A Turkish author who writes in his native language, Orhan Pamuk is the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been compared to Borges, Nabokov and DeLillo. His best-known (best-selling) novel is reminiscent of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and his peregrinations through Istanbul are more extensive and detail-centered than those of 1998 Nobel Laureate José Saramago around Lisbon.

Pamuk’s politics have not endeared him to the Turkish government. He was charged with insulting ‘Turkishness’ — a crime in Turkey — for publicly speaking about the 1915–1917 killings and deportations of minorities in Turkey, saying “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” Although some believe his vocal criticism compromised Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union, the charges were dropped in 2006.

Pamuk’s novels have been translated into forty languages. My Name is Red (1998) won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003. Snow (2002) won the 2005 Prix Médicis étrangers, a French award granted to foreign books. The Independent listed Pamuk as one of six literary heroes of 2005 and the German Book Trade awarded him the Peace Prize in the same year.

His novels have been described as intelligent, well researched, erudite and elegant. His aim is to bridge the divide between East and West. The difference between the two cultures has caused him pain: The world Pamuk inhabits is not a happy one. It is steeped in backwardness, and the struggle between secular and religious thought is tearing at the fabric of his country. Poverty is endemic, the weather harsh. Pamuk’s stories are immersed in gloom; all his heroes suffer from acute anxiety, a sense of doom and a general feeling of inadequacy and quiet despair.

His work belongs to two distinctive genres: The first, that of historical fiction, includes The White Castle (1985) and My Name is Red. The second — including Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), The Black Book (1990), Snow and The New Life (1995) — makes a central subject of his beloved Istanbul and occasionally the small villages of Turkey with their ordinary citizens.

As Pamuk’s tales unfold, it becomes clear that the distinction between the two genres is slightly blurred, as the historical settings only act as frameworks, often forgotten or neglected in favor of his favorite recurring themes.

Murad Sezer With his books available in forty languges, Pamuk has brought Turkey to the world.

Istanbul is one such theme: the city then and now, its stray dogs, harsh winters, the fires that destroyed its palaces and neighborhoods periodically in the past, the destitution of so many of its residents. Beyond the city, Pamuk’s work also addresses the wretchedness of the human condition in general, the brutality of men, the complexity of Turkish women, interminable snowfall and its effects on the Turkish mood, the deep sorrow permeating the landscape and the population, and radical Islam — a commonly chosen refuge of the poor which is rejected and combated by the government, the rich and powerful.

His entire work is infused with the ever-present dichotomy of East versus West, “their” ways against “ours,” modernity at odds with Islamic fundamentalism.

Pamuk’s style is often experimental, featuring long meandering sentences, flashbacks and protracted monologues. His descriptions of settings, mood, climate and some peripheral details take precedence over the action, which is extremely slow to unfold — sometimes resulting, alas, in readers’ fatigue. (This aspect of his writing may be a result of translation. Pamuk’s method of expression may be best suited to the Turkish in which he writes.)

The majority of his books have one or several protagonists, albeit not necessarily the heroes, as narrators. His plots are kept deceptively simple, allowing a multitude of literary effects to develop freely.

The White Castle works as a perfect example of Pamuk’s style. He writes in the introduction, giving a hint about his technique, “[T]he ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation.”

In this novel, a young seventeenth-century Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and sold as a slave in Constantinople. He becomes the property of Hoja, a Turkish scholar whom the Italian imagines to be his exact double. It is never made totally clear, but it seems that Hoja is also, at least part of the time, conscious of this uncanny resemblance.

The body of the novel recounts the exchange of ideas, knowledge and language skills between the slave (from the West) and the master (from the East), highlighted by Hoja’s raging desire to penetrate the European mind. Their relationship is set against a background often fraught with danger since both their lives depend on the caprices of the Sultan and his courtiers.

Customs at court, life of poor Turks, questions of human nature (Is it pre-ordained? Can it be reformed?) and childhood memories occupy the protagonists and sometimes stoke the fires of their apparent antagonism. Ambition, loyalty and resignation are examined at length.

Over the course of the novel, the characters’ respective status changes imperceptibly and they eventually come to the realization that they are no longer master and slave, that they have become equal and interchangeable. By the climax, the conclusion comes as no great surprise and the end flows gently as the two men, appeased, slip into each other’s remaining years.

Pamuk’s most erudite work, My Name is Red, is centered (on the surface) on Eastern versus Western artistic practices. But as Pamuk explained on accepting the Nobel Prize, “[W]hen I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorizing each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life.”

The narrative unfurls in Istanbul in the late 1590s among the community of miniaturists. The Sultan has commissioned a secret book to celebrate his reign. He wants it illuminated in the “European way” by the best artists of the time. The problem rises from the fact that his preferred method is against the artists’ tradition — and, more importantly, against the tenets of Islam.

To circumvent the difficulty, the Sultan entrusts one person to supervise the artists, none of whom will know for whom they are working or what the whole project will be like. Each artist will concentrate on one small part of the oeuvre, which will be eventually collated by the supervisor.

The book opens with a chapter entitled ‘I Am a Corpse’ in which one of the miniaturists is brutally killed and thrown down a well. The victim describes his own murder, while the murderer remains unknown. Who has killed the miniaturist and why? Had the artist discovered something about the book, endangering the project? Was it a crime of passion and jealousy involving the beautiful and unattainable Sekure?

The dead man’s colleagues and the murderer speak in their own voices, expounding on the mysterious murder, their lives, their work, their traditions, their idiosyncrasies, their guesses about the purpose of their present work and their own conception of what their art should be.

Pamuk’s favorite themes are also present in My Name is Red: unrequited love, jealousy, poverty, stray dogs — preferably black — rain and snow and of course the city of Istanbul, all have a share in the action. The story features a number of Pamuk’s favorite archetypes as well: the inaccessible beauty (Sekure), the bashful lover (Black), the jealous rival (Hasan), the ex love (Sekure’s husband who has disappeared in the war), the cunning old man (Enishte — is Black’s maternal uncle and Sekure’s father), Sekure’s two sons from her absent husband (one of whom, Orhan, is reminiscent of the author as a child).

This weighty novel (Pamuk’s longest) is a tour de force in scholarship that will certainly fascinate any student of the period. The lay reader might lose interest in the action half way through, however, with his attention sometimes drifting, snowed under by the sheer extent of the information the author straps in.

Probably the most arcane of Pamuk’s novels, The New Life has a visionary dimension and dreamlike qualities.

It is also politically charged. “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed,” announces the hero, who is soon after thrown into a world filled with strange conspiracies, hermetic texts, bomb making and long bus and train journeys across Turkey in search of a new life.

“In the light that surged from the book into my face, I was terrified to see shabby rooms, frenetic buses, bedraggled people, faint letters, lost towns, lost lives, phantoms. A journey was involved. It was always about a journey,” Pamuk writes. And later, “So we embarked on the road, traveling from town to town, touching life’s appearances, looking for what is hidden under its colors, searching for reality but not finding it.”

In this novel there is a new love — the hero falls for the elusive and heavenly attractive Janan, a rival suitor (Mehmet), the attempted assassination (perhaps imagined) of Mehmet, the pain of loss, separation and exclusion, a ‘great conspiracy’ from the West, the scary and mysterious Dr. Fine, uninviting Turkish landscapes, small cafés, stray dogs, poor and aimless people and rain and snow in all their metamorphosing states.

Together with Janan, the hero visits cities and villages, stops to contemplate hovels and burned-down houses, observes fields covered with snow, and even spots a sign under a tree advertising “Circumcision performed the good old way, not by laser.”

Here again Pamuk creates an anti-Westernization protagonist, Dr. Fine, to express the fears of Turkish fundamentalists. “He [Mehmet] brought up the subject of Dr. Fine,” says Janan, “touching on his struggle against the book, against foreign cultures that annihilate us, against the newfangled stuff that comes from the West, and his all-out battle against printed matter.”

“After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been in its 2000-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy, or (like most Istanbullus) making it my own” reads Istanbul, Memories of a City — which is Pamuk at his most riveting.

“The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy,” wrote the poet Ahmed Rassem, and Pamuk is in agreement.

Istanbul is the story of Orhan as a little boy growing up in Istanbul, inhabiting the “Pamuk Apartments” — a turn-of-the century once-impressive building where his extended family shares the various apartments.

Having grown up and become an important writer, Pamuk revisits the street, the building, and his old apartment and brings to life the members of his family (who are amply photographed in the pages of the book), the shopkeepers on his street, his school friends, and his parents’ old acquaintances. More than a personal memoir, he wants Istanbul to be the chronicle of a typical well-to-do Turkish family living in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century.

Khaled Habib

Every event of Pamuk’s young life is rooted in a spot of Istanbul: here he cried, there he was happy, here he dreamed a crazy dream and there he saw a black dog wagging its tail.

Istanbul would not be the fabulous, stirring city that it is for Pamuk without its people, its writers, its poets, its journalists, its beautiful women, even its murderers. In the company of the author, the readers explore vistas, large streets, and little alleys. They are introduced to Istanbul’s architecture, to its often-derelict mosques and monuments.

Pamuk claims that he has embraced (or was contaminated by) Istanbul’s endemic melancholy. He seems, however, so attached to his city that even during short trips abroad he says that he sorely misses its unique atmosphere.

More than anything else Snow and The Black Book confirm Pamuk’s gifts as a twenty-first century, politically engaged, original writer.

Khaled Habib

Here again we find heroes desperately in love with women they will lose (Ka and Ipek in Snow; Galip and Rüya in The Black Book), snow and more snow, bus rides and the streets and neighborhoods of Istanbul. “‘The silence of snow,’ thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called what he felt inside him ‘the silence of snow’” reads Snow. The same element, but a different sentiment, is given in The Black Book: “When after his sleepless night, Galip stepped out into the street to find the usual monotonous grays of Niantai brightened by a strange white light, he saw that it had snowed more than he’d thought.”

In The Black Book the mysterious disappearance of the beautiful Rüya leads her husband, lawyer Galip, to search for her across Istanbul. He goes to the streets and neighborhoods they visited together, to the places where she had gone with her first husband Cëlal, an influential columnist, but he too has vanished. The disappearances may be politically motivated, but can Galip be sure? As he pursues his investigation, Galip finds himself assuming the personality of the older Cëlal, living in his apartment, dressing in his clothes, and writing his columns, revisiting a theme Pamuk experimented with in The White Castle.

The Black Book’s general climate is dismal. The characters are weighed down by their own sadness, and Galip’s loss seems to permeate the whole city.

In Snow, where all of Pamuk’s props are more than ever present, he addresses the problem of Islamic fundamentalism in particular. As the snow, which will soon close the city of Kars, begins to fall, a young poet and journalist named Ka arrives by bus to investigate an epidemic of suicides among the veiled girls of the city.

The government wants to keep the occurrence hushed, but Ka is determined to understand the motives of the veiled girls: Is it because the government has barred veiling from the schools? Are they starting a protest movement?

Kim Piper

The director of the Education Institute, who has obeyed the state’s orders and closed the doors of the institute to veiled girls, is murdered by an Islamist student in front of Ka. Prior to the assassination, the murderer and his victim have a conversation in which the younger man demands to know if the law of a secular state takes precedence over the word of God. The question is left unanswered, however the point of view of both sides is made clear.

Reality, however, is not so simple: secular families have fundamentalists among their members, and Islamists have secular relatives. The country may be divided on this vital question, but the lines are so blurred that, try as he may, Ka will not solve the problems of Kars.

Unlike his conflicted heroes, Pamuk has finally bridged the gap between East and West with grace. He has fully accepted his Turkishness while remaining aware of his country’s political, social, economical and religious problems. He has explored Western thought, and is now standing at the crossroads, a beacon to a new generation of Turks who might be able to hang onto their traditions while opening up to fully accept ‘the other.’

And the Award Goes To

Getting a book published isn’t easy. Most authors must spend years working on books with no guarantee of ever seeing compensation. Once finished, writers must audition for a literary agent who tries to push the manuscripts through the doors to the desks of publishers who may or may not look at them. I’ve known writers who are thrilled to receive a hand-written rejection letter from a publisher (“At least it wasn’t a form letter”).

Statistically speaking, a finished book — even a relatively good one — will never get published. For the most hopeful novelists, winning a literary award doesn’t even enter the realm of possibility; getting published during their lifetime would be the reward.

Take prolific Author John Kennedy Toole, whose abject failure publishing his book, A Confederacy of Dunces, which he considered his masterpiece, prompted the young writer to take his own life. Eleven years later, through the relentless campaigning of Toole’s mother, the book was published and went on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

For the lucky published few, a book award can launch you from the status of “published” to literary superstar. Most of those authors whose names are recognizable to us — even if we may never have read their work — can attribute much of their prestige (not to mention net worth) to some sort of award. But what separates the Pulitzers from the Man Bookers or the Nobels?

Modern and smart, Booker winners are rarely a disappointment and are never inaccessible or lofty. With past winners including Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri, J M Coetzee and Ian McEwan, a Booker sticker on a book jacket essentially guarantees a good read.

This year’s Man Booker Prize went to Kiran Desai, prodigal daughter of author Anita Desai for her book, The Inheritance of Loss. The book is set in the Himalayas and focuses on an aging, disillusioned judge who wants to be left to retire in peace, but is unhinged by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter and the son of his cook.

Desai told the BBC that winning the award felt “like a family endeavor,” as her mother Anita has been short-listed three times for the award, but has never won. At 35, Desai is the youngest female winner of the prize. The Inheritance of Loss is her second book.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is given yearly to an American fiction writer. The 2006 award went to an author who spent quite a bit of time as a journalist in the Middle East, based in Cairo. Geraldine Brooks wrote Nine Parts of Desire, a book of non-fiction, which tells the stories of women around the Middle East and Foreign Correspondence detailing her experiences searching for her childhood pen pals around the world.

A versatile writer, Brooks has since switched her focus from journalism to historically based fiction. She was awarded the Pulitzer for her novel March, which is set in the Civil War-era United States. March is about an army chaplain, whose character is based on the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. After leaving his family to do what he feels will be the right thing, fighting the good fight against the Confederacy, the idealistic character March becomes severely shaken and the moral dilemmas he faces begin to affect his ideals and his marriage.

As awards go, you could hardly hope to be given anything to put on your mantel that carries more prestige than a Nobel Prize. Named after the esteemed Swedish intellectual Alfred Nobel, recipients of the celebrated award have made a significant contribution to society through their work.

The Nobel in literature is different from most book awards because the committee looks at an author’s whole body of work rather than one specific piece. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel in Literature for his body of work, including the books My Name is Red, Snow and The White Castle, which tackle issues relating to Turkey’s convergence with and resistance to the Western world. In Snow, Pamuk writes about a man who travels from Istanbul to far eastern Turkey where he grapples with both fundamentalist and secular corruption, violence and love.

The Nobel Academy stated that Pamuk “discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures” through his work. Often politically charged in life as well as in his work, Pamuk is outspoken about his support of Turkey’s Kurdish population and has condemned the massacres of Armenians by the Ottomans in the early twentieth century. He was arrested last year on charges of “insulting Turkishness;” the case was later dropped. (For an extensive review of Pamuk’s work, see “Exploring Turkishness,” page 104.)

Apparently even prestigious literary awards can be bought and sold just like everything else. Looking up the nominees for this year’s Whitbread Book Awards, you will find that, strangely, the awards are now named for their new corporate sponsor. The Whitbread Book Awards, which recognize talented British and Irish authors, are now referred to as the Costa Book Awards — as in Costa Coffee — and are separated into categories that have individual winners, who are then pooled together for consideration as the year’s best overall book.

This year, the First Novel Award winner was Stef Penney for the book The Tenderness of Wolves. Judges said the book made them feel “enveloped by the snowy landscape and gripped by the beautiful writing and effortless story-telling. It is a story of love, suspense and beauty. We couldn’t put it down.”

Judges gave the 2006 Costa Novel Award to William Boyd for Restless saying, “Restless remains in the mind long after you finish it. Its scenes of wartime tension, the smell of espionage and the consequences of deceitful lives. Double cross, double bluff — all written with effortless clarity, resulting in an un-put-downable read.”

Other categories include poetry, biography, and children’s book. The final decision for the winner of the Costa Book of the Year will be announced on February 7.

The Quill Book Awards are the People’s Choice Awards of the book world. Based on populist sentiments, Quill winners are chosen by readers, as opposed to an elitist panel of experts. The Hollywood-glam awards ceremony grants fancy modern statuettes to winners in 19 categories ranging from romance to graphic novels.

This year, nominated books included titles such as It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken by Greg Bahrendt, which was short-listed in the Health/Self-Improvement category, and The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken, nominated under the Humor category. Other authors as diverse as Steven King and the Dalai Lama were also nominated for a Quill.

Ultimately, the winners in the major categories of biography and fiction were, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan, and A Dirty Job by the hysterically funny Christopher Moore, respectively. Al Gore’s apocalyptic wake-up call An Inconvenient Truth won for current events genre, and for poetry the celebrated Maya Angelou took home an award for Amazing Peace.

This award recognizes American authors with copious amounts of writing talent, included among the past recipients are: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saul Bellow and William Faulkner. The most prominent literary award in the United States, it is presented by the National Book Foundation, whose committee decides the winners in four genres of literature.

The 2006 award went to Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker for fiction and Timothy Egen’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl for nonfiction.

Living Outside the World

As for my place in the world — in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was ‘not in the center.’ In the center of the world there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its center, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father’s library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul’s books — our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail — and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world’s otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West — just as I would do later.

With an elegant cover displaying the poster of one of the classics of Egyptian cinema — Anwar Wagdy’s The Prince of Revenge — Egyptian Film Posters displays the evolution of local film posters during the past century and is a brilliant piece of indirect commentary on Egypt’s changing emerging social values and habits.

The book’s 100 pages of images — starting with the 1938 Master Bahbah and ending with the 1985 The Confrontation — are introduced by Mahmoud Kassem, who explains the both the technique of developing a movie poster, along with how the art form has evolved during the past century.

The book contains posters by multiple artists, promoting a range of films and their stars. The differences and contrasts are immediately visible; although very similar in layout and general presentation, there is noticeable and intriguing difference in their actual content throughout the years.

More interesting than the actual posters are the underlying social changes that catalyzed and paralleled their development. In the 1950s, the posters focused primarily on male characters, in both the size of the pictures as well as the size and position of the stars’ names. Although female heroines were portrayed alongside their male counterparts, the priority was clear and the actress seemed to be more of a supportive figure. As the society became more open to the West after the 1952 Revolution and female presence became more accepted in the market, the depiction and role of women on posters changed.

During the 1950s and 1960s, women were used on posters with increasing frequency, a trend that can’t be attributed solely to female empowerment or the rising professional presence of women in film. It can, however, be connected to the advent of sex appeal in marketing: female sexuality made posters more attractive. Although not all posters displayed revealing photos of actresses or heroines in provocative poses, most of them extensively capitalized simply on the actress’ femininity, sexuality or beauty as a means to promote the film.

By the mid-1970s, however, more daring posters became commonplace — some actually showcasing love scenes. With the rise of a more conservative trend in the 1980s, the posters move away from direct titillation to more dramatic or comic appeal. This wasn’t due to government censorship as much as social pressure: Members of the public frequently vandalized racy posters, and controversy arose over movies from the 1960s such as Nahed Sherif and Hassan Youssef’s A Honeymoon Without Interruption.

Also noticeable in later posters is the influence of the Western media on Egyptian cinema, with posters imitating famous Western film imagery. Adel Imam’s Prince of Darkness poster portrays him sitting on a chair with a black background in a pose very similar to one commonly associated with the famous Godfather saga.

Moving away from social values and into the cinema and art world, another ongoing theme is the different techniques used to settle the everlasting debates over the positions of the actors’ names on the poster. Kassem explains how the artists constantly looked for creative ways to put the stars’ names on the same level without one overpowering the other to settle the disputes; some of which ended up in police stations such as the argument between El-ham Shahin and Fify Abdo over the poster for The Killing Night.

Although the poster’s importance in promoting film was well known in the past, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that an organization called The Media Creativity was launched to honor the work of the posters’ artists with different prizes and awards. After reading Egyptian Film Posters, it becomes clear that such recognition was long overdue. (NS)

The available literature on the fauna of Egypt, especially in English, has increased dramatically since I first arrived here in 1987. My library shelf then consisted of a tome of blurred photographs optimistically entitled Red Sea Fish Guide, John Randall’s scientific, but uninspiring, collection of dead fish plates Red Sea Reef Fishes, and The Common Birds of Egypt, interestingly, and tellingly, written and illustrated by the author of the current text.

Recent years have seen the publication of comprehensive and locally available guides to butterflies, mammals, Red Sea fish and invertebrates, with birds now covered by a number of very thorough field guides of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Now the reptiles and amphibians are covered, too, in the excellent, scholarly and attractive A Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of Egypt by one of their greatest advocates, Sherif Baha El Din.

They have had a long wait. The first and last detailed treatise of this group was John Anderson’s Zoology of Egypt: Vol. 1 published back in 1898 and though there have been updates, notably the now much criticized Checklist of the Reptiles and Amphibians of Egypt by Hymen Marx in 1968 and Amphibians and Reptiles of Egypt by Mostafa Saleh in 1997, it is only now that they have finally been done justice. It is wisely entitled “a guide” since it goes beyond the limits of a typical field guide.

Put simply, the guide describes every single one of the 118 species of reptiles and amphibians recorded in modern Egypt. For each species there is a detailed diagnosis highlighting key identification features, notes on habitat and ecology, meticulous distribution details and an evaluation of current status. Each entry is accompanied by a map on which its definite and probable distribution is clearly displayed. Most, but by no means all, are illustrated in high-quality color photographs and, where necessary or helpful for identification, in black and white ink drawings. The book is prefaced by concise discussions on biogeography, habitat and conservation.

Apart from being an indispensable companion for any zoologist, ecologist or field worker, I am sure that many who read this book will be amazed by the variety of reptiles and amphibians found here. While the relative paucity of amphibian species, nine, is perhaps unsurprising given the tiny proportion of the country that represents suitable habitat, the 109 species of reptiles, including 39 snakes and 61 lizards, is testament to their ability to adapt to often highly arid desert environments. This is clearly illustrated in the map of species richness at the beginning of the book. No area of the country, however hot, dry or remote, is devoid of reptiles.

There is a wealth of information here, and while the flyleaf claims it provides “an accessible approach for generalists and amateurs,” I suspect some may be overwhelmed. Often reptile ID requires detailed analysis of the number and type of scales, and to this end detailed technical keys to morphological features are necessary for identification. As the identification keys clearly show, this is what distinguishes closely related taxa and without such technical information the book would have been worthless for the expert. But the layman will still find much in here, and without the technical and scientific expertise will easily be able to narrow down what he has seen using the distribution maps and the plates.

I was very pleased to see that the plates are ‘honest’. Where an animal has been obtained from a pet trader rather than photographed in the wild this is stated. Ditto for species photographed outside of Egypt.

This is a timely book. Like so much of Egypt’s fauna, many of our reptiles and amphibians are in trouble due to over-collection, particularly of the venomous snakes and, as the author points out, especially by habitat destruction. The future, according to Baha El Din, lies in the Protected Areas, though recent developments in Wadi Degla (“Sold Down the Valley”, Egypt Today, December 2006, page 76) and elsewhere, show that even there it is not assured. (RH)

In the hands of a less gifted writer, this story would be a complete mess. A maniacal artist who eats cats for their souls, a wandering simpleton who can make it rain eels and a spiritual quest guided by none other than Colonel Sanders himself; it just shouldn’t work. Luckily for anyone who picks up Kafka on the Shore, they are brought into a vivid, imaginative and, most importantly, believable world by a master.

The story focuses on two characters destined to collide in some way — the reader just can never be sure of where and how it is going to happen. Kafka Tamura has just run away from his Tokyo home and is seeking refuge and understanding in a remote town in the north of Japan. There he finds a world of intrigue sewn together by unique characters with troubled and complicated pasts.

Meanwhile, Mister Nakata — the story’s other half, if you will — sets out from his home in Nakano to follow Kafka’s trail. He traces his steps but doesn’t really know the reason why and they end up pulled into each other’s worlds by an unexplained destiny.

The story sounds complex, and it is, but this is all part of the fabric that makes up any Murakami novel. His stories are always non-linear and almost unbelievable, but his characters are steeped with such heightened emotions and untold depths that their actions always seem justified. It is these qualities along with rich and descriptive prose that has made Murakami one of the most fiercely followed cult authors of the last two decades.

Although Kafka is not Murakami’s latest novel (he released a collection of short stories last year) many have called it his best since his opus The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The journey Murakami takes his readers on is not an easy one, but those willing to take it are greatly rewarded. It is a very intricate and complicated story, spanning from the Japanese ghosts of World War II to the troubles facing two old-fashioned characters that are misunderstood in modern Japan. The story ducks and weaves through ideas of multiple dimensions and the strange history of a song that has come to life, aptly titled Kafka on the Shore.

What makes the convoluted story work is the persistence of the characters to solve the mystery they’ve all become a part of. Murakami is able to make the reader sympathize with these characters by allowing the reader into their personal vulnerabilities and watching them draw their strength from them.

Murakami is a deft descriptor, bringing everything on the page to reality whether it’s something as simple as the taste of a grilled mackerel to the complex chord structure of the song that personified the sorrow of the female lead, Miss Saeki. This is what keeps his fans coming back to his novels.

Despite the fact that many themes overlap from book to book and characters from one novel can greatly resemble those from another, his magical ideas and unique storytelling style is always fresh. Much of the back story in this novel is set in the form of interview transcripts from post-war Japan and the first person accounts prove far more effective than straight narrative prose would have.

True, this book may not be for everyone. The ending is very hard to grasp — one that Murakami has reportedly said is only understood through multiple readings. But anyone with the patience for a difficult but well-crafted story will certainly benefit from the stellar work of a brilliant artist. (SM)

Do you remember the Delice Persan Froid and Iced Mango Soup your mama made on hot summer days when you were growing up? Or the Cream of Lettuce soup she’d serve up on a cold January night? No? According to John Feeney, the New Zealander who “visits Egypt frequently,” these are all Egyptian soups.

Feeney’s tiny 65-page Egyptian Soups: hot and cold is filled with these wacky concoctions, not one of which seems to be Egyptian. The ingredients are Egyptian, although some may be hard to come by (such as the white desert truffles and camel’s milk needed for Crème de Truffe du Désert).

The recipes are imaginative but overly complicated; the Cream of Lentil Soup recipe calls for boiling onions and a double boiler — as well as four cups of milk and a half cup of cream. The soup takes over an hour to prepare, and the end result is a disappointingly dull affair — not an improvement on the delicious and straightforward Egyptian Lentil Soup we all know and love.

A cookbook should be welcome in the kitchen. It’s not too much to ask for a sturdy cover with a dust jacket that can survive on the kitchen counter as well as on the bookshelf. Egyptian Soups showed signs of wear after a few days use, and its paperback cover could never repel a stray drop of Feeney’s signature Cream of Guava and Ginger Soup.

Feeney is a photographer by trade, and the book is filled with some of the most beautiful pictures of food this reviewer has ever had the occasion to drool over. Egyptian Soups may not contain much in the way of Egyptian soups, but it serves as an excellent pictorial overview of Egyptian spices, vegetables and fruits. (DR) et

Reviews by Nadine El Sayed, Richard Hoath, Shane McNeil and Dan Reese