Granskningar och kommentarer

Published in English as "Cinnamon"

A modern-day Lolita? Well, it's in the ballpark, thematically at least. A young woman forced into a loveless marriage by her family, and a young girl forced by her father (who's already murdered her sister) to take a job as her handmaiden or try to survive on the streets, find love with each other instead. That's a happy ending, right?

Except the girl is 11 when they first meet. And not a virgin, and not by her own choice. And her mistress has had experiences in the past she didn't have much of a say in either, and is desperate to have someone. And so while there is genuine love and affection between them, there's hardly a single truly consensual relationship in the entire book. The question is if there can be when the people involved hold absolute power over their partners, and when society condones and even encourages it. Suffice to say, it doesn't end where it begins.

The old chestnut "all sex is rape" gets brought up now and again, mostly by people who want to prove how wacky feminists are. Not saying its necessarily true, but as Cinnamon highlights, there is an issue with how relationships work in a society where people are fundamentally inequal, whether based on gender, class, age, or plain muscle strength. Yazbek paints a vivid, and very frank, picture of Syrian society as seen from the bedroom or back alley that serves as such; of how the fetishization of women's bodies is used as an argument against them, how it's internalized by themselves, how the "power" they wield by being desired by men (or women) is brittle at best (and no match for those who simply decide to take it)...

At the same time, I find myself wishing the novel would be about something more. The relationship between Hanan and Alya remains oddly by-the-way, and Yazbek is a little too fond of flowery melodrama that milks a few central images a little more than they're worth. But an intriguing book, nonetheless.

"Time isn't circular," she said to Dr Kellet. "It's like a... palimpsest."
"Oh dear," he said. "That sounds very vexing."

It starts with the protagonist dying as she's born in 1910; then it continues with her surviving only to drown at 4 years old; then it continues with her surviving that and dying of the Spanish flu in 1918; and so on and so on until she starts to become vaguely aware that she's repeating and starts trying to change it. At once a brilliant historical novel that gets to examine lots of different angles by starting over every few chapters (and loaded to the rafters with Austen references), and a clever story of saving yourself by understanding your own narrative. (Yes, Atkinson is a Buffy fan.) I used to be a big Atkinson reader, but she kind of lost me with the Jackson Brodie novels - they weren't bad, but cosy English detective stories bore me. Cosy English time travel-ish stories, though? Sign me up!