Abdul > Recent Status Updates

4/5 stars.

I was enjoying the book until Tita went inside Gertrudis' room. At that point, I was rooting for Mama Elena's ghost. I grew to dislike Gertrudis.

"Tita wondered whether the fact that there was not a single chile left on the platters was a sign that good manners had been forgotten or that the chiles were indeed splendid." Tita never realized it's not about the appearance of greed but its manifestation.

Chapter 7

"During the funeral Tita really wept for her mother. Not for the castrating mother who had repressed Tita her entire life, but for the person who had lived a frustrated love. And she swore in front of Mama Elena's tomb that come what may, she would never renounce love."

"...Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn't find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted."

3/3

"...In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it."

2/3

Chapter 6

"As you see, within our bodies each of us has the elements needed to produce phosphorus. And let me tell you something I've never told a soul. My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help..."

1/3

"...[The] weeping was just the first symptom of a strange intoxication-an acute attack of pain and frustration-that seized the guests and scattered them across the patio and the grounds and in the bathrooms, all of them wailing over lost love. Everyone there, every last person, fell under this spell. Only one person escaped: the cake had no effect on Tita. The minute she finished eating it, she left the party."

2/2

Chapter 2

"The moment they took their first bite of the cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing. Even Pedro, usually so proper, was having trouble holding back his tears. Mama Elena, who hadn't shed a single tear over her husband's death, was sobbing silently..."

1/2

This book smothered with a pillow all the others I read this year, those poor Desdemonas, no matter how faithful they were to my expectations.

This is quickly becoming my best read for 2022. A high summit, considering I've read books by Nabokov, Saunders, Carver, and Pamuk this year. Even more so since the copy I'm reading from has missing commas and other typos.

"I am no Othello. Othello was a lie."

"He'd said we could not be reformed, that if we were to survive our only alternative was to submit immediately, and after this we would not be able to do anything for centuries but imitate those to whom we had surrendered."

"...yes, He had indeed wanted, very much, to save us. This did not mean there was no evil in Him. All genius was like that!"

2/2 "...my love for Him resembled the way I had become used to the futile insect-like movements of my hands and arms, the way I understood the thoughts which every day echoed against the walls of my mind and died away, the way I recognized the unique smell of sweat from my wretched body, my thinning hair, ugly mouth, the pink hand holding my pen..."

1/2 "I loved Him, I loved Him the way I loved that helpless, wretched ghost of my own self I saw in my dreams, as if choking on the shame, rage, sinfulness, and melancholy of that ghost, as if overcome with shame at the sight of a wild animal dying in pain, or enraged by the selfishness of a spoilt son of my own. And perhaps most of all I loved Him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself..."

2/2 "...that this would make me unhappy for the rest of my days; I knew then that I would never be able to live alone: it was as if in the dead of night, along with my story, the shadow of an alluring phantom had fallen across the room, arousing our curiosity while it put us both on guard."

1/2 "And I, I was thinking of my own life, of Him, of how I loved the story I'd created; and I felt pride in everything I had lived and dreamed of: the room we were sitting in overflowed with the sad memories of all that both of us had once wanted to be and what we had become; it was then I understood clearly for the first time that I would never again be able to forget Him..."

"Don't they have any corner inside their heads for storing knowledge?" he said, and looked around as if searching for the right word. "They should have a compartment inside their heads, some compartment like the drawers of this cabinet, a spot where they can put various things, but it's as if there were no such place. Do you understand?"

"...even whips could not make the slaves obey once they had been roused by the passion for freedom."

"...the fools here cared as little for the stars as the stars do for the fools."

2/2

"...I desperately wanted to engrave the entire volume on my memory so that when they did come, I would not think of them and what they would make me suffer, but would remember the colours of my past as if recalling the cherished words of a book I had memorized with pleasure."

1/2

"...I knew that at any moment the book would be snatched from my hand, yet I wanted to think not of that but of what was written on its pages. It was as if the thoughts, the sentences, the equations in the book contained the whole of my past life which I dreaded to lose; while I read random phrases under my breath, as though reciting a prayer..."

A question gnawed at me: why did Gurnah avoid writing about the massacre of the Omanis in Zanzibar, when the characters were in the thick of that political turmoil when it happened? Was it ethical restraint? Was it to reinforce unspeakable memory?

I'm interested if he tackles head on the subject of Arab/Omani share of the blame for the slave trade in other books, considering he shows the African's share in Paradise.

"I have taught myself not to speak of the years which followed, although I have forgotten little of them. The years were written in the language of the body, and it is not a language I can speak with words. Sometimes I see photographs of people in distress, and the image of their misery and pain echoes in my body and makes me ache with them. And the same image teaches me to suppress the memory of my oppression..."

"Sometimes I had a fancy that it was he who had been in prison and not me, for despite appearances I was resolute inside to avoid further indignities if I could, to live the wasted life that was my lot with what composure I could manage, as a mute recognition of what little bits of decency had come my way."

"[They] were no more Omani than I was, except that they had an ancestor who was born there. They did not even look any different from the rest of us, perhaps slightly paler or slightly darker, perhaps their hair was slightly straighter of slightly curlier. Their crime was the ignoble history of Oman in these parts, and that was not a connection they were allowed to give up. In other respects they were indigenes..."

"There was nothing gay in what they did or sought to do. They coveted his grace and his effortless, supple beauty, and muttered to him as he strolled by, offering him money and gifts and transparent predatory smiles... They never left him alone, the looks, the comments, the casual touch, all were suggestive, something between a cruel game and a calculated stalking exercise."

2/2

"...even the most skinless civilised European, but I had not expected to see so much black black black on a page like that... It made me feel hated, suddenly weak with a kind of terror at such associations. This is the house I live in, I thought, a language which barks and scorns at me behind every third corner."

1/2

A black immigrant poetry teacher checks the dictionary: "So I looked up black, and quailed: blackhearted, blackbrowed, blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, Black Maria, black market, black sheep. Entry after entry like that, so that by the time I finished reading through them all I felt despicable and disheartened, smeared by the torrent of vituperation. Of course I knew about the construction of black as other..."

"'...If it was not they who made me into the useless coward you see here, then who did? Perhaps I just have the nature for it, or it is the way we live... our custom. But her, they broke her heart. What else is there to hold above that? If you don't want me to call it honour, then call it anything else you like.'"

2/2

"...and images of his abandonment came to him in a spate. They all condemned him for self-neglect. Events had ordered his days and he had held his head above the rubble and kept his eyes on the nearer horizon, choosing ignorance rather than futile knowledge of what lay ahead. There was nothing he could think of to do which would unshackle him from the bondage to the life he lived."

1/2

"Yusuf felt the reel of his life running through his hand, and he let the reel run without resistance... [He] sat silently with himself, numbed by guilt that he had been unable to keep the memory of his parents fresh in his life. He wondered if his parents still thought of him, if they still lived, and he knew that he would rather not find out. He could not resist other memories in this state..."

"'I'm afraid, you're right... though not only of [these Europeans]. We'll lose everything, including the way we live... And these young people will lose even more. One day they'll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.'"

"Grief, my friend, lurks even in gilded palaces, and you can't escape from it anywhere."

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"...our hero tried to address Olsufy Ivanovich with a touching outpouring of his soul; but in the fullness of all that had accumulated within him he could not explain anything whatsoever, and, with a very eloquent gesture, merely pointed in silence to his heart..."