Ahdaf Soueif
A finalist for the Booker Prize in 1999, The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif unfolds in two different timelines and through a variety of different formats.
The novel opens in 1997 with Amal, an Egyptian-American living in Cairo. She is contacted by Isabel, a young American journalist, with a request to translate Arabic papers and journals she found in her mother’s old trunk. Amal agrees to the task and so Isabel turns up in Cairo and the two begin going through the papers. They soon discover they are distant cousins. The papers belong to Anna Winterbourne, an English woman and Isabel’s great grandmother. Anna’s second marriage was to an Egyptian who happened to be Amal’s great uncle.
The second timeline, beginning in 1899 and running through to 1913, consists primarily of Anna’s journal entries and letters. After the death of her first husband, Anna decides to travel to Egypt. She revels in the sights, sounds, and smells of Egypt, but expresses frustration at her less than authentic experiences since she is primarily confined to a British circle of friends. Determined to remedy the situation, she disguises herself as a young man and sets off to find adventure in the desert. She gets more than she bargained for when she is kidnapped and taken to the home of Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Predictably, the two fall passionately in love and marry.
Anna adopts Egyptian ways and customs and begins learning Arabic. She is embraced by her husband’s family and friends, but is shunned by many of her former British colleagues. Happy in her marriage and very much in love, Anna soon finds herself embroiled in the political upheavals of an Egypt trying to break free from British and Ottoman control and a Palestine increasingly occupied by European Zionists.
The novel transitions from Anna’s timeline and that of Amal and Isabel unravelling the documents in 1997. The plot is further complicated when Isabel confides she has fallen in love with an Egyptian—Omar, a famous symphony conductor and Amal’s brother. The timelines intersect and parallel each other. Just as Anna contends with the political turmoil of the early twentieth-century, Amal has to navigate the political turmoil of Egypt at the end of the century. Sometimes the shifts are abrupt, and sometimes the political wranglings go on longer than necessary as if the speakers are mouthpieces presenting different points of view. There are a number of coincidences and twists which stretch credibility.
Ahdaf Soueif’s treatment of language is interesting. Anna doesn’t speak Arabic and Sharif Pasha doesn’t speak English, so they speak to each other in French—a language that is not native to either one, forcing them to pay close attention to what each is saying. Amal occasionally tutors Isabel on the roots and outgrowths of certain Arabic words. And the novel is peppered with transliterated Arabic words and idioms, all of which are explained in the glossary and which provide readers with a taste of Arab culture.
An intricately woven and engaging love story that connects the past with the present while showing how the seeds of the current political turmoil in the Middle East are rooted in decisions made in the past.