I think I just found another favorite author. This past week, but mostly Friday and Saturday, I have been swept away to Syria in the the novel De duistere kant van de liefde (The Dark Side of Love; original German title Die dunkle Seite der Liebe) by Syrian-German writer Rafik Schami. I read slightly more than half of the 760+ page book on Friday and Saturday. Friday was my day off and I had no other plans. I ended up reading and reading and reading, because I couldn’t put the book away. Then on Saturday morning I woke up, made coffee and decided to read for a bit in bed before I’d go get some breakfast, because we didn’t have anything to eat in the house. Next thing I know, I close the last page and it is three hours later. And I still hadn’t had breakfast!
The story starts and ends with the murder of a Muslem officer in Damascus, the capital of Syria. In between we learn what led to the murder, we learn about the vendetta between the clans of the Shaheen family and the Mushtaak family, the forbidden love between Rana Shaheen and Farid Mushtaak, their lives and those of their families, how the Syrian dictatorships influenced the lives of individual people. The story shows the depth of love, but it also shows the darkest side of human beings. It is a great story spread over most of the twentieth century, a grim and at times bloody and at the same time a sensuous and colorful story of love and hate. And at the same time a lovesong to Damascus and to the Arab world.
The previous paragraph is as close as I will get to disclosing the plot, because really there is too much in the book. It would turn into an and-then-and-then-and-then summing up. Which doesn’t do any justice to the story at all. Besides, way too much happens in the book to tell the plot in a few sentences. There are lots of characters in this book, but somehow it was easy to keep them all apart. They are all different, but also the family-trees of the Shaheen and the Mushtaak families included in the book helped a lot.
Rafik Schami is a Syrian writer who has been living in Germany for about 35 years. He writes in German, which is interesting because that is not his first language. He has written novels, YA-fiction, and children’s books. Some of it has been translated into English. I had never heard about Schami unil a German friend gave me a copy of his YA-book A handful of Stars (this one has been translated into English for sure). It was her favorite book. I loved it as well. When I was in Holland last winter, I spend a couple of hours browsing in a big bookstore, where I found De duistere kant van de liefde on the table with new books. Despite the book being big and heavy (had to take it back to Armenia with me), hardcover and expensive, I couldn’t leave it there and had to take a copy with me. Boy, am I glad I did!
Can you tell how much I loved this book? This is definitely going to end up very, very high on my list of favorite books of this year and it also goes on my list of favorite books ever. At the same time, I realize how little I have to write about this book here. I want to share and tell so much, but that would all be spoilers. I guess I’d love to share my thoughts with someone who has also read the book. I somehow feel that this review doesn’t do the book justice. It does in showing how much I loved it, but not in talking about the book itself. Isn’t it weird, how sometimes the best books you read are the hardest to write about?
Apparently Die dunkle Seite der Liebe will be published in English. If it won’t, I hope someone somewhere in the publishing industry will change his mind, because the English speaking world is missing out on something. If you can get a hold of a copy in a language that you read, do pick it up. I highly recommend this book.
I am starting to overdo my praise, am I not?
Update October 23, 2008: I have some good news! Pam left a comment on this post saying that The Dark Side of Love will be published in English in 2009. For more information keep an eye on the website of Interlink Publishers here. I had never heard of this company, but if you are interested in world literature, the site is definitely worth a visit. They have lots of interesting titles in their catalog.
A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction - Virginia Woolf
In Europa - Geert Mak
Prince Rupert's Teardrop - Lisa Glass
WOW! it’s fun to read about books that make people’s all time faves.
Oh that does sound good! I have a good friend living in Syria right now and I’m curious about the country of course. I’ll have to watch for it in english since my Dutch and German are not good enough to read novels in.
It sounds fascinating!
Dang! I was getting excited to add this to my TBR list until you said it wasn’t in English. Don’t you love books that make you forget the time?
I know, Natasha, not good that it hasn’t been translated into English (yet)!. Not good at all! I really hope that it does get translated, especially since it is set in a country, Syria, that generally doesn’t get good press in the US and many other countries. This is a such great book to counteract that.
I have just finished reading it and i relate so much to you! just like you, i felt i couldn’t put it down, i just needed to know more and more about the lives of any of the characters, the tones of them!! It didn’t care if they were minor, they still had a story to tell. A must-read.
Silvia, I am so glad you loved the book as much as I did! I know what you mean when you say that even the minor characters were interesting and you wanted to know more about them. An amazing book, isn’t it?
The good news is it will come out in English next year — watch http://www.interlinkbooks.com for details.
Pam, that is such good news! I was really hoping this book would be translated into English, because it is such a great story.
I’m literally in the middle of reading “The Dark Sede of Love”.I first discovered Rafik Schami some years ago when I read a very glowing review of “Damascus Nights”, which I enjoyed so much that I ended up buying 12 copies for some of my friends. “The Dark Side of Love” is, of course much bigger , literally, more significant and more sweeping.And While I do enjoy it, the first half has left me with a slightly bitter aftertaste.
Like Rafik Schami, I’m a Syrian, but unlike him, I’m a Moslem,albeit a very secular one. I also share with him the fact that we’ve both been living in the ‘West” for a very long time, the US in my case, and that we both,obviously, care deeply about our country, its culture and its history.So you can imagine my feeling about the way he portrays Syrian Moslems, who, by the way, costitute the majority of the population. In his world , we are mostly non-existent, and when we do make a cameo appearnce, it is as corrupt officers,back-stabbers, ignorant politicians, hypocritical,semi-literate clerics,bandits, etc., this being a mere sampling of our portrayals in the novel. Let me hasten to add that we certainly have our share of allery of rogues, but we are much more than that.Even when it comes to the physical reality of Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, Schami reduces it to the Christian Quarter, which while so rich in its history and architecture, does not reflect the entirety of that great city.
I recognize, of course, that novelists should not be held to the same standard as historians. I simply cannot understand why he makes the Syrians who rose up against the French during the period 1919-1925 as mere brigands and bandits. While they most certainly included in their ranks people who were out for spoils, the leaders and the rank and file were simply fighting for independence and trying,against tremedous odds, to shake off the yoke of French colonialism. Also, in the same vein, I take exception to the cavlier way which he portrays Anton Sa’adeh,the Lebanese founder of the Syrian National Party. Although it is true that he was strongly influenced by certain German Nazi theoriticians,portraying him as a mere, thuggish, incompetent adventurer does a great disservice to the modern political history of the Near East.While I’m no partisan of his or a member of his party, I think that no objective observer would begrudge him his great influence on many educated youth which, to a lesser extent, continues to this day, esp. in purging the virus of sectarianism from the young and inculcating in them the spirit of secularism, which , particualrly in view of what is happening today in many parts of the Near East is no mean feat.
Finally a word about the publisher and the translation. Interlink deserves much wider recognition in the English speaking world for the very intersting tiltes it puts out every year. It especially renders a great service to all those intersted in the Middle East.However,the translation of this particular book leaves a lot to be desired; at times, it was ungrammatical and sounded strangely unidiomatic.