EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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Out of desperation, Frances becomes friends of sorts with the Pakistani woman across the hall and the Arab woman living upstairs, each of whom explains her dismaying rationalization for the role of women in this puritanical society. The flat directly above Frances and Andrew is supposedly empty, but Frances hears sounds of life there. She is then told that in fact the flat is used by a junior member of the royal family for illicit trysts, but she comes to suspect that is simply a tale put out to satisfy a foreigner's curiosity. with a charitable trust. ''Reared in the service of the great god Self-Control,'' Ralph and Anna have schooled their children in the virtues of self-sacrifice and built their family life around the comforting notion Like everything else in these accomplished novels, the question makes one think. Some readers may find themselves re-examining their own ideas about the artist's right or obligation to render politically uncomfortable truths. Others may elect not Mantel paints the varied expat communities (and the ugly corporations that do business there) very well, her opprobrium doled out equally to natives and foreigners alike.

Mantel carefully builds up the story, horror replacing the stifling boredom of the place as she progresses. That's fine," she said, "but just try to ensure that what we're given doesn't include Pollard. Do you think they'll all be like him?" street full of new faces. It was true that you could go as far as Johannesburg now without steeling yourself for the journey over dirt roads; it ought to have been an advantage, but in fact it made life too easy. They were a direct connection Andrew bit his lip. "He said, `I have witnessed the biggest transportation of ready-mixed concrete in the history of the human race.'" When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. It's all in her imagination, she's told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate.So perhaps, too, he should have wished her into suggesting Saudi Arabia; then she would have known it was her own decision. But from what he had heard it was a part of the world in which women's decisions did not operate. He made a leap of faith: it will be all right, I know it will. "Frances," he said, "we won't go unless you want to."

Mantel writes with a jaunty, wry panache and a scientific precision that can capture a character or a mood and offer it up, impaled and squirming, like a bug on a pin. A group of Saudi men, white robes flapping in the desert wind, resembles ''a scene. When the Jidda earthquake comes -- and it will come -- all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.''

Bowles and Rachel Ingalls, among others) that these misfortunes are at least in part the projections of the European traveler's deepest, ingrained desires or fears. In Mantel's novels, however, the malevolence is all too real Well, it can't be such a grand life, because he's just signed up with Turadup himself. He's going to manage their Jeddah business; he's had experience out there, of course."

three nights in succession, he had sat by himself, seemingly disconsolate, on a corner stool in the bar of an expatriate club, not even looking her way, but concentrating hard; until she had asked him to go home with her. She had fed her Eight Months on Ghazzah Street centers on the Shores -- Andrew, an engineer who came for the money to be made there, and his wife, Frances, who joins him. The novel moves slowly at first as Frances struggles to adjusts to her situation: she vacillates between acceptance as a survival strategy and refusal to submit. Andrew is the only one she can be honest with, and he is preoccupied by looming financial trouble as the oil price falls. For him, it’s not just about the money he can make in Saudi Arabia: he’s fallen in love with the architecture of the building he’s contracted to construct. Opportunities like this are rare, and he wants to see it built… Originally published in 1989 in the U.K., Mantel's slim, intense novel displays the author's formidable gift for illuminating the darker side of the human heart, offering metaphoric and literal Continue reading »She thought of that cheese, that people say French taxi drivers won't let in their cabs. "What, really not?" Pollard did say—" He looked at her in slight anxiety. "He said that his only reservation was how you'd settle in. As you've been a working woman." Half an hour later she is inside the terminal building. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405. They live on Ghazzah Street -- "which got its name quite recently when street names came into vogue".

A heady spice of significance cleverly spiced with an aura of lurking menace.” — The New York Times Book Review No, not really," she said. "I think I was just there for too long. I liked it, in a way. At least, I'm glad I went there. I wouldn't have missed it." I must like it, she thought. I shall try to like it. When everyone is so negative about a place you begin to suspect it must have some virtues after all. "No alcohol!" people say, as if you'd die without it. "And women aren't allowed to drive? That's terrible." There are lots of things more terrible, she thought, and even I have seen some of them. She dozed.You poor things, that's all I can say. And you were in Zambia too? I've been to Lusaka, done a couple of stopovers. They're thieves in Lusaka. They'll take the wheels off your hire-car as soon as look at you. This friend of mine went into a pharmacy for a drop of penicillin, he was planning, you know, on being a bit naughty that night, and he believed in dosing himself first; and he came out, and no bloody wheels."