elizabeth returns to Cairo thirteen years after spending a year there with her parents in the 1950’s.
Her father is a timid history professor, who describes himself variously as broken or lost. Nevertheless, “Father looked Egyptian - we both did - so that Cairo embraced us unquestioningly…”
Mother’s Restless Beauty
The men of Cairo embrace Lizzie’s mother in a different way, as you might infer from the following description.
Her mother is “a big, beautiful Icelander, a noisemaker...Mother’s extravagance and acute blondness were striking anywhere, but above all in Egypt...She was voluptuous, dressed as Mother often was, in a white silk suit, a scarf of gold lame tied at her neck...Mother’s breasts, so damned gorgeous, her long legs…Leggy and unpredictable...Mother is mad; Mother is sad; she is eccentric; she has a dark secret. She is homesick…And then there was the problem of her beauty, her restless beauty, its incessant transformations…”
One Egyptian explains her to Lizzie in the following terms:
Mother is attracted, and irresistible, to tall dark slim muscular “handsome men flourishing thick mustaches” (gazelles) and soon separates from her family, which “annihilated my father and me, severing us from her and from ourselves.”
Mother describes herself as “a bad mother” and “bad news”. She brags that she could have any man she wants. Not only does she intimidate her female friends in Cairo, but she becomes a sexual rival to her pubescent daughter, who she calls “my gosling”, as if to suggest that she is an ugly duckling.
Father retreats into playing chess with specially-crafted ivory pieces and war games with toy soldiers. He is naively, condescendingly and ineffectually protective of Lizzie. Like the fathers of many teenaged girls, he has no sense of her inner life. In a way, Elizabeth’s return trip is an attempt to reconstruct and understand what happened to her (“My adolescence was passed under the sign of strangeness…”). However, it’s also a narrative tool that allows Ducornet to write about Lizzie’s emerging sexuality in a more adult and knowing way.
Attar of roses ("It takes two hundred and fifty pounds of petals to make an ounce of attar.")
The Perfumed Garden of the Past
The person who has the greatest impact on Lizzie is Ramses Ragab, a parfumier who is a friend of her father’s:
Rameses draws an analogy between the manufacture and enjoyment of fragrances and the transformation that Lizzie is going through:
The Wantoning Eyes of Scheherazade
Rameses also recognises the importance to Lizzie of her uncensored copy of “The Arabian Nights”:
The older Elizabeth explains the appeal of “The Arabian Nights”:
The Insight of My Reasonable Heart
Father is a victim of his own introspective reason, Mother a victim of her irrationality and insatiable desire, which encourages Lizzie to head down a path where there is less conflict between the head and the heart. Ironically, the path owes much to a different perspective on the mind prevalent in ancient Egypt:
This gives Lizzie a framework within which to find her own gazelle:
So, over the course of the novel, Rikki Ducornet designs for Elizabeth a metaphysical eroticism that is equally informed by the wisdom of the Old Kingdom and the seductive powers of "The Arabian Nights", which allows her to achieve her goal of "outdoing" her mother.
SOUNDTRACK:
26 year old Elizabeth returns to Cairo thirteen years after spending a year there with her parents in the 1950’s.
Her father is a timid history professor, who describes himself variously as broken or lost. Nevertheless, “Father looked Egyptian - we both did - so that Cairo embraced us unquestioningly…”
Mother’s Restless Beauty
The men of Cairo embrace Lizzie’s mother in a different way, as you might infer from the following description.
Her mother is “a big, beautiful Icelander, a noisemaker...Mother’s extravagance and acute blondness were striking anywhere, but above all in Egypt...She was voluptuous, dressed as Mother often was, in a white silk suit, a scarf of gold lame tied at her neck...Mother’s breasts, so damned gorgeous, her long legs…Leggy and unpredictable...Mother is mad; Mother is sad; she is eccentric; she has a dark secret. She is homesick…And then there was the problem of her beauty, her restless beauty, its incessant transformations…”
One Egyptian explains her to Lizzie in the following terms:
“There are women like lionesses. It is their nature to prowl. She is like this. And this is her mystery, Lizzie; her mystery and her tragedy, perhaps. Well...I like her famishment, you know? It is about life. I think of your mother this way: a famished lioness, on the prowl…”
Mother is attracted, and irresistible, to tall dark slim muscular “handsome men flourishing thick mustaches” (gazelles) and soon separates from her family, which “annihilated my father and me, severing us from her and from ourselves.”
Mother describes herself as “a bad mother” and “bad news”. She brags that she could have any man she wants. Not only does she intimidate her female friends in Cairo, but she becomes a sexual rival to her pubescent daughter, who she calls “my gosling”, as if to suggest that she is an ugly duckling.
Father retreats into playing chess with specially-crafted ivory pieces and war games with toy soldiers. He is naively, condescendingly and ineffectually protective of Lizzie. Like the fathers of many teenaged girls, he has no sense of her inner life. In a way, Elizabeth’s return trip is an attempt to reconstruct and understand what happened to her (“My adolescence was passed under the sign of strangeness…”). However, it’s also a narrative tool that allows Ducornet to write about Lizzie’s emerging sexuality in a more adult and knowing way.
Attar of roses ("It takes two hundred and fifty pounds of petals to make an ounce of attar.")
The Perfumed Garden of the Past
The person who has the greatest impact on Lizzie is Ramses Ragab, a parfumier who is a friend of her father’s:
“My life has been devoted to the task of illuminating, by way of perfume, the beautiful obscurity of the past. Always I am after a scent worthy of this ancient sensibility that will evoke a loving kindness in the heart of those who wear it. Like melting down the bright wax of the world’s hum and buzz into one perfect grain of intense delight. An atom of delight.”
“The requisites of randomness...The requirements of uniqueness…The subtle yet marvelous divergence that will make the fragrance more active than before, more complex, more seductive, astonishing somehow. So that the one who wears it will never be forgotten.
“Here lies the heart of the problem: to be empirical yet attentive to the subtle shifts due to some unknown, unexpected sequence of events, for example an unusual conformation of the soil, that deviance or anomaly that will make the world spin a little faster. The beauty of absolute certainty always embraces the subversion of absolute doubt.”
Rameses draws an analogy between the manufacture and enjoyment of fragrances and the transformation that Lizzie is going through:
“Imagining for the first time, fearlessly, the reality of a girl being sexual (a term of my mother’s) with a man...These are the thoughts that thrust me into pleasure’s heady orbit, pleasure, like an act of magic, flooding the hours of the night with fragrancy...It is dark and desire...And the beauty of delight hath appeared with perfume.”
The Wantoning Eyes of Scheherazade
Rameses also recognises the importance to Lizzie of her uncensored copy of “The Arabian Nights”:
“Now all you need is a red dress. To be as beautiful as Scheherazade. You will wear a red dress and fragrance of attar of rose, and you will be among my most cherished clients, more cherished than the daughters of sultans, khaleefahs, and weezers!”
The older Elizabeth explains the appeal of “The Arabian Nights”:
“Scheherazade reveals the sympathy between sensual love and adventure; she reveals that love is both the reason for adventure and its reward. Love, Scheherazade tells Schahriar, is the Universe’s soul - indissoluble and indestructible. Without love’s ardor to animate it, the Universe would be as lifeless as a handful of sand.
“Everything is perceived through the senses, she reminds him; it is the imagining mind that makes the world intelligible, and nothing animates the imagination as does love. It is love that makes us human, spontaneous, and thoughtful; it is the highest bond and the greatest good.
“The world and all its forms belong to Eros, and when everything is ended love will persist. Ardor, Scheherazade tells Schahriar, is the world’s cause and the world’s reason. When Scheherazade speaks, it is as if the words themselves are wantoning.”
The Insight of My Reasonable Heart
Father is a victim of his own introspective reason, Mother a victim of her irrationality and insatiable desire, which encourages Lizzie to head down a path where there is less conflict between the head and the heart. Ironically, the path owes much to a different perspective on the mind prevalent in ancient Egypt:
“In the Old Kingdom, reason was said to dwell in the heart, as did insight and perception.”
This gives Lizzie a framework within which to find her own gazelle:
“My insightful, my perceptive, my reasonable heart was after refinement, a certain tone of voice, depth of eye; a certain ease of manner. If he shared an anatomical resemblance to Ramses Ragab; if he were dark and wore white linen suits, all the better.”
So, over the course of the novel, Rikki Ducornet designs for Elizabeth a metaphysical eroticism that is equally informed by the wisdom of the Old Kingdom and the seductive powers of "The Arabian Nights", which allows her to achieve her goal of "outdoing" her mother.
SOUNDTRACK:
April 14, 2011
There is no Carter! There is no Rushdie! There is only Ducornet! Rikki Ducornet is one of my favorite under-known writers, an extraordinary fantasist. A camphor-scented bildungsroman set in 1950s Cairo, Gazelle is probably her strongest novel, it's definitely her most autobiographical, and it would be the best introduction to her work. Which, by the way, is chock full of sex. And mummies.
February 27, 2025
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...
“Whenever a man longs for a woman, all he needs to do to cure himself of this affliction… is to remember… in no time, in no time at all; is to remember… in an instant, a brief instant...the times it takes for a spark to leap from the fire… the times it takes to tie a simple knot…”
[...]
What I wish to write about is a brief period of time in Egypt, one year, and above all, one summer that seems to stretch to infinity, a time of disquiet and loneliness. That year, and that summer, were a paradox, both intensely felt and numbing. The world passed before my eyes like an animated stage, distant, colorful, untainable, and I, in my own chair, looked on, watchful and amazed, frightened, enchanted, and disembodied, too.”
Rikki Ducornet es otra de esas autoras que estoy segura que ha llegado en el momento más adecuado, o afinando aun más todavía, ahora quizás estoy en una etapa en la que la aprecio de verdad, aunque no sé tampoco porque es lo primero que leo de ella..., pero sí, estoy segura que ya no voy a alejarme de ella. Es lo primero que leo de ella y no he podido disfrutar más esta “Gazelle”, que me ha volado la cabeza en muchos sentidos, por toda ella, por los temas que toca, por el lenguaje que traspasa el simple texto y casi llega a ser una experiencia sensorial. Me ha recordado en este aspecto, el de los sentidos, a “El Rio” no tanto la novela, pero sobre todo a la película que adaptó Jean Renoir, también años 50, cuyos olores, sabores, una especie de voluptuosidad vivida a través de una adolescente, traspasa la pantalla, o las mismas páginas del libro. En este aspecto, Gazelle, es algo muy parecido, una de esas experiencias lectoras inmersivas impagables, y tras terminar este libro tan cortito, solo hubiera deseado que hubiera sido un tocho de mil páginas, y casi me dieron ganas de volver a empezarlo de nuevo en cuanto lo acabé. Ay Rikki Ducornet..., ¿por qué nadie se ha ocupado de traerte a España?? Otro de esos sacrilegios que nunca acabaré de entender y mira que hay editoriales aquí pero claro, igual la gracia está en leerla en inglés…
"… in the still of the night, would her return from the mystery that kept her so often away. On such nights it seemed to me that Mother's orbit was like that of a comet. Light-years away, when she approached us it was always on a collision course. "
[…]
“In those years chess became the sole vehicle by which he could be reached, or rather, engaged, for he could never be reached, the navigable airspace in which he functioned was invariably at the absolute altitude of his choosing.”
Gazelle, es la historia de Elizabeth, una niña americana de trece años que viaja con sus padres al Cairo por motivos laborales de su padre, historiador. Aunque parezca que la novela esté narrada en primera persona por esta niña, Elizabeth, Liz, Lizoo…, es realmente la Elizabeth de trece años después quien la narra, desde el mismo Cairo también. Ese verano en el que esta familia llega a esta ciudad es justo un momento de desmembramiento de la unidad familiar, el verano en que tras un matrimonio completamente desincronizado, su madre abandona a su padre para instalarse en otro hotel de la ciudad y asi poder seguir con sus aventuras amorosas con total libertad. Desde el primer momento, Elizabeth desde su primera persona, aguda, inteligente, curiosa y reflexiva, nos enfrenta a la visión que tiene de sus padres, los dos únicos personajes en toda la novela que no llevarán nombre, son Father o Mother, siempre en mayúsculas. Es un matrimonio desigual en todos los sentidos: su padre es introspectivo, callado y obsesionado con la historia, sobre todo las guerras…, su madre que es islandesa es todo lo contrario, imita fisicamente a las estrellas americanas del cine, hermosa y obsesionada (no sabemos si por una especie de carencia en su pasado) por atraer la atención de los hombres. A partir de la partida de su madre, y aunque siga en escena, se convierte en la protectora de un padre que es como un niño, destrozado y desesperado por una mujer que huyó de él.
“I do not think Father was aware of how irrational he had become. He would look to the street and the sky for signs, signs that were the indication of Mother’s movements, revelations as to the tenor of her moods and the nature of her thoughts.”
Éste es un tema, el del cisma familiar, esencial para poder entender la mirada de Elizabeth y la manera en que Rikki Ducornet nos la presenta porque realmente está atrapada entre dos concepciones completamente diferentes de ver la vida: el desprecio de su madre por ese amor incondicional de un padre cada vez más perdido en sí mismo calarán no solo cada vez más en la niña sino en el lector que también se verá zarandeado por estas dos mentalidades: "Don't you see that I'm lost? I'm lost!, he repeated with atonishment. Meeting his eyes, I saw that it was true." . Dentro de estos tres personajes, hay un cuarto, Ramses Ragab, el mejor amigo de su padre, perfumista y dueño del Kosmeterion que los introducirá en el verdadero Egipo, el de los aromas exóticos, el de los jeroglificos, el de la magia, su padre incluso traerá a una especie de mago del desierto para poder recuperar a su esposa. Ramsés Ragab, será el testigo del dolor del padre y de cómo esto afectará a la adolescente y al mismo tiempo, será un personaje que ejercerá una fascinación sobre Elizabeth, que verá en Ragab la representación del misterio que esconde Egipto: 'I cannot place or name you. You are to 'volatile' -a word you taught me." A través del personaje de Ramses Ragab y del recuerdo de la Elizabeth ya adulta de ese verano, Rikki Ducornet evoca también el tema del despertar a la vida adulta de la adolescente. No solo en su obsesión idealizada por él, sino en la forma en que nos describe un Cairo de los cincuenta, tórrido, colorido, acompañado por las historias de Ragab que lo convierten en una especie de ciudad legendaria de las Mil y Una Noches. Ragab, ¿la verdadera gacela de la novela? ejercerá de catalizador en ese cisma en la vida tanto de Elizabeth como de su padre y les mostrará ese Egipto de leyenda, en un intento por salvar al padre de Elizabeth de la locura.
"But tell me, Elizabeth. Do you dream often?
It is true that I dreamed every night, as through dreaming were a product of our family disintegration, a way to fill the vacuum created by Mother's departure. These were dreams, It seems clear to me now, about awakening from the perpetual blindness that had characterized us both, Father and me. An absence, that even as a small child I chose to call: Something gone missing."
Y ahora llegamos a la madre del cordero, la escritura de Rikki Ducornet, que es quizás lo que más ha podido emocionarme en una novela sin respiro para mí. La prosa, que es luminosa en su evocación de la ciudad egipcia, se convierte en una prosa a flor de piel cuando evoca la percepción que tiene de sus padres y ya cuando pasa a evocar el despertar sexual de Elizabeth, esa idealización entre onírica y erótica de una adolescente reconociéndose como una mujer, pasa a un lenguaje completamente diferente: obsesivo, con un toque de ansiedad.
“The covered pans held steaming food, and as I write this down I long for the Cairo of “Old Time”, that is to say “My Time”, the Cairo of the fifties when the air did not smell of car exhaust but of long-simmered lamb and fresh coffee, the comforting smell o animal dung and mint tea and jasmine."
Y no nos olvidemos que Gazelle está contada desde el punto de vista de una Elizabeth de veintiséis años y quizás aquí esté el otro tema importante de esta novela única, que me tiene todavía impactada. Porque la Elizabeth adulta, no ha podido superar el recuerdo de ese año en el Cairo, y lo vemos en las pocas incursiones que se atreve a hacer de su presente Elizabeth, que vive en El Cairo, sigue recordando la ciudad de sus trece años, sin poder ajustarse a ese presente, sin haber superado, entiendo, todas esas experiencias vividas durante ese corto periodo de tiempo. Un periodo de pocos meses, idealizado quizás pero que ha perdurado en la memoria, que todavía sigue “persiguiéndola”, aunque no es este el verbo ideal para describir lo que le pasa a Elizabeth ya de adulta, no es “perseguir”..., mucho mejor hacer uso de lo que decía Javier Marías: “Hay un verbo inglés, to haunt, hay un verbo francés, hanter, muy emparentados y más bien intraducibles, que denominan lo que los fantasmas hacen con los lugares y las personas que frecuentan o acechan o revisitan; también, según el contexto, el primero puede signficar encantar, en el sentido feérico de la palabra, en el sentido de encantamiento...” Pues eso. A sus pies, señora Ducornet!
“An important memory is like a gravitational field, the mind is compelled to return to it again and again. It is like a moon; it lives in light and shadow.”
♫♫ ♫ Should Have Known Better, Sufijan Stevens ♫♫ ♫
“Whenever a man longs for a woman, all he needs to do to cure himself of this affliction… is to remember… in no time, in no time at all; is to remember… in an instant, a brief instant...the times it takes for a spark to leap from the fire… the times it takes to tie a simple knot…”
[...]
What I wish to write about is a brief period of time in Egypt, one year, and above all, one summer that seems to stretch to infinity, a time of disquiet and loneliness. That year, and that summer, were a paradox, both intensely felt and numbing. The world passed before my eyes like an animated stage, distant, colorful, untainable, and I, in my own chair, looked on, watchful and amazed, frightened, enchanted, and disembodied, too.”
Rikki Ducornet es otra de esas autoras que estoy segura que ha llegado en el momento más adecuado, o afinando aun más todavía, ahora quizás estoy en una etapa en la que la aprecio de verdad, aunque no sé tampoco porque es lo primero que leo de ella..., pero sí, estoy segura que ya no voy a alejarme de ella. Es lo primero que leo de ella y no he podido disfrutar más esta “Gazelle”, que me ha volado la cabeza en muchos sentidos, por toda ella, por los temas que toca, por el lenguaje que traspasa el simple texto y casi llega a ser una experiencia sensorial. Me ha recordado en este aspecto, el de los sentidos, a “El Rio” no tanto la novela, pero sobre todo a la película que adaptó Jean Renoir, también años 50, cuyos olores, sabores, una especie de voluptuosidad vivida a través de una adolescente, traspasa la pantalla, o las mismas páginas del libro. En este aspecto, Gazelle, es algo muy parecido, una de esas experiencias lectoras inmersivas impagables, y tras terminar este libro tan cortito, solo hubiera deseado que hubiera sido un tocho de mil páginas, y casi me dieron ganas de volver a empezarlo de nuevo en cuanto lo acabé. Ay Rikki Ducornet..., ¿por qué nadie se ha ocupado de traerte a España?? Otro de esos sacrilegios que nunca acabaré de entender y mira que hay editoriales aquí pero claro, igual la gracia está en leerla en inglés…
"… in the still of the night, would her return from the mystery that kept her so often away. On such nights it seemed to me that Mother's orbit was like that of a comet. Light-years away, when she approached us it was always on a collision course. "
[…]
“In those years chess became the sole vehicle by which he could be reached, or rather, engaged, for he could never be reached, the navigable airspace in which he functioned was invariably at the absolute altitude of his choosing.”
Gazelle, es la historia de Elizabeth, una niña americana de trece años que viaja con sus padres al Cairo por motivos laborales de su padre, historiador. Aunque parezca que la novela esté narrada en primera persona por esta niña, Elizabeth, Liz, Lizoo…, es realmente la Elizabeth de trece años después quien la narra, desde el mismo Cairo también. Ese verano en el que esta familia llega a esta ciudad es justo un momento de desmembramiento de la unidad familiar, el verano en que tras un matrimonio completamente desincronizado, su madre abandona a su padre para instalarse en otro hotel de la ciudad y asi poder seguir con sus aventuras amorosas con total libertad. Desde el primer momento, Elizabeth desde su primera persona, aguda, inteligente, curiosa y reflexiva, nos enfrenta a la visión que tiene de sus padres, los dos únicos personajes en toda la novela que no llevarán nombre, son Father o Mother, siempre en mayúsculas. Es un matrimonio desigual en todos los sentidos: su padre es introspectivo, callado y obsesionado con la historia, sobre todo las guerras…, su madre que es islandesa es todo lo contrario, imita fisicamente a las estrellas americanas del cine, hermosa y obsesionada (no sabemos si por una especie de carencia en su pasado) por atraer la atención de los hombres. A partir de la partida de su madre, y aunque siga en escena, se convierte en la protectora de un padre que es como un niño, destrozado y desesperado por una mujer que huyó de él.
“I do not think Father was aware of how irrational he had become. He would look to the street and the sky for signs, signs that were the indication of Mother’s movements, revelations as to the tenor of her moods and the nature of her thoughts.”
Éste es un tema, el del cisma familiar, esencial para poder entender la mirada de Elizabeth y la manera en que Rikki Ducornet nos la presenta porque realmente está atrapada entre dos concepciones completamente diferentes de ver la vida: el desprecio de su madre por ese amor incondicional de un padre cada vez más perdido en sí mismo calarán no solo cada vez más en la niña sino en el lector que también se verá zarandeado por estas dos mentalidades: "Don't you see that I'm lost? I'm lost!, he repeated with atonishment. Meeting his eyes, I saw that it was true." . Dentro de estos tres personajes, hay un cuarto, Ramses Ragab, el mejor amigo de su padre, perfumista y dueño del Kosmeterion que los introducirá en el verdadero Egipo, el de los aromas exóticos, el de los jeroglificos, el de la magia, su padre incluso traerá a una especie de mago del desierto para poder recuperar a su esposa. Ramsés Ragab, será el testigo del dolor del padre y de cómo esto afectará a la adolescente y al mismo tiempo, será un personaje que ejercerá una fascinación sobre Elizabeth, que verá en Ragab la representación del misterio que esconde Egipto: 'I cannot place or name you. You are to 'volatile' -a word you taught me." A través del personaje de Ramses Ragab y del recuerdo de la Elizabeth ya adulta de ese verano, Rikki Ducornet evoca también el tema del despertar a la vida adulta de la adolescente. No solo en su obsesión idealizada por él, sino en la forma en que nos describe un Cairo de los cincuenta, tórrido, colorido, acompañado por las historias de Ragab que lo convierten en una especie de ciudad legendaria de las Mil y Una Noches. Ragab, ¿la verdadera gacela de la novela? ejercerá de catalizador en ese cisma en la vida tanto de Elizabeth como de su padre y les mostrará ese Egipto de leyenda, en un intento por salvar al padre de Elizabeth de la locura.
"But tell me, Elizabeth. Do you dream often?
It is true that I dreamed every night, as through dreaming were a product of our family disintegration, a way to fill the vacuum created by Mother's departure. These were dreams, It seems clear to me now, about awakening from the perpetual blindness that had characterized us both, Father and me. An absence, that even as a small child I chose to call: Something gone missing."
Y ahora llegamos a la madre del cordero, la escritura de Rikki Ducornet, que es quizás lo que más ha podido emocionarme en una novela sin respiro para mí. La prosa, que es luminosa en su evocación de la ciudad egipcia, se convierte en una prosa a flor de piel cuando evoca la percepción que tiene de sus padres y ya cuando pasa a evocar el despertar sexual de Elizabeth, esa idealización entre onírica y erótica de una adolescente reconociéndose como una mujer, pasa a un lenguaje completamente diferente: obsesivo, con un toque de ansiedad.
“The covered pans held steaming food, and as I write this down I long for the Cairo of “Old Time”, that is to say “My Time”, the Cairo of the fifties when the air did not smell of car exhaust but of long-simmered lamb and fresh coffee, the comforting smell o animal dung and mint tea and jasmine."
Y no nos olvidemos que Gazelle está contada desde el punto de vista de una Elizabeth de veintiséis años y quizás aquí esté el otro tema importante de esta novela única, que me tiene todavía impactada. Porque la Elizabeth adulta, no ha podido superar el recuerdo de ese año en el Cairo, y lo vemos en las pocas incursiones que se atreve a hacer de su presente Elizabeth, que vive en El Cairo, sigue recordando la ciudad de sus trece años, sin poder ajustarse a ese presente, sin haber superado, entiendo, todas esas experiencias vividas durante ese corto periodo de tiempo. Un periodo de pocos meses, idealizado quizás pero que ha perdurado en la memoria, que todavía sigue “persiguiéndola”, aunque no es este el verbo ideal para describir lo que le pasa a Elizabeth ya de adulta, no es “perseguir”..., mucho mejor hacer uso de lo que decía Javier Marías: “Hay un verbo inglés, to haunt, hay un verbo francés, hanter, muy emparentados y más bien intraducibles, que denominan lo que los fantasmas hacen con los lugares y las personas que frecuentan o acechan o revisitan; también, según el contexto, el primero puede signficar encantar, en el sentido feérico de la palabra, en el sentido de encantamiento...” Pues eso. A sus pies, señora Ducornet!
“An important memory is like a gravitational field, the mind is compelled to return to it again and again. It is like a moon; it lives in light and shadow.”
♫♫ ♫ Should Have Known Better, Sufijan Stevens ♫♫ ♫
October 9, 2014
Overripe, but only in the sense that a champagne mango or a persimmon must seem overripe in order to taste their richest and sweetest. Even with a spare plotline this felt like a condensation, a rose attar, of an epic to get lost in for weeks; and though it only took me a day or so to read its potency obviated time by a relentless, though languid, saturation of moments both sensual and literary. Lovely, morbid, aromatic, and sexily escapist.
April 2, 2012
Yes yes yes! If books were perfumes, this one would be the perfect mix of storytelling prowess, enchantment of language, whiff of philosophy, and scent of great characters. Oh, and a dash of humor to taste. A highly potent potion, to be sure, yet none of the above elements suffers because of the others. It’s like each word in this short book is doing double or triple duty to those ends.
The gesture, like the gesture a magician makes with his wand, multiplying doves at will, seeded the city with women--voluptuous women smelling of henna and smoke, of the metal knife the moment it halves the apple, of brocade, of nostalgia, of transgression. I felt the press of women's bodies coming at us from all directions.The imaginination and pure awe infused herein was thrilling, and reminded me slightly of the wonder of certain children’s books, except that even though everything here is soaked in a kind of fantastic openness bordering on magic, you soon realize that nothing is really magical or illogical. Behind the enchantment is a tough reality that guides everything, allowing no short cuts for the characters or the reader. The flaws of the narrator, her father, her mother, and even Ramses Ragab all become apparent. They are all tragically flawed, yet entirely loveable.
Then she [Mother] was back in the cab, her white hand sparkling behind the filthy glass, and then she was gone. p. 80Reading the other reviews on here, you’d think this was an overly poetic book at the cost of the plot, but it’s not. The things that happen in the book may not seem significant in the normal sense of ‘plot’, but each little thing adds up to huge internal changes in each of the characters. This is what makes it so exciting, and such a fast-paced book (for me), while being such a slow book (apparently) for others.
I remember that Ramses Ragab took up Father’s feet to tuck them beneath the covers. That the beauty of my father’s feet astonished me. p. 85
As father and I retreated into the blazing sun, the rising dust and clamor of the street, the city of Cairo gave way to a forest of the mind. A forest where female animals offered themselves to love and in broad daylight were mounted before the eyes of the world.I’m amazed at the number of themes Ducornet is able to fit in here, the idea of bottling things up, preserving memories (and thus the body), of sexuality/sensuality, men/women, of betrayal, of rationality vs. everything else, of moral weakness, of games and play vs. life, and thus of reality vs. escape. The book has a lot to say, most of which I can’t even express as binaries, or it would be unfair to. But if there was one thing I was disappointed with, it would probably be the ending, which seemed to reduce (though not completely) the complex network of themes woven previously into one of sexual realization. To me, it seems to be about so much more.
This amulet is often joined by another representing the knife used to cut the umbilical cord. Whenever I find it, I make a quick (superstitious!) gesture across my own belly. In this way I have, over and over, severed ties with Mother. p. 52This was my first experience with Ducornet, and I am definitely going to check out more of her books.
January 22, 2016
Meh. I can imagine far too many of her sentences as "quote of the day" on Goodreads...
June 18, 2022
A sort of anti-Süskind, which, though I enjoyed, is something I can fully appreciate and endorse for simple humanist convictions alone. When perfume needn’t be one thing or the other, why not just read both?
January 14, 2011
Yawn. I just didn't care. Very unlikable and unsympathetic characters, especially the parents who were so wrapped up in their own drama that they didn't seem to notice that they had a child. This would have been okay if the narrator herself had been interesting and intriguing, but she was instead mopey and self-involved. In other words, like the average teenager. Average teenagers don't make for good fiction. Her first person narrative moved along at a snail's crawl even though the book was 189 pages.
There were moments where I thought the prose beautiful, hence the two star.
There were moments where I thought the prose beautiful, hence the two star.
July 15, 2013
I...just cannot shake the "already seen" feeling. Yes, a lot of literature is, in fact, retelling of the same old story, but the storyteller has to add something new to intrigue the audience. This book didn't intrigue me in the least. The lone part that stirred my interest - and consequently, one of the few that remain in my memory - was the one about father being "airy", perpetually floating and distant.
I felt this book was not unlike this father - like air. Maybe the idea was to make it like perfume. But perfume is still heavier than air, it lingers and stirs something in people. It leaves a mark, even if it lasts but a few seconds before it vanishes. I am not sure words of this book left even that long an effect on me.
Maybe it's partially because of different perceptions of sexuality. No, I do not mind subtle and unspoken. But here, it's way too ephemeral. Too stylised, if you will. All pretty, cliched metaphors, but nothing that strikes a single chord and makes me remember my own experiences. It's like a painting of what ideal sexual awakening should be like - the kind that is put on pedestal, but no one really experiences. At times, it's so heavily stylised it's borderline insincere and unrealistic. The final act of surrender felt so rushed, almost tacked on. And then things were brought full circle to the few flashes to narrator's "current" love troubles. I think this further development of her character's eros would have been better off left out or expanded. Granted, we have part of maturity presented already via mother, but it is established firmly that they are very different persons, with different sexuality.
This is not to say this is a bad book. As far as prose goes, it's vastly better than those books where I've "already seen" the things that are repeated here. But, unfortunately, just lovely writing is not enough now. If we were going just on pure craft and literary values, this book would be "five stars". But I chose to follow GR system, for better or worse, and intend to stick to it. I just cannot feel any stronger about it than "nice".
I felt this book was not unlike this father - like air. Maybe the idea was to make it like perfume. But perfume is still heavier than air, it lingers and stirs something in people. It leaves a mark, even if it lasts but a few seconds before it vanishes. I am not sure words of this book left even that long an effect on me.
Maybe it's partially because of different perceptions of sexuality. No, I do not mind subtle and unspoken. But here, it's way too ephemeral. Too stylised, if you will. All pretty, cliched metaphors, but nothing that strikes a single chord and makes me remember my own experiences. It's like a painting of what ideal sexual awakening should be like - the kind that is put on pedestal, but no one really experiences. At times, it's so heavily stylised it's borderline insincere and unrealistic. The final act of surrender felt so rushed, almost tacked on. And then things were brought full circle to the few flashes to narrator's "current" love troubles. I think this further development of her character's eros would have been better off left out or expanded. Granted, we have part of maturity presented already via mother, but it is established firmly that they are very different persons, with different sexuality.
This is not to say this is a bad book. As far as prose goes, it's vastly better than those books where I've "already seen" the things that are repeated here. But, unfortunately, just lovely writing is not enough now. If we were going just on pure craft and literary values, this book would be "five stars". But I chose to follow GR system, for better or worse, and intend to stick to it. I just cannot feel any stronger about it than "nice".
April 12, 2008
I read this while bored to tears selling books (or rather, NOT selling books) at a literary festival. It only just kept me awake. Beautifully written, very visual ... and nothing happens. I got about a third of the way in, and said, well let's try further in. Still beautifully written, visually evocative, and nothing happening. The most exciting character in the book (the philandering, oversexed, Icelandic Mother) is completely absent, and the narrator (daughter) spends all her time NOT thinking about the mother. Also, the daughter is raised by a near parody of the aloof professor who lives to play chess blindfolded, while her mother is absent, out on the town cuckolding him with any young body with a big mustache she can find. Yet, she comes across as a 30 year old in a 13 year old's body. Totally sane, detached and eloquent.
It was kind of annoying, really.
But, I met the author, and she was really sweet, with a humorous aura. So, I feel vaguely guilty to be panning her book. It was lovely prose.
It was kind of annoying, really.
But, I met the author, and she was really sweet, with a humorous aura. So, I feel vaguely guilty to be panning her book. It was lovely prose.
May 11, 2014
Rikki Ducornet has a wonderful way of writing, its not something everyone will embrace. There is a dreamy quality to the story telling and the pages drip with fragrance. I felt transported to Egypt. Do not be misled this is not erotica or romance, but it is sensuous and exotic. The protagonist is a grown woman who takes us back to a summer when she was 13 and living in Cairo. Her mother has run off to be be with other men and Lizzi and her father are left to themselves to deal with this most heart breaking situation. This novel appealed to me on an intimate level, it brought back memories of when I was 13 years old and I started seeing my parents for the first time in a different light. Its not a happy story nor can I say its truly sad, but it did leave me with an aching, melancholy feeling forcing me to replay moments in my life that have passed, that I didn't realize at the time how important they were.
August 1, 2021
If Rikki Ducornet's fiction were a variety of fragrances they first would have been dreamt of by a theurgist in ancient Babylon, formulations to be captured from the timeless cosmic consciousness, plucked like a wisp of angel's breath from the metaphysical ether by a former monk and alchemist in Cappadocia, Turkey. From a base extraction of fragrant fecund soil sifted and milled from the most exotic four corners of the world, the aromatic augmented by a distillate of the mournful wail of a solitary Sandhill Crane, burnt cinnamon and myrrh, ceremonial oils reconstituted from the tombs of pharoahs, macerated rose petals, frankincense, jasmine, oakmoss, sandalwood, ambergris from the coast of Madagascar, and colored with a tincture of iridescent blue from the eyespots of Indian peacocks. Such is the sensual, voluptuous, exotic, sui generis quality of her mythology. It is the essence of 'Gazelle.'
July 5, 2012
This reminded me of the Alexandria Quartet for the sensual expat memoir content. It is memories of being thirteen and the tumultuous, vivid, perverse emotional landscape there. A bit heavy on the exotique but quite a nice read. I'm reading commentary on the 1001 Nights and this ties in nicely too.
May 30, 2025
2.5/5
Ahh, Ducornet. How misguided my interest in you has been. Indeed, the fact that I found this copy at a book sale of my artist colony turned wannabe-Cannes says a great deal about the readers whom I used to run with and the women authors they allowed to creep into their 'caucasian' boy's club canon. Ducornet was one of a few names I latched onto as part of my effort to convince myself there was something to staying the gender the world was obsessed with codifying me as, and coming to her after rising above that nonsense certainly has its perks when it comes to maintaining objectivity. For example, I'm not saying that I consciously picked up Orientalism in reaction to reading this, but the conjunction has certainly been stabilizing. For what we have here is a white girl utilizing the entirety of a country known as Egypt, one of the most Orientalized of the Orientalizables, as her magic lantern bildungsroman. Add in an unsexed mother and an amatonormatized father, and in the status quo hands you have a field ripe for every sort of analysis save for the ones that could actually save someone from addiction, abuse, and suicide. Fortunately, Ducornet wriote with an especially luscious turn of phrase, the book knew when to exit stage left, and many works could learn something from the text's treatment of the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl (when it wasn't being embarrassingly WASP colonial, at any rate). So, not the best read in the world, but certainly not the worst, which is good enough for me to close this particular reading chapter in my life for good.
Ahh, Ducornet. How misguided my interest in you has been. Indeed, the fact that I found this copy at a book sale of my artist colony turned wannabe-Cannes says a great deal about the readers whom I used to run with and the women authors they allowed to creep into their 'caucasian' boy's club canon. Ducornet was one of a few names I latched onto as part of my effort to convince myself there was something to staying the gender the world was obsessed with codifying me as, and coming to her after rising above that nonsense certainly has its perks when it comes to maintaining objectivity. For example, I'm not saying that I consciously picked up Orientalism in reaction to reading this, but the conjunction has certainly been stabilizing. For what we have here is a white girl utilizing the entirety of a country known as Egypt, one of the most Orientalized of the Orientalizables, as her magic lantern bildungsroman. Add in an unsexed mother and an amatonormatized father, and in the status quo hands you have a field ripe for every sort of analysis save for the ones that could actually save someone from addiction, abuse, and suicide. Fortunately, Ducornet wriote with an especially luscious turn of phrase, the book knew when to exit stage left, and many works could learn something from the text's treatment of the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl (when it wasn't being embarrassingly WASP colonial, at any rate). So, not the best read in the world, but certainly not the worst, which is good enough for me to close this particular reading chapter in my life for good.
May 2, 2022
loved the prose, hated the orientalist nuances and unshakable already seen this sort of feeling. could be because i’m arab? who knows! the prose was undeniably beautiful nonetheless. i was expecting More however
April 26, 2020
This would be a great book to read in a bath of rose, neroli and sandalwood. It's a quick read, very sensual, a la Maguerite Duras. It's also been compared to Patrick Suskind's /Perfume/ because of it's many descriptions of scents and a perfumerie--but it's not nearly so dark. The narrator, now an anthropologist studying mummies, looks back at her thirteenth year, a year she spent in Egypt with her eccentric father, after her mother left them. The writing is often gorgeous. The voice is believable. The only criticism I have is that Egypt is sometimes sentimentalized and "exoticized"--and yet that's part of its charm too, at least for this Midwestern American. The story itself is neither light nor too sentimental, though there's plenty of life here. Ducornet is a generous author, giving to her readers with both hands. Unfortunately, the last few chapters are somewhat disappointing in terms of language and plot--and I found myself wanting some resolution for the present-day story line.
July 26, 2013
The most delightful book I've read in a long time. Ducornet's language is beautiful as always; every line of this simple, yet multi-layered novel can stand by itself as a poem or a little story. After reading just a paragraph or two, I feel nourished by images, fragrances, glimpses of the Old Time in Egypt and how it continues to affect the present. A vivid portrayal of a young American woman discovering her identity and her desires in mid-20th century Cairo, amid the often-conflicting philosophies of the people around her -- her fragile father, her gloriously sexual mother, the household's Egyptian cooks, artisans, a perfumer, a magician. The novel takes the form of a memoir written by the same young woman grown older, tempered by loss and introspection, and following a unique path informed by the obsessions and mysteries first encountered long ago.
November 30, 2012
I waited to mark this as read until I could rave about everything I loved about this, but after a couple of years it's time to just give it five stars and stop pretending to be "currently reading" it.
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!!!!
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!!!!
September 14, 2025
This was definitely going for a Marguerite Duras vibe, complete with a dash of questionable orientalism. That said, it was sexy and restrained in ways that did set my mind to reeling. People who like perfume and incense would enjoy it.
April 2, 2024
Reading the book I was overcome by the smells of Cairo, both the heavenly and the malodorous. Yes, I said smells. Ducornet's narrator, Elizabeth guides us on a sensory tour of the city. The descriptions of sites, sounds and smells of the city made me want to visit (although things must certainly have changed since the 1950s). I would try to search for the shop of Ramses Ragab, the owner of Kosmétérion, where he and his assistants concoct the most wonderful perfumes imaginable. Would it be too strange to say that the descriptions of those fragrances were palpable to me?
Ducornet's writing is exquisite. Her attention to detail remarkable. And the coming of age story of Elizabeth pulls no punches; we are introduced to a 13-year-old girl caught up in the throes of her sexuality in a way that is raw and real.
Ducornet's writing is exquisite. Her attention to detail remarkable. And the coming of age story of Elizabeth pulls no punches; we are introduced to a 13-year-old girl caught up in the throes of her sexuality in a way that is raw and real.
August 21, 2017
un libro raffinatissimo ed elegante, che sarebbe piaciuto a d'annunzio per le tante bellissime pagine dedicate ai profumi, alle loro magie, alla loro sensualità: rikki ducornet sa scrivere e leggerla è un piacere. e poco importa allora che talvolta i personaggi non siano approfonditi (tutti quei comprimari, da popov a sakkiet, di cui si vorrebbe sapere di più), perché il vero protagonista è l'egitto e il suo fascino, la cui capacità di cambiare le persone (o di renderle eternamente immutabili, come le mummie che segneranno il destino di elizabeth) segnerà per sempre le vite dei protagonisti.
May 17, 2024
Gazelle is a fascinating glimpse of the expatriate world in Cairo in the 1950s. Lizzie, a thirteen year-old American girl, her mother, and her father (an expert on war) have moved there because of the father’s Fulbright scholarship. The mother, a blonde Scandinavian embarks on a series of affairs and moves out of their home after she’s discovered dancing in the nude with a strange man. Her devastated father immerses himself in playing war games with his friend, Ramses Ragab, a gentle perfume maker, while neglecting his daughter. Lizzie fantasizes about becoming Ram’s lover, her first crush on an older man, as she reads A Thousand and One Arabian Nights—the unexpurgated version. She and her father return to the States early, leaving the mother behind, after a betrayal of the worst kind.
This is a lovely, somewhat erotic coming-of-age story steeped in the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of Cairo. The story is told by one narrator in two timelines, the past in the point of view of the teenaged Lizzie and the present in the voice of Lizzie years later when she’s returned to Cairo and works as a surgical anatomist specializing in mummies. The two voices wind around each other seamlessly as the older Lizzie realizes that the events of that summer have altered the trajectory of her life immeasurably, tainting her relationships with the men in her life.
This is a lovely, somewhat erotic coming-of-age story steeped in the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of Cairo. The story is told by one narrator in two timelines, the past in the point of view of the teenaged Lizzie and the present in the voice of Lizzie years later when she’s returned to Cairo and works as a surgical anatomist specializing in mummies. The two voices wind around each other seamlessly as the older Lizzie realizes that the events of that summer have altered the trajectory of her life immeasurably, tainting her relationships with the men in her life.
October 18, 2017
a fascinating and exotic story. not a quick read, but one to savour, very sensual, about the coming of age of an adolescent girl in Egypt. in many ways her parents are both wanderers: father - of the mind; and mother - of the body. perfume, mummies, betrayal. RD is an interesting voice, and new to me. i plan to read more of her work.
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