Status Updates From A Land Like You (The Africa...

screaming and crying and throwing up

Nino 🥹

one thing Nathan does masterfully is bring together the greater history and the small occurences of everyday life not in contrast to each other but as things that go hand in hand.

We're now in 1932,Zohar is a grown child. What strikes me as interesting is him falling in love with Masreya and the taboos associated as they drank the same woman's milk as infants,how their relationship read through today's standards is not so shocking at all but to their family it's worse than if they were related by blood. An interesting look into taboo and immorality and how their details change with time.

This chapter we're introduced to Oum Jinane, 25, singer to the prostitutes and their clients, daughter of a village imam, who performs pretending to be a boy. Needless to say İ'm obsessed with her

we got introduced to more characters, establising their lores, all the more fascinating. the way this book is written is reminding me of Najib Mahfuz books

kinda obsessed with rabbi mourad & how the women are always like let's ask the rabbi he knows best and then he says something they don't like and they're like well what does he know. also the more Esther becomes a fully formed character the more İ can see her played by Sophia Loren

interesting how the intersection of magic and psychology seems to be a recurring theme in books İ've read lately,İ just finished Baru Cormorant where magic was mainly powerful through its position as a societal force,ppl believing in it. and now here we have a novel by Tobie Nathan,versed in ethnopsychiatry, drawing parallels to history, anthropology, looking at a society from a different angle with a similiar frame.

20 pages in İ'm like oooh Lévi-Strauss, Le sorcier et sa magie

it's like I wander around in the realm of books and come book to this genre, this world that feels familiar and comfortable