Unfollow! or A Story of an anti-Social Media Obsession

I will share with you how I start my very early working morning - around 4.30, the latest 5am: by checking my social media tools - Instagram or Twitter, once in a while Facebook. I listen to the latest music releases on YouTube from musicians I´ve subscribe to, or travel and media chanels of interest. I also check my Goodreads and update the bookish selection of the books I want to read and, when necessary I even download some ebooks or order some physical ones. For almost half an hour, my brain is reconected to the reality of my everyday busy schedule in a very smooth, sometimes intellectual sometimes entertaining way.

Yesterday, my ritual followed the same format, with a plenty of good reasons for a good beginning: a food blogger I admire is advancing her cookbook project, some of my travel e-buddies are sharing their photos from their new destinations, some people do learn a language, another artist released a new album, a beautiful soul of a friend of a friend that was tragically widowed from the love of her life and left alone with 4 kids, remarried recently. 

Then, on the high waves of positivity, I started to read Unfollow. How Instagram is destroying our life - please observe the use of the 1st person plural, like lady Nena Schink, the author, is my defender and spokeperson. 

For Miss Schink, being on Instagram is a painful experience she has to go through for the sake of the research for her book. She is unhappy that women are posting pictures on bikini, she included, that their are getting 7-number advertising from big fashion brands therefore she decides to avoid those brands. She is completely against sharing her life to strangers, though, she is stalking ex friends and stars having a look at their live stories. However, she is ´wise´ enough to warn&lecture you, me, ´us´ how Instagram can be the cause of mental illness and depression, according to the principle that you envy what you do not have - beautiful family, shining car, fancy outfits. By the way, you don´t need Instagram to figure this out and eventually feel bad about it and the warnings are not based on any serious scientific and medical basis. And if her therapist told her so, better find another one. 

Nena Schink is not alone in her approach towards social media in Germany. I recall the abhorrent obsession of teachers a couple of years ago with the Digitale Demenz by Manfred Spitze, on the same alarmist tone warning against the dangers of social media and Internet in general for the young generation. Hopefully the school fans of Mr. Spitze changed their mind, as the current Corona crisis displayed the very limited skills of German teachers in dealing with online teaching, an environment very familiar to their peers in France, to mention only one of the neighbouring EU advanced countries.

So bad you cannot unfollow a book instantly, but in many respects, this book - which I´ve read in the original language - is an useful bibliography if you want to understand the misunderstanding of the German public opinion towards social media and Internet. This may explain why the most boring social media consulting projects were those aimed to the German market. The potential is there but unfortunatelly the decision-makers and some of the journalists - although young (after all, Nena Schink is under 30) - are thinking with mindset pertaining from another century.

Rating: 2 stars

Bella Figura by Kamin Mohammadi or How to Make Your Italian Dream Come True

Made redundant from her job at a glossy magazine in London,without a rental contract, no cat, single and in her late 30s, Kamin Mohammadi landed in Florence initially for a couple of month, trying to figure out her life. From the very beginning of her new life adventure, besides the tastier fruits and vegetables compared to the bland offer from the British supermarkets, there is something else that caught her attention: bella figura. 

This concept means ´making every aspect of life as beautiful as it can be, no matter when, from what we eat to how we get to work in the morning´. It means welcoming the day and every moment of it with grace, charm and relaxed, the opposite attitude of the burnout life of a busy professional in London. 

And what a beautiful lifestyle it is but how hard is to get rid of old habits. But it is worth more than all the detox and diets and positive thinking and expensive therapy sessions. On the other side, the men, the Italian men - some of them still living with their parents in their 40s because...it seems they can - , are real trouble but going through the experience of loss or romantic failure is part of the long process of knowing how to deal with your own life, moving forward and discovering one´s strengths and resources. 

The memoir, Mohammadi´s second after the book that she wrote during her Florence adventure about her childhood in Iran and her family escape after the Islamic Revolution, is organised monthly, around some important details, such as the produce of the season, the scent of the city, the Italian moment and the word of the month. Every chapter has its own repertoire of recipes, simple and filled with natural ingredients. Expect a lot of olive oil, maybe too much for my taste, but when in Tuscany...

Kamin Mohammadi has a charming way of writing, inviting the reader into the story. She is not only a great storyteller but also an inspirational travel writer, her detailed descriptions of her Florence environment and trips deep into Tuscany being instant recommendations for a slow, off-the-beaten path adventures, with insightful observations about the architecture and local vibe.  

Kamin Mohammadi keeps living her Italian dream in Tuscany with a handsome Italian men, sharing her experience of bella figura and enjoying it every day, and writing about beautiful places. 

It is Tuscany on my mind right now...

Rating: 3.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review 

What About My Bookshelves?

It is summer time and the life is getting easier when you have all your bookish plans settled for the coming months. In case that you are brave and lucky enough to afford thinking about your next holidays plans, outside your home/garden/lockdown location. Bookish or not, this year was like no other, forcing many of us to think and focus more on our immediate reality and environment priorities.

Like, paying more attention to decorating the house and the rooms, adding exotic ingredients to the pantry, experimenting more with recipes, returning to old hobbies like visual arts - both painting and photography -, handwork and jewelry making, and once in a while even with some interior design ideas. With money saved from my weekly travels, I added a piece of furniture here, another tablecloth there, new cooking tools for the kitchen. Just wanted to feel comfy enough to better enjoy my long reading list, nothing more, nothing less. 

However, in-between two interesting books, I´ve decided I need more movement. Thus, most of my parcimonious free time I´ve also spent organising and re-organising carefully my closets, shelves and other corners in the home that for various reasons were left untouched for at least one year. 

As someone who rarely enjoyed more than a year or so in the same place - or the same country - I am very conservative when it comes to reorganising my rooms. I like my mind free and my schedule full of activities, but I prefer my home environment to be safe, predictable without dramatic changes or frequent furniture removals, unless necessary. Under ´necessity´ being filled: the damage of the piece of furniture, the need to accommodate the space for welcoming new residents in the house. In over ten years of living in the same place - an outstanding success given my previous long list of addresses - I only changed twice the outline of the rooms, the last time almost five years ago, when my son was born.

An adept of minimalism - except when it comes to bags and shoes - most of my house space is taken by books and notebooks. I love my e-books and to read on my Tablet, but the physical books are still part of my life, especially those that accompanied my life journey for a long time already. They are survivors therefore they deserve to stay with me. There are books autographed by people as diverse as Henry Kissinger and Salman Rushdie or books authored by people I count amount my closest intellectual friends from all over the world. There are books - very few of them - that I grew up with and belonged to my family, like an old Larousse which is filled with a lot of outdated information however it reminds me of those few times when I was sharing learning time with my mother of blessed memory. I have books in an impressive amount of languages, I am playing with once in a while, with different levels of knowledge: dictionaries, handbooks, short stories and novels. My son started his own library, as for now, in his three languages he is starting to read the world through. In addition to this, I have a shelf which is dedicated to the books I regularly loan from the many generous libraries spread over Berlin that I visit regularly.

When it comes to organising my shelves, I am again an example of plain simplicity. There are, indeed, people who are organising their books using various criteria: the colours of the book covers, the edition houses, the styles and historical periods of time, the alphabetical order, the topics covered. I refrain from criticizing or judging some of those choices, that may not be necessarily intellectually relevant. Sometimes, the choices for an option or another depends at a great extent of the amount of available space for the books. I envy my childhood times when we used to have a room dedicated exclusively to books, a library with books from the floor until the ceilings, organised, according to the wishes of my grandfather on my mother side, alphabetically, with the name of the books and authors carefully written in a Répertoire, eventually with mentions to whom and when books were loaned. An admirable work of library planning that does not make too much sense though for my everyday 21st century habits.

As many other things in my material life, the organisation of my shelves is following a very low level sophistication and the criteria are based on different topics of interest: a couple of shelves for my history and political science books, a couple of shelves for my languages´ books, a space for Central and Eastern European literature, another one for the Middle Eastern authors I love, another one only for the French-language books, anogther one for English books - the largest so far -, neighbouring another hosting the few books in languages as diverse as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Hungarian. A big shelf, with double rows, hosts my new collection of German books. In the last years I added a shelf for all my travel books which counts only few guides, besides an increasing number of travelogues and diaries. I haven´t read all of those books, and once in a while those who are not interesting enough, I give them away or sell to the English-speaking bookstores in Berlin. The topics of my books are as diverse as my interests: from cooking books to theories about philosophy, mathematics and poetry, feel good and mysteries, prayer books and historical topics. 

This variety of choices is nothing compared to the over 1,000 books well stocked on my electronic devices. In a physical format, I would need at least three more rooms only for books, or at least a little castle with a dedicated library covering a space much larger than my current apartment. 

Last Sunday, I had enough time and energy to completely reorganise my shelves. Took all them out of their shelves, cleaned the dust, rearranged everything in a more orderly way. Surprisingly, I´ve found a couple of books I completely forgot I purchased that were instantly added to by TBR of the next days and weeks. Especially the books from the languages shelves motivated me to be more organised with my foreign languages maintenance, therefore, a modest plan for more grammar exercises and easy reading was set. 

Reorganising my shelves was one of the best time investment I´ve done this month. Nothing fancy, minimal physical activity, a lot of inspiration for my next reading and intellectual chores. As for now, there will be nothing fancy happening with my bookshelves, except that probably in a couple of months I see some new shelves, maybe a complete new library setting, coming my way. Until then, I will keep being busy with my books and happily blogging about it. 

Book Review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

´At night, Esi dreamed that if they all cried in unison, the mud would turn to river and they could be washed away into Atlantic´.

´Evil is like a shadow. It follows you´.

Human history across century has plenty of examples of the tragedies humans would inflict to each other. The amount of trauma carried on from a generation to another is hard to evaluate and the ways in which affects everyday life cannot be easily evaluated.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is following a family history which starts in the 18th century in nowadays Ghana until the 21st century America. Effia and Esi are the two sisters whose genealogy is pursued through a tragical history, stained with the blood of the slave trade. 

This cruel trade involved not only the colonial powers of the USA, the British Empire, the Dutch or the Portuguese, but was greatly supported by local actors who maintained the slave market and Homegoing is largely acknowleding this historical fact. The beginning of the story is largely taking part in this context and in my opinion is the most elaborated and coherent from the whole story. Violent encounters do outline the story and separate and connect characters and life encounters. 

This narrative unity is largely lost in the next installments of the story, once we advance through the current historical and political momentum. The characters themselves are diluted and there are too many directions to follow - personal events in the life of the characters, political events and social outrage - to keep the story together. Technically speaking, unless one wants to create a big saga covering several volumes, it is impossible to focus properly within such an enormous time span. It is like you try playing a symphony by using only one, maximum 2 instruments.

But as the skin-based discrimination remains, so it is the strength of love which unites the main characters that are following the genealogy of the two sisters. It is not the romantic love or the hopeless love, but the enduring one, which is as strong as the pain inflicted by the lack of freedom and pure racial hate.

It took me a very long time to read Homegoing. I´ve started two years ago, then gave up, than started again while carefully reviewing my notes. I am aware that I must add some additional historical reading about the history of Ghana and the slave trade in general, therefore my focus is mostly on the aspects related to the literary side of the story.

Meanwhile the Ghana-born Yaa Gyasi wrote her second book, Transcendent Kingdom which is using the same historical and cultural context of her country of birth, that I am interested to read as well, therefore I better upgrade my bibliography.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Bringing Luck to Others

I will take the freedom to translate the title of my latest by Catalin Dorian Florescu, the Romanian-born Switzerland-based author brilliantly writing in German, Der Mann, der das Glück bringt by The Man that brings good luck to others. This is what an author/artist is or must be: someone that makes other people lucky, if happiness can be considered a matter of luck, among others.

This was my first novel by Florescu (read in the original German language), an author whose works I am interested to discover, after being pleased with the collection of short stories I´ve read a couple of months ago. This new novel revealed that Florescu not only is a charming storyteller, but he is also an excellent German writer, with interesting linguistic turns that adds an exquisite touch to the story.

Ray and Elena meet in the 9/11 New York in an unusual context. She is in America on a mission: to bury the ashes of her mother, who died in the leprosery located in the Danube Delta area- which according to the 2018 local news is still operational for around ten people. Elena, now in her 40s, never knew her mother and father, both inmates in the leprosery, as she was shortly after birth took away an placed in one foster family after the other.

Ray has also a rich family history behind, with an adventurous grand father who landed ´from the Moon´ on the NYC shores growing up in the multi-ethnic boiling pot of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century. His grand father, who took the name of Berl (but without being Jewish) sometimes, sometimes Paddy, used to have a great, Caruso-like voice, and was considered the one who brings good luck to others. His grandson is just living in the shadow of his great stories but unable to fully live his life, at least at the same risky and full dedication his granfather used to have.

There are similitudes between the two stories, although shared from two very opposites corners of the world, because, after all, it has to do with human beings and their dreams, broken expectations and sadness. Interestingly, in both cases, the general historical contexts, like WWII, for instance, is randomly mentioned. In the Danube Delta villages, Elena´s grandfather and his friends got the news a couple of days, or even weeks later, but did it really matter for them when exactly Rosa Luxemburg was assassinated? The fact that the two of them are meeting when the Twin Towers were hit is also a short mention worth, for the overall context and because Elena´s jar with ashes opens up and her mother ashes are mixing with those of people being killed in the terrorist attack. Life is going on when you are small enough to be out of time and your life is set on survival mood.

The stories from Der Mann der das Glück bringt are very powerful and eventful and it is hard to put the book down or thing/read anything else until the end. However, I had sometimes the feeling that many of the ideas and stories or plot ideas to need even further development that for the sake of the unity of the story were abandoned. When you simply have too many stories to tell it is, indeed, hard to give up, but for the reader it creates expectations and makes you long for more. I, personally, will look reading more books by Florescu, because I really like this writer.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Book Review: Disoriental by Négar Djavadi

´Believe me, no one misses the foreigners. No one can resisgt the cheap pleasure of scratching that itch of difference. Language is definitely the lastest way to catch them out and corner them, until the facade of normality they´ve spent a long, painful time acquiring cracks and hangs in shreds´.

Disoriental was written and published in French as Désorientale - a mix of two words: Oriental - coming from the so-called East - and désorienter - having lost one´s direction. Part classical immigrant story, part a historical account of a dissident family in Iran before and after the Islamic revolution, the story it is told on a nostalgic voice, addressing once in a while the reader directly. 

Moving in a new country, facing the choice of a new language, leaving behind your identity and stories is an effort of re-aranging the identity pieces of puzzle in a new, completely different way. Memories are lost, re-evaluated, the identity is going first through a disitegration process,  before following new directions. ´No one who demand that immigrants make ´´an effort to integration´´ would dare look them in the face and ask them to start by making the necessary ´´effort at disintegration´´. They´re asking people to stand atop the mountain without climbing up it first´.

On a side note, not all the novels written by writers with an ´Oriental´ background should be necessarily compared to 1001 Nights/Scheherazade. Dear book reviewers from all over the English-speaking world, from NYT to other part of the USA, maybe spending extra time doing some serious research would help to avoid such painful literary stereotypes. Please, I bet you can do much better that to copy paste the same bland observations when it comes to appreciating authors and novels outside your limited comfort zone...

The youngest in a family of three daughters, Kimia Sadr is the daughter of Darius Sadr, an independent leftist intellectual whose articles bothered both the Shah and the dictatorship of the mullahs. Her family chronicle starts long before our current times, in Mazandaran province, near the Caspian Sea and ends in France, where the family settled after leaving Iran. 

Under the overwhelming pressure of the personal history, her own sexual amiguities and the challenges of a new environment, Kimia is looking for her own way of expressing herself through music. No words are needed and it confers that freedom where you can rather lost yourself instead of being forced to assume and express a certain identity. 

The novel is packed with historical and political information, when the voice of the author switches to the journalistic register. A welcomed addition especially for the readers not familiar with the political context in Iran in the last century or so, but I personally prefer the purely literary voice, also because it is so nicely nostalgically wrapped. 

Disoriental is an intense identity story from a literary voice that would love to follow.

I´ve read the English translation from the original French.

Rating: 3.5 stars 

YA Book Review: My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life by Rachel Cohn

A rags to riches slow paced YA novel, My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life by Rachel Cohn explores relationships between lonely children and estranged, broken and addictions-prone parents. 

Although the topic itself is very tragic, the author is able to create a story which is drama-free. Elle Zoellner, the daughter of a drug-addicted mother who ended up in prison, spent most of her teenage years moving from a foster family to another. Adulting haven´t influenced considerably her nature and her interests remained focused on school. On her 16th birthday she will receive an unexpected present: her father of whose existence she was not aware before is ready to offer her a new life, in Tokyo, where he is a very successful businessman belonging to a prestigious family. He had met Elle´s mother during his studies in the USA but had to leave her and her daugher in order to answer his family obligations.

In 24 hours, Elle is starting a completely new life: she is about to leave her precarious life flying business class to Tokyo, her first time in an airplane and out of the States; she is enrolled in a high-end private school, having as colleagues children of rich expats and local personalities; she will leave in a luxury hotel in a new country.

Her experiences in Tokyo are part of the usual ´culture shock´ of the European, Western traveller to Japan and the places she is discovering with her ex-brats group covers the usual travel attractions in the capital city - Robot restaurant, cat cafés, Shibuya, karaoke venues, sushi (actually not your local everyday meal) etc.  

At one level, Elle is trying to connect with her new school environment and making new friends - very fast and unproblematic - while working hard to be accepted by her new family - which is not an easy task, especially when it comes to her grandmother. Her Japanese part of the family, including her father, are cold, work- and business obsessed and by default, they seem to use her as a mean to network as well, through her fancy school mates. After all, it seems that even though she and her mother were poor back in the States, and her mother had to work long hours to cover their financial needs, at least they had a daugher-mother connection that it´s more complicated in the case of her interactions with her father. Instead of being a rebelious child, Elle is rather eager to avoid conflict than to jump to direct confrontation. She is moving within a safety area and even when dramatic things are happening, there is always place for negotiation. 

The story is simple and the characters themselves are uncomplicated, no matter what challenges ahead. More complexity - both of the story and of the characters - would have make the novel more interesting. For instance, there is mentioned at the beginning that Elle has, on her mother side, a mixed Native American, African American heritage, which is not further explored.

My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life is an enjoyable read but I wish the story is just a bit bolder.

Rating: 3 stars

How Many Quichotte/Quixote Do We really Need?

Do we really need to re-write and re-contextualize classical - successful works of literature or rather keep telling new stories addressing the contemporary issues pertinent for new audiences? Can it be that that time has come when no matter what was written before, the topics and characters can be re-used and sometimes abused too but having already lost their original meaning?

In visual arts it is easy to re-organise various fragments of a work of art into a completely new arrangement. When it comes to words, I am not always sure that the stories are interchangeable.

I gave a chance to Quichotte by Salman Rushdie - read in the German translation - because I appreciate the author´s qualities of storyteller. The book - shortlisted for The Booker Prize last year - is built around the original Quixote story but with a different casting and in a different world. The hopeless romantic is an Indian wandering across America in our days, accompanied by his son, Sancho, obsessivelly dreaming about a young TV star of Indian origin, Salma. Himself exists only as the work of fiction of the author of his story, Sam duChamp. This direction is conventional, over-used but the interaction author/characters was for me one of the most important development of the book. 

It sounds unfair especially when the book promises to cover ironically the big issues facing America, including the opioid crisis and the excessive use of firearms. There are plenty of references to sci-fi movies and Mayflower - the first ship that transported Puritans from the Old to the New World - is featured as a portal where an experiment involving the Schrödinger cat - but using a dog instead - is more than a historical reference. 

The stories are flowing and once in a while I got completely lost into its intricacies and ironical references. But when I was stepping out of the story myself, there was nothing intellectually appealing enough to call it a big good story. What is the point to try rewriting a story when there are so many other original stories already waiting to be told?

I will continue reading Rushdie - the storyteller - after Rushdie but for me, Quichotte is a failed experiment.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Book Review: Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea

I am not sure what I would have think about the Girls of Riyadh if I would have read it when the story of four non-conformist young women growing up in Saudi Arabia was published at the beginning of 21st century. 

Initially the book was forbidden in Saudi and instantly become a bestseller in Lebanon - a realm that is mentioned as an alternative space of freedom more than once in a book, and not only for the nose jobs and other plastic surgery interventions enjoyed by the Middle Eastern women, but also because, for instance, you can find there books on various topics, including the works of Freud. The controversy around the author, currently a medical practitioner living in the US, increased considerable its popularity among young women and men in Saudi Arabia.

I personally approached the book - read in the German translation - very carefully, curious to find out about the literary qualities or at least some interesting story. At the time, without the protection of a male relative, women were unable to achieve anything outside the walls of their homes. Although nowadays the situation slightly improved - women can drive, for instance - there is still a long journey towards a welcoming environment for Saudi women.

Girls of Riyadh is set as a weekly email exchange based on the adventures of four young Saudi ladies, in their attempts to adapt Sex and the City narrative to the secluded world of Riyadh. The book is not supposed to be a collection of philosophical/methaphysical considerations about the West versus East lifestyles. Those girls are from families with a high income, eventually with lavish properties in London, interested in following a professional career but at the same time resigned to give up once they will get married. Marriage is mostly arranged and although some romance seems to be allowed, the enthusiasm is easily cut once the match is evaluated from the point of view of the personal/social/financial status.

Each chapter starts with a quote, from various sources, including a couple attributed to Socrates, which I have some doubts they are really genuine - as poor Socrates haven´t write anything and his thoughts are mostly assumed through Plato´s words and works. Such a choice gives an intellectual air to the story but otherwise expect a lot of forbidden love - for the Western reader might sound exotic, unusual, ridiculous even to know your future husband or/and wife in an arranged setting - and desire. The girls do dream about romance and sensuality, inspired by the freedom of chatrooms where anyone can hide, but at the end of the day they are not left with too many choices, one of the most common being to disappear for a while in the US, London or Dubai.

How exactly those women want to be free? Champagne drinking, and dating someone of one´s choice, spending money as they wish or randomly hanging up with strangers. I can understand that there are people looking for such achievements, but I am rather interested in more complex situations and choices. Not every forbidden apple has a taste.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Book Review: Compass by Mathias Énard

For centuries, when the ´West´ was looking for a source of vital energy and often for interchamgeable goods like spices or precious diamonds or more recently oil, it turned its compass towards the ´East´, the ´exotic Orient´. On the other side of the imaginary curtain, the ´Orientals´ themselves looked towards the ´West´ in order to emulate them, integrate their values into their local system, when they were not bluntly to do it under political, economic or cultural pressure. Proud, some ´Orientals´ were able to display their local concotions: beautiful philosophical systems emulating Western values suited for the local needs - I wil leave for another time a well-deserved long discussion about how Iranian readings of French philosophers like Foucault or Gabriel Marcel were reinserted into the intellectual narrative of the Islamic Revolution; a relatively bizarre association yet as proved by intellectual facts, achievable.

Compass by Mathias Énard is an intellectual book as no other I´ve read in a very long time. And it is different of everything I´ve read before but always wanted to read. A novel with a very serious academic background about a topic I am personally and professionally dealing with on a regular, daily basis: the representations and projections assigned to cultures belonging to different ideatic realms. The word trigger is ´Orientalism´, the term branded by Edward Said which in its original acception is in my opinion very limitative and politically biased which obturates the extraordinary range of interpretations besides the power-oriented constructions.

But Énard which speaks Arabic and Persian, has the largesse d´esprit to open up to a different kind of discourse. Before being a very serious academic analysis about the gateways to and from Orient, Compass is set to be an academic love story, between the Vienna-based musicologist Franz Ritter and the curious Sarah, an infatigable French-Jewish academic whose PhD thesis was about ´Visions of the other between East and West´. Their love story is not the strong point of the novel but it allows at a certain extent the intense academic exchange to take place. Is the deep intellectual love impossible? The common fascination and intellectual interest and curiosity for almost everything that the human mind created is not enough and not necessarily the first and foremost condition of love?

Ritter is not necessarily the type of the critical intellectual, he prefers to display the academic knowledge in a story-format, without necessarily exposing and criticizing the elements of the representations. He, as Sarah, rather prefer to generate stories, adding various elements, instead of destroying myths. 

Their exchange of letters, emails and ideas when traveling together in places like Tehran or Damascus covers an immense share of world history, in point-counterpoint style which moves smoothly from music to poetry, fictions and ideology. The same moves are following various geographical areas from Vienna - defined by Hofmannstahl as the gateway to the Orient to more or less remote destinations. Sometimes, Budapest was ´exotic´ enough to oil the rotten joints of the European spiritual entreprise. Sometimes, Nepal or India or even China (indeed, what about a Made in China Orientalism?) were much sought. For Berlioz, Sicily was the Orient. The Middle East was always kept in a limbo: loved and hated for all the wrong reasons, it remains the alter-ego of the European failures and fake expectations. It´s a Jerusalem syndrome projected at the scale of a region.

And it goes both sides. We, as humans, we love to plunge into dreamlike territories, to escape ourselves. We travel and search for our roots and for spiritual awakening or alternative medicine. We are using a prigiledge that real people coming from our imaginary lands should fight for, sometimes with their lives, sometimes with their freedom. They leave behind homes and families and intellectual discussions and they are free in lands whose everyday life doesn´t correspond their intellectual expectations. The lost of identity is not always good tolerated by the soul. Compass mentions more than once the tragical fate of the talented Iranian intellectual Sadegh Hedayat who turned the gas into his Paris apartment. Was it because deeply alienated? Using elements of Persian folklore, his main work The Blind Owl is labelled the first modernist Iranian author, his writing being influenced among others by Rainer Maria Rilke or E.A. Poe. (hopefuly will be soon in the right mood to finally write the review of this book). But understanding the work properly means more than being able to recognize the letters and the various influences, it has to do with the conundrum of cultural influences and the context as such as, for instance, the symbol of the owl as such is a bad omen in Iran or India but for the Europeans it is associated with wisdom and knowledge. 

If we pay a careful look into recent history, there is at least one double take almost everywhere.´Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archeology, dispossesing the colonized populations by means of the pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as aline: and so brainwashed Islamist wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is an alien, retroactive emanation of foreign policies´. Within the context of the Orientalist policies at the extreme - in times of war, for example - the intellectual is assigned by his state of origin a different ´mission´: the archeologists might turn into spies, the linguists in propaganda experts and ethnologists into disciplinarians. To be continued...

Compass is a very complex reading and although I was literally hungry to read it throughout I needed to take a break every couple of pages and think and research and made a list of topics and authors I would love to read more about or composers whose works I need to listen to in the near future. The academic world, to whom both protagonists do belong, is roughly exposed, but in a more diplomatic, less ironic take as in the novels of David Lodge and it is rightly so as, in fact, the factories of Orientalism are everywhere although very often it starts among intellectuals, dreaming for escapes in far away geographical spaces - as the mind needs specific geographic boundaries to travel within, or maybe really does?. 

In one of the many breaks I´ve took from this book I asked myself more than once: how much Orientalism do I have/long for in my life? I may have a slight excuse of culturally belonging to a realm that includes a part of the Middle East however, what about yoga retreats, certain foods and spices I´ve obviously not grown up with, calligraphy and pleasure in listening - not necessarily understanding in the existential sense of the word - non-European tunes. It is probably a discussion that I will continue in the next readings and intellectual exchanges. 

I´ve read Compass in the English translation, which is a pity, but maybe will read the other novels by Énard in the original French language. As for now, this author is for me the literary revelation of the year.

Rating: 4.5 stars