Lord of Arabia - by 

In Beirut ...

Been a long time since I posted anything there. I'll be back soon. I've been in Lebanon for a few months now, so many things to tell ... But such a crappy internet and not much time !

The Demon Cycle by Peter V. Brett

     I just finished the first two books of the Demon Cycle : The Painted Man and The Desert Spear ... Soon I'll go on with the Daylight War.

     I have a highly mitigated view on these books : they're efficient, the story is well built, but too major aspects prevent me from loving them totally, so let's go with the bad stuff first, and the good afterwards :

-  the writing is not "seamless". You can actually see, sometimes, how carefully built the whole thing is, you can see the stitches, sometimes at the expense of some sentences and situations that don't feel natural, or way too convenient to make the reader forget about the "story skeleton".

-  the peoples : the authors says, for example, that he created the Krasians thinking of Spartha and medieval Japan, and added a bit of midde eastern aspects to it. The thing is, what you see is only a huge orientalistic picture of the middle east or the "orient" in the general old sense (I'd almost say parody, I couldn't believe the tons of clichés piled up). The word "minaret" and "harem" repeated a bit everywhere don't exaclty help either in imagining an invented culture (let alone one from Ancient Greece or Japan !). So for people who know the Middle East a little bit will cringe reading this book, despite the commendable efforts of the author to create credible peoples. After all the same can be said of the Thesans, north-western-like people. Most fantasy readers won't care about those clichés, but in the current world we live in, I don't think we needed additionnal clichés about the middle east, most medias take care of it very well ... I love fantasy precisely because it's usually less stupid than most medias. But if "post 9/11 fantasy" was a subgenre, then that would be it.

Now the good sides :

-   Despite the clichés, the author really tries to show good and bad sides to everyone, and that's good, not to the extent of the blurry mentalities and morals of Game of Thrones, but the intent is there, and that's good. The characters are most typical fantasy characters, no surprises there, but like old friends you appreciate finding them again, throughout the fantasy genre.

-    Lots of ideas are very enjoyable : this warding system to protect oneself against the demons, the differents uses they have, according to where they are used, the old almost lost knowledge of a vanished world of science, the vision of beliefs each character have (from the unbeliever to the fanatic, with all the shades in between : the one who appreciate some verses of a religious books without being religious, etc)... In the end, I reckon it could make a great movie, lots of visuals to work on.

Anyway, I'll wait for the end to really assess if the clichés are just clichés serving an cliché end or if the author will surprise us with a more subtle and interesting ending that what we can expect (the clichés then being just a way to usefully confuse the reader).

Just read books, Dawkins, damn it.

"One could make the case that the Islamic religion is not friendly to science", Richard Dawkins in the Observer (and Guardian Weekly). He might be regarded as a great scientific, but he definitely sucks at history ... It's not hard to take a history book and see that the great scientifics breakthroughs in the middle ages were taking place in the muslim world.
How can he not see that scientific greatness is linked much more to economics than we care to imagine ? It's not a war-torn country that will be able to spare money and brains for science (like Europe in the middle ages, and the middle east today).

Tarmon Gai'don ... At last.

(Note : possible spoilers for those who haven't finished yet the Wheel of Time series).

     Ten years ago I bought a book, The Eye of The World, by Robert Jordan. And even though the writing style didn't strike me as great, the story held my attention, and decided to continue the adventure, to the last book, which was released a few months ago but which I couldn't read before this month. And I just just finished it, book N°14 of The Wheel of Time series (W.O.T).

       Some years ago when the author, Robert Jordan, passed away, I got rather desperate, having read all these books, gotten into the story, and no knowing if there would be an end. Brandon Sanderson was picked to finish them with what the authors had left behind of outlines and drafts. Thank God ... so I re-read the whole stuff and finished five minutes ago. Ten years of adventures, just finished. I feel a bit sad ...

     In the fantasy/science fiction world, these books don't have always good press : too long a story, dragged out and slowed from book 6 to book 10 (more or less), characters a bit too cliché sometimes, a writing style bordering somtimes on the dull, and much more could have been done with the scope of this very rich universe ... but what I think these books suffer the most from is that it's a old-school fantasy adventure. The Good vs Evil is clear and neat, Star Wars style. Now fashion is more to "realistic" fantasy stuff, such as A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) by George R R Martin, where all the characters are not quite good nor quite evil (whichi is a very good development in my opinion), and have the habit of dying quickly, or stupidely, or unexpectedly, like in real life. 

     These two series can't really compare, they're quite opposite for me in the Fantasy literature world, even though in the writing style they could be compared : neither is great, it's only an efficient writing (essential criteria to grip the reader into the story), but there is no poetry, no literary sense or subtelty which we can find in other fantasy novels.

     As for the stories, I must say that somehow, even though I really enjoy reading the Song of Ice and Fire, I prefered the Wheel of Time, for all its old-school-ness and things that could have been done better. It takes me into another world much more efficiently than the George R R Martin's one which only reminds me of the real world, with not much more to it than a little bit of magic and dragons. I love fantasy when it makes me travel, makes me dreams of other things, makes me take a huge step outside reality (if only to better look at it too, from a distance !), when you can be more or less sure that the good guys win* (it makes the one who dies even more dramatic for me, like, in W.O.T, Egwene). And this is why W.O.T is clearly a fantasy book for me, and for that I prefer it to a Song of Ice and Fire, which I would classify almost as a realistic novel (it leaves me much the same impressions and thoughts than when I read a realistic or historical fiction. I love both things, it's just that when I've been presented Song of Ice and Fire as fantasy, I was initially pertubed ... I'm sure I would have better appreciated it from the start if I had been told it was more like a historic-style thing, as I now do).

       Anyway, no use to mix up two books that are so different, it was just to point out what you should expect when reading the W.O.T series, at a time when the Game of Thrones' style is all over the place. Something akin to the Lord of The Rings but not an extension of it, as would the bookcovers quotations make us believe, the writing style is not up to it, and well, the Lord of the Rings has been there before, it clearly set the specifics of the fantasy sub-genre Robert Jordan followed.
       And damn, what great movies W.O.T would make. All these peoples, costumes, and special effects ... Maybe not 14 movies, but at least 10. And not TV series, I would really want to see it on the big screen.
      The only negative remarks I could say about this last novel, A Memory Of Light, is some awkward sentences (maybe edited too quickly ?), and the end of the book : if only there had been a longer epilogue ! After 14 books and 10 years of seeing the characters and the world evolve, you're highly frustrated not to know anything about the "after", for example, if ever Rand reveals himself again to his best friends and his father, or anything like it. Or what has changed in the world, if some of Aviendha's visions would come true or not ... If only glimpes of stories set in the future all packed up as an epilogue. The epilogue, as it is, is way too thin as compared to the massive story to which it puts an end. Maybe this frustration is deliberate, but I can't say I'm happy with it !




* It is why I think fantasy novels are always popular. It's one universe at least that doesn't make you anxious because you get attached to characters that might fail and die quickly, like in real life. There is always one or two dying in the process of the story, but not too many. That the good ones win gives you energy and happiness and hope, as stupid as it might sound, but essential for me, like listening to good music.
(And this is something that George RR Martin is set to change, and which made me almost quit reading his novels - before reagarding them as pseudo-historic, now I can say I really like them and enjoy reading them - , I barely stand having to read a book and keeping an emotional distance from the characters not to be overwhelmed by their sudden deaths ... Or at least the fantasy literature is the one domain where I usually can safely not do that, I keep that capacity for realistic novels).

Books

Lost In Transmission - by Jonathan Harley

     Most interesting book on an australian foreign correspondent experience in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He doesn't get the religious side exaclty right (or rather, he doesn't delve too deeply into it, contenting himself with sometimes unadequate generalities), but the rest is very good, informative but above all, it makes you discover the experience of a journalist who tries to do things the right way in impossible circumstances. It's especially interesting on the personnal level : no one is a hero, and the ones who are die very quickly and those who only appear to be are the worst of the lot.

     Also a good book to be read when you start forgetting, as a sheltered westerner (sheltered from wars and such), what the rest of the world looks like. As he rightly says, we are not the norm, we're just lucky. The last pages on the death of his friends, on this subject, are moving and disturbing.

     And once again, the experience of someone who is "hooked up" by Afghanistan. This terrible and beautiful country seem to have this effect on so many people who ever managed to go there, capturing their minds for ever.

City of Veils - by Zoë Ferraris

      Good thriller, good crime story set in Saudi Arabia. This is the reason, as always, that made me buy the book, since anything on this country interests me, but in the end, the book in itself is really good, as any good thriller I read before. 

      It's the first book from her that I read, and I'm quite happy to have ordered the other two, that seems to take up the same characters in the same place (mainly Jeddah).

      The author obviously knows stuff about the place and the country, even though you might detect, through the characters (what they say of the islamic veil, etc), that the author knows very well the religion as practised in Saudi Arabia in hard-line milieus, but not really, if at all, how it is percieved and practised elsewhere. As if she knew islam only through the lense of hard-core Wahhabism, and so sometimes I would have wished so feel the texture and deepness of the rest of the islamic world, if only the neighbouring countries, and its past ... Since wahhabism is only a recent phenomenon there.
        So the plot is good, the writing is ok, but if you want to learn anything on the religion or the culture, it's not really the book to buy. It still relies too much on the usual clichés, and it doesn't have the deepness you could expect from someone who researched the subject. Though I don't know anything about the author, I would say it's the sort of book written by someone who lived there for a short time but whose experience didn't end well.

       Well, you can't blame an author for giving the western reader what life is like sometimes there and giving into the cliché to grip a usually ignorant western audience, but even in this country there are other forms of living and religious practise and understanding that have yet to be described (after all, like every Gulf country, Saudi Arabia has a lot of migrants from the arab and non-arab world). But then, I haven't read the other books, maybe it gets more "real" in the others ... !

Impossible Man - by Michael Muhammad Knight

      Most interesting autobiography. I don't want to comment much on it as I haven't read what seems to be the follow-up "journey to the end of islam", but I would say that I enjoyed his novels more that his autobiography, thus far. 

     It explains how he got to know so much about islam, but also why he is locked, always, in a patriarchal vision of everything, despite islamic feminism or any other phenomenon producing other discourse. I would have thought that with everything he had studied, he would have at least seen the huge roles of women both in history and nowadays in the middle east, but he seems to see islam only through a patriarchal lense, to mix up the cultures where it is practised with the religion that is practised (well, most of people do, but still, it's not an excuse). Maybe because he was confronted since the start to a near "hardcore" version of the religion. (We can understand this it to an extent ... These are times where, in any country and any culture, you only hear about the hardcore part of politics and ideologies, the "quiet majority" keeps to itself, hidden).

       Anyway, more than the religion, it's a story of a quest for absolutism, what any and every teenager is after, a quest that fails since life doesn't give much into absolutism of any sort ... He was looking for perfection and found a religion practised by most imperfect humans, like any religion or anything else. He expected religion to stand the test of science, and there too many people, in my opinion, fail to get that science has nothing to do with religion. One explains the rational part of the human being, the other tackles the irrationnal one. And the danger begins when you want to wipe off one of these two ...

      Anyway, I've been a bit carried away. Back to the book : the real hero is his mother, and the book's key sentence is something his insane father told him "Woman is the  nigger of the world". (Something that is only true if you keep seeing the world, like the author, as a classic-style patriarchy. Because my experience of so-called patriarchal societies shows something much more complex ...)

"Le voyageur sans orient" de Salam al-Kindy

(FRA)

« Le voyageur sans orient : Poésie et philosophie des Arabes de l’ère préislamique» de Salam al-Kindy

     Voilà un très beau livre, plein de réflexions qui donnent à réfléchir et à revoir la culture arabo-musulmanne classique d’un oeil neuf. L’auteur maîtrise tellement son sujet, la pensée philosophique occidentale et la littérature des deux mondes arabe et européen qu’on se sent un peu bête parfois, et quelques passages son quelque peu difficile, mais si on prend le temps de le lire, et de le relire, c’est fascinant.

     Il nous explique l’essence de la poésie pré-islamique, pourquoi tant de spécialistes l’ont mal comprise, et ce en quoi elle diffère de la poésie post-coranique, même si de forme les similitudes sont grandes. Et de là, la différence radicale entre la vision du monde jâhilite (pré-islamique) et la vision du monde après l’apparition de l’islam :

«On présente parfois la Jâhiliyya et sa poésie comme ayant ‘‘préparé»» l’ère coranique ; il serait plus exact d’écrire que le Coran a bâti une réponse terme à terme à la vision du monde de la Jâhiliyya et à son élaboration conceptuelle»

p.161

     Et je dirais même qu’il est peut-être essentiel, à qui «l’esprit» de l’islam lui échappe, de comprendre d’abord l’esprit et la vision du monde de la Jâhiliyya. La réponse monothéiste apparue ensuite prend tout son sens. Dans le monde jâhilite ultra-pessimiste, étrangement  très moderne pour nous occidentaux du 21ème siècle, vient une réponse optimiste avec la promesse de l’au-delà, et l’affirmation d’une existence divine qui donne un sens là où les poètes erraient «sans orient», subissant les pertes du temps, sans retour possible aux joies passées ...

     Il ne faut pas y voir une hiérarchisation, façon «quelle vision du monde est la meilleure ?», mais simplement ce va et vient entre les deux opposés, et comme les concepts de l’un sont repris par l’autre (voir le dernier chapitre qui parle du soufisme) pour aller encore plus loin ... et qui forme finalement la base de la culture arabo-musulmanne.

Bref, même si la poésie n’est pas notre tasse de thé, ce livre vaut vraiment le coup d’être lu (et relu).

(ENG)

«The traveller without orient, poetry and philosophy of the pre-islamic Arabs» by Salam al-Kindy

         Excellent book, in french, but I highly doubt it's been translated into english ... A shame really.

      It is essential in my opinion for who wants to understand the spirit of arabo-islamic cutlure, and in what world the islamic religion appeared. It unearth this often over-looked and almost always badly apprehended poetry that is the «jâhiliyya» poetry (pre-islamic), and the world view it shows. A world view that is strangely very modern and very «pessimistic», to which comes the Quran, bringing an «optimistic» view with the afterlife and the affirmation of the existence of God. Not that one is better than the other, but you suddenly understand what this is all about, and on what opposites is based the whole arabo-islamic culture. And how this post-quranic culture took and used some pre-islamic concepts and made them into something both similar and different, on another level.

       The author master both litteratures and philosophies, western and arabic, so the book sweeps through philosophy and poetry, and also mystical concepts, and all becomes clear and coherent, which is very rare, when the subject is both so precise and obscure (pre-islamic poetry) and large (world views).

    Anyway, despite some difficult paragraphs (especially for those who are not used to philosophical prose), this is worth reading, and re-reading.

"المسافر بدون اتجاه : شعر وفلسلفة عرب الجاهلية" 

لسلام الكندي  ـ لا أعرف إذا ترجمتي صحيحة ...الكلمة "اتجاه" بالفرنسية هنا هي نفس الكلمة من "شرق"

 كتاب مكتوب بالفرنسية على يد مثقف عربي من سلطانة عمان, عن الشعر الجاهلية والرؤية وراءها, رؤية العرب أناذاك عن العالم والحياة وهذا الكتاب كان مهم جدًا بالنسبة اليّ ففهمت الكثير وفي أي عالم ظهر الاسلام وما هو من أجوبة في عالم رؤيته متشائمة بالمعنى الفلسفي فالقرآن يحمل رؤية متفائلة ... صعب جدًا أن تختصر مثل هذا الكتاب الذي  يستوعب الشعر وفلسلفة وحتى التصوّف  ... ولكنه مهم جدا جدا بالنسبة لأي شخص مثلي الذي\التي يريد أن يفهم عما أُسّس الثقافة  العربية القديمة , وبشكل ما المعاصرة أيضًا 

نكتشف أن الرؤية "الجاهلية" هي متشابه جدًا من رؤية يمكن أن نجدها في فرنسا والغرب ـ لا أتكلم عن سلبية الأمر أم اجابيته فقط أجد التشاؤم الجاهلي قريبًا من تشاؤم نعرفه في فرنسا وأن في النهاية الشعر الجاهلي قريبًا منا وليس شيئًا قديمًا بعيدًا..