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New York Times
a day ago
- General
- New York Times
A Modern-Day Scheherazade Weaves Her Story of Motherhood, War and Exile
I'LL TELL YOU WHEN I'M HOME: A Memoir, by Hala Alyan 'Since childhood, I've been aware of an audience,' Hala Alyan writes in her gorgeous, lyrical memoir, 'I'll Tell You When I'm Home,' which examines with a poet's precision the many ways in which storytelling is rooted in matriarchy, carrying messages between mothers and daughters as a means of survival. Playing Scheherazade in a high school production of 'One Thousand and One Nights' — a character whose 'reassuring maternal voice' quite literally spins tales to keep herself alive, 'lulling us into imagination' — Alyan recalls having to improvise onstage when another cast member misses their cue, filling the awkward silence with clever lines she's invented on the spot. The audience laughs, and 'the magic of the moment endured,' she writes, 'the suspension of disbelief unbroken. It mattered so much to me that I was able to keep them believing.' Alyan, the author of two novels and five collections of poetry, uses the figure of this archetypal storyteller as a framework for her memoir. Told in short passages that loop through time, the book is organized into 11 chapters named for the various stages of a pregnancy, from preconception to months one through eight to birth and postpartum. Slipping through her past and future selves, she braids together several timelines: her nomadic coming-of-age moving between Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas and Oklahoma City, often in the shadow of war; her addiction and sobriety in her 20s; her struggle with infertility in her 30s and the strain it put on her marriage; her five miscarriages and her eventual path to motherhood through surrogacy. At its core this is a book about longing: for motherhood, for a return to the Levantine homeland that shaped her family history, for a sense of belonging in America that never arrives, for a personal unraveling that may or may not come, for a sense of safety in her marriage that never resolves. Alyan speaks to different versions of herself across time, as though every moment in her history were happening concurrently, were still happening, playing and replaying itself, even now. The story must keep going for its teller to keep living. That story begins in 1948, with Alyan's two grandmothers: Siham and her family are being displaced from their hometown of al-Majdal, Palestine, in the Nakba; and Fatima is the daughter of a sheikh in Damascus, Syria, which she will later leave for Kuwait, and then Lebanon. 'The story of the women starts with the land,' Alyan writes in a book that casts exile and war as her inheritance. 'What is landlessness that takes root, turns inward,' she asks. 'What is it to carry that lack, that undoing.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Electric Spark by Frances Wilson review – the mercurial Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was nothing if not protean. Her gravestone declares her a poet; posterity knows her as the author of 22 short, indelibly strange and subversive novels. In life, she was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life. She was also the enemy of biographers, a pursuer of lawsuits who managed to delay the publication of her own authorised biography by seven years ('a hatchet job; full of insults', she said, unjustly), and went to war with the former lover who wrote two accounts of her life. And yet she didn't hide her traces, leaving for researchers not one but two vast archives, of her personal papers and her working process, neatly organised in box files that total the length of an Olympic swimming pool. It's Wilson's belief that Spark was playing a cat and mouse game with the future, packing her novels with clues and cryptic mementoes from her own past. Rather than the conventional cradle to grave, Wilson's focus here is on the first 39 years of Spark's life, culminating in the publication of her debut novel, The Comforters, in 1957: 'the years of turbulence, when everything was piled on'. This doesn't mean that later masterpieces like A Far Cry from Kensington or Loitering With Intent are ignored, but rather mined for evidence of their real-life antecedents. Time slips and shuttles, fittingly for a writer who was such a master of prolepsis, those devastating little glimpses into the future that make novels like The Driver's Seat and The Girls of Slender Means so uncanny. A formidable student, whose first poem was anthologised at the age of 12, Camberg didn't go to university. Her parents – ordinary class, in her estimation – were too poor, and so instead she took a precis-writing course and a position in a school, where she learned shorthand in lieu of pay. Her next job was as a secretary, this time for hard cash, which she spent on the jazz dances at which she met her future husband, Sydney Oswald Spark, known as Ossie. 'I thought him interesting,' she said, and: 'I didn't know that a girl could break away and get herself a flat.' It wasn't a happy marriage. Ossie had failed to mention that he was subject to violent paranoia, under psychiatric care, and no longer employable as a teacher in Britain due to his erratic behaviour. In 1937, the couple married in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, now Harare, Zimbabwe. By Christmas she was pregnant and trapped amid the stultifying, amoral racism of the settlers. 'He was camouflaged in the colony,' Wilson writes of Ossie, 'in the sense that his illness, which took the form of berserk and violent outbursts, was indistinguishable from the berserk and violent outbursts of those settlers who didn't suffer from Ossie's condition.' After he tried to shoot Muriel, she escaped with her two-year-old son Robin and his nanny. The war meant it took her five years to get home. She left Robin in a Catholic boarding school, and fled via Cape Town. Though she eventually managed to get Robin to Edinburgh, where he was raised by her parents, she would never live with him again. This is considered one of the Great Crimes of Muriel, along with the supposed fact that she concealed her identity as a Jew. It was Robin, victim of the first, who was her accuser in the second. In adulthood he converted to Orthodoxy, and announced to the world that Spark's mother was not a Gentile but a Jewish convert (her father was Jewish, a fact she hadn't concealed). Nonsense, retorted Spark, salting the wound by saying of her only child: 'He's never done anything for me except for being one big bore.' But her cruelty conceals the desperate attempts she made in London to find herself a job and a new husband, so that she could get custody and provide a home for her young son. The law, in its wisdom, had granted custody to a violent man in psychiatric care rather than the woman who fled from him. Brilliant, beautiful and disinclined to conceal her talent or ambition, Spark was much desired and much despised in London. After working in black propaganda during the war, she became general secretary of the Poetry Society and soon after editor of its journal, the Poetry Review. The society was an internecine and antiquated establishment that she attempted to drag into the 20th century. This was not a success. Her close encounter with irrationality and malevolence, which later provided satirical material for Loitering With Intent, left her isolated and determined to make her own way as a writer. Before the novels began, Spark underwent one last enormous transformation. In the early 1950s, she suffered a breakdown, precipitated by her use of Dexedrine as a diet pill, and converted to Catholicism. From now on God was in charge, even if her faith was distinctly unconventional. She believed in angels and liked miracles, but was pro-choice, didn't go to confession, and tended to skip the tedium of the sermon, arriving just in time for the eucharist. It's interesting that Wilson describes Spark as being unable to grasp that misogyny was her real enemy, the disguised combatant behind many of her episodes of paranoia. She certainly saw it in her books. It's hard to think of a more knowing account of male violence against women than her short story The Portobello Road, with its beyond-the-grave narrator, murdered in a haystack. I suspect the real reason Spark didn't participate in the struggles of feminism was that she believed the earthly world would always be divided into the powerful and the powerless, and that her task was to record the struggle. Laughter was her weapon, a purifying absurdity – a 'derisive undermining of what was wrong,' as she once put it. Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves, you feel her thinking, the pompous and the cruel, the self-serving and self-deceiving. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Juxtaposition, compression, elision: Spark knew what to leave out, and it is these odd gaps that make her novels feel so much larger than they are, so spookily resonant and sly. To read them is to be inducted into a code, to move between the lines, to grasp both the stock phrase and the terrible unsaid that lurks behind it. Pleasurable and interesting as this biography is, it feels as if it misses the point of the impersonal in Spark's approach. Her own life is in there, for sure, but distilled into its purest form, which is to say a human comedy, where dark forces seem to triumph, unaware that they are being skewered by a sharp and all-seeing eye. Olivia Laing's new novel, The Silver Book, will be published in November. Electric Spark: the Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson is published by Bloomsbury (£25). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Review Geek
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Review Geek
Our Unwritten Seoul – K-drama Episode 3 Recap & Review
Knock, Knock, Please Open Your Heart Episode 3 of Our Unwritten Seoul begins with Ho-su recognizing Mi-ji, though she successfully convinces him that he's mistaken. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Mi-ji and Ho-su had been close in high school until Mi-ji suspected Ho-su of dating Mi-rae. On the day of her important race, she spotted the two hugging from afar, lost her focus, and tripped, breaking her ankle. With her athletic career derailed, Mi-ji felt abandoned by everyone. In a desperate bid to return to form, she removed her cast prematurely and resumed training, ultimately damaging her chances of ever returning to the sport. Meanwhile, Ho-su jeopardizes a lawsuit by helping the victim involved in his client's case. His senior, Lee Chung-ku, a lawyer Ho-su has admired ever since seeing him give a lecture at university, immediately realizes Ho-su's involvement and excludes him from meetings and ongoing cases. Mi-ji, on the other hand, meets with the elderly restaurant owner, only to learn that the woman intends to officially decline the company's offer. Determined, Mi-ji returns multiple times, cleaning the restaurant in hopes of changing the woman's mind, but her efforts are fruitless. She even follows the owner to a poetry class, only to be caught. Seeking advice, Mi-ji turns to Ho-su. They discover that the restaurant owner is a well-known poet who has long supported students from single-parent families, Ho-su included. He had benefited from her sponsorship during his own academic journey. Elsewhere, Mi-rae continues working diligently at the strawberry farm. Her intelligence and intuition shine through in the way she selects saplings and nurtures the yield. After her shift, Se-jin offers her a ride home and is surprised by her excellent driving skills, especially since she doesn't even know how to ride a bicycle. Back at the law firm, Ho-su is excluded from a project he had been working hard on. Despite Chung-ku's orders, he asks his teammates to let him participate. Comically, this leads to him joining them on a triple date, where he runs into Park Ji-yun, a former high school classmate. They call Mi-ji to join them, since Mi-rae and Ji-yun had grown close after Mi-ji's athletic career ended. Later, Ji-yun gives Mi-ji a ride to the old restaurant. Mi-ji pretends the elderly woman is her grandaunt, but her real motive is to return a bathroom key she accidentally took after being scolded by the woman during one of her uninvited visits. Back at the firm, Lee Chung-ku introduces Ho-su to a humanitarian lawyer, suggesting he change teams. An argument breaks out, Chung-ku questions whether Ho-su is willing to abandon his ideals just to stay in his current position. Meanwhile, Mi-ji is pressured by her director to secure the old woman's participation in a redevelopment meeting. Coincidentally, Ji-yun also wants to cast the restaurant in her new project. Mi-ji races to the scene, only for the old woman to meet them both and discover Mi-ji's lie. Despite this, she plays along with the pretense. After Ji-yun leaves, the old woman agrees to meet with Mi-ji's company officials, if only to refuse the offer in person. Mi-ji feels grateful, knowing that technically she's fulfilled her assignment. While Mi-ji steps out to retrieve the bathroom key, Ho-su visits the elderly woman to thank her for sponsoring his education. Moved, he's the first person to ever thank her, she cooks him a meal. Elsewhere, Se-jin apologizes to Mi-rae after discovering she cleaned and organized the warehouse. He explains that the old chair she moved had sentimental value, it had belonged to his grandfather, whose farm he now tends. In the final scene, Ho-su reveals to Mi-ji (whom he still believes is Mi-rae) that he has quit his job and is ready to truly help her going forward. The Episode Review Episode 3 continues to explore the swapped lives of Mi-ji and Mi-rae. However, most of the plot twists involving Mi-ji and Ho-su serve as red herrings, and the narrative feels stretched thin. Mi-ji's repeated attempts to win over the restaurant owner start to feel repetitive, and Ho-su's internal conflict with Chung-ku lacks depth, many scenes and character decisions seem poorly justified or illogical, especially on Ho-su's part. That said, Mi-rae's quieter story at the strawberry farm stands out. Though she has less screen time, her storyline feels more grounded and emotionally rewarding. Removed from the city's chaos, Mi-rae slowly makes her mark through patience and capability, offering a compelling contrast to the tension surrounding Mi-ji and Ho-su. Overall, this is a decent episode but Mi-ji and Ho-su's story could use more urgency and narrative development. Hopefully, upcoming episodes will explore their evolving relationship in more meaningful ways. Previous Episode Next Episode Expect A Full Season Write-Up When This Season Concludes!
Malay Mail
5 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Malay Mail
Dragon Boat dumplings: An ode to Cantonese ‘zung'
COMMENTARY, May 31 — Today is the Dragon Boat Festival or Duen Ng Jit (or Double Fifth Festival in Cantonese). The fifth day of the fifth month in the Chinese lunar calendar, when we commemorate how the ancients threw dumplings into a river where a beloved poet had drowned himself to prevent the fish from eating his corpse. Which sounds a bit macabre but what we are most mindful of today aren't dragon boat races or long-lamented poets but the delicious dumplings. This is my ode to the Dragon Boat dumplings, specifically my favourite Cantonese zung. The most common triangular or pyramid shaped 'zung'. — Picture by CK Lim Let us begin with its iconic shape (and the appetite-whetting thrill we get when we recognise it, even from a distance.) The most common zung you'd see is likely to be triangular or pyramid shaped. A tetrahedron, really. There are, of course, variations. The Northern Chinese zung is shaped like a log. In Japan, their version of zung, called chimaki, is sweet and has a long conical shape, typically eaten on Children's Day. A Northern Chinese 'zung' is shaped like a log. — Picture by CK Lim Those who grew up Malaccan, as I did, care less about the shape and more about the colour of the zung. Our Nyonya version is partially dyed blue thanks to the use of blue pea flower; the filling is simpler too — a sweet blend of minced pork and candied winter melon. But there's nothing quite like the stuffing of a formidable Cantonese zung. Full of goodness within, from shiitake mushrooms and mung beans to marinated pork belly and tender chestnuts. A bit of decadence when you add Chinese sausages and salted egg yolks. Plenty of aged umami from dried shrimp and dried scallops. Don't forget the sugar, salt and Chinese five spice. The secret ingredient, I've been told, is some chicken bouillon powder (the same secret ingredient to a fantastic fried rice, come to think of it). It's like the greatest hits from a well-stocked Cantonese pantry. Full of goodness within, from mushrooms to chestnuts. — Picture by CK Lim This might sound blasphemous to some but consider pairing your favourite savoury zung with some chilli oil. Really, don't knock it till you've tried it. Some folks like to dip their zung into a saucer of granulated sugar; me, I prefer some fragrant laat ziu yau. My favourite chilli oil is laden with fermented soybeans for an extra umami kick. Experiment with different types of chilli oil — anything from chilli crisps with fried garlic flakes to a hot honey chilli crunch. Honestly, it doesn't taste as spicy as you might fear (not when you have grown up eating cili padi!). The spice doesn't threaten unbearable heat; instead it deepens the savouriness of the zung. Your taste buds will thank me, as will you. Pair your favourite savoury 'zung' with some chilli oil. — Picture by CK Lim Of course, if you truly crave something fiery, you can always spice things up with some Sichuan mala powder. The mixture of Sichuan peppercorns, dried chilies, salt and a good dose of aromatic spices such as cardamom, cumin, cloves and star anise will electrify your palate. Not too much, but just enough to make you appreciate a soothing slice of shiitake mushroom or a fatty morsel of pork belly. You might be delusional from the numbing spices but you swear these gelatinous textures help to cool your tongue, now on fire. Spice things up with some Sichuan 'mala' powder. — Picture by CK Lim At the end of the day though, I'm happy to enjoy my zung as is. Slowly peeling the greasy bamboo leaves away to reveal the glutinous pyramid within. Slicing the now naked dumpling to unearth its treasures. Which should I taste first? The collagen-rich pork belly? The sweet chestnut? The seductive salted egg yolk? Perhaps start simply, with a few grains of the sticky rice, as well seasoned as a good life.
The Independent
5 days ago
- General
- The Independent
On discovering the real sex of my owl, I began to hatch a plan
Voices Learning that one of her male Eurasian eagle owls was, in fact, a female, poet and artist Frieda Hughes decided to try and hatch one of its eggs in an incubator this week
