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Ahdaf Soueif

The Map of Love

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  • siamooihas quoted9 years ago
    A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall.
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    New York City, February 1997
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    Oh what a dear, ravishing thing is the beginning of an Amour!

    Aphra Behn, c. 1680

    Cairo, May 1997
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    My journal is of no use on such occasions for it would merely encourage the expression of these emotions that threaten me and that I must put aside.

    I cannot believe that he is happy.
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    Cairo, April 1997
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    An old-fashioned trunk made of brown leather, cracked now and dry, with a vaulted top over which run two straps fastened with brass buckles black with age and neglect.
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    The American had come to Amal’s house. Her name was Isabel Parkman and the trunk was locked in the boot of the car she had hired. Amal could not pretend she was not wary. Wary and weary in advance: an American woman – a journalist, she had said on the phone. But she said Amal’s brother had told her to call and so Amal agreed to see her. And braced herself: the fundamentalists, the veil, the cold peace, polygamy, women’s status in Islam, female genital mutilation – which would it be?
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    But Isabel Parkman was not brash or strident; in fact she was rather diffident, almost shy. She had met Amal’s brother in New York. She had told him she was coming to Egypt to do a project on the millennium, and he had given her Amal’s number. Amal said she doubted whether Isabel would come across anyone with grand millennial views or theories. She said that she thought Isabel would find that on the whole everyone was simply worried – worried sick about what would become of Egypt, the Arab countries, ‘le tiers monde’, in the twenty-first century. But she gave her coffee and some names and Isabel went away.
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    You can buy one today in the Ghuriyya for twenty Egyptian pounds
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted3 years ago
    A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall. For Amal al-Ghamrawi, this story started with a trunk.
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