Una joya de la literatura! Sin duda! Hac铆a tiempo que no le铆a una historia taaaaaannnnn condenadamente buena y absorbente. La voz de Schami me ha transportado a Damasco como si fuera una alfombra voladora y me ha envuelto en una Mil y una noches de historias proh铆bidas; de secretos y pasiones, de carceles y manicomios, de amores imposibles y venganzas... Sin dudarlo, de momento este es el mejor libro que he le铆do este a帽o!
"No hay peor falta de libertad que la que uno se ve obligado a sopotar tras haber apendido a respirar libremente."
I am so very frustrated with this book! The violence is repetitive. The sex is disturbingly portrayed, and it is repetitive too. There is no beauty in any love relationship. Beauty....I thought I would glimpse the beauty of the Syrian landscape. No! I thought I would be drawn into learning about Syrian history and culture. I thought I would get a feel for Damascus. All of this is lacking.
There is no emotional tie between the reader and the numerous characters. You meet a character and he is married and has six children and then is killed or dies of an illness. All within three pages. Then the next character is delivered to you in the next two pages, and so on and so on. Yes, I am exaggerating a teeny bit, but not much. I need a feeling of attachment to at least one or two characters. I feel nothing for any one of them. Why? There are too many, there is zero dialog and you are told rather than having been shown. The classical failure of poorly written books.
Have I learned interesting facts of history? No! I have been told in a few short sentences about the conniving behavior and bribery of those in power, but there is no continuity to the historical facts. There is little substance to show me how the people were affected by life under these leaders. They merely appear and disappear.
This book is poorly written. There is not one beautiful or thought provoking line. You learn nothing, neither about human behavior, history, Damascus nor Syria. You couldn't care less about any of the characters. There is no humor. It is inexcusable that more than 200 pages is necessary for a book to become interesting or the slightest engaging, so yes, I am dumping this book.
**
Through page 175:
I hope this improves. There are two Syrian families that have a blood feud. If you can kill someone in the other family, you do it! Guess what happens then? A girl from one family and a guy from the other feuding family fall in love. Surprising? The biggest problem is that I have met about fifty people from these two families. (Thank God there are two complete family trees in the front of the book.) Too many characters to feel a thing for any one of them, let alone keep their names straight! Yes, there is murder and fornication and then another murder and more fornication. Multiply that by three or four. None of the characters mean anything at all to me so I couldn't care less..... I hope this improves. I have heard the book has a slow start.
This is without a doubt one of my favorite books of all time. I'm surprised to see that some of the other reviewers criticized for being yet another book about honor killings in Arabia; one of the things I loved about was that it did NOT deal with honor killings as the all-encompassing story, in fact, it was just one of the many haunting and exquisitely told stories in this mammoth of a book.
Definitely the length of the book should not be looked at as a hindrance: once I really got into the book after the first 70 pages or so, I found myself thinking, yay I still have a lot more to go! I actually didn't want to get to the end because I was so thoroughly enjoying myself.
Somewhere towards the end I remember the author mentioning the story as a mosaic, and I think that's the perfect way to describe this novel. I also think it's the ideal way to show readers an image of life in an Arab country: each piece is a little fragment of the whole, on its own may not make much sense, but its still beautiful, and will be laid down, and little by little the image will build up in your head, until you see the whole picture.
Love is everywhere in this book, but I think the greatest love of all is the author's love of Syria, the country from which he has been exiled for many years. The dark side of love for land is a very strong theme throughout. Whilst personally I can't get over the title - I feel it's too cheesy to do the book justice, I guess it fits in some ways.
Unfortunately a book too big for me. Don't get me wrong, if it had been interesting enough, I would have read the whole 1000 pages (with very very small letters). I thought it will give me the chance to find out more about that part of the world. But after 100 pages where you learn about a lot of characters who love and hate and produce children and die, I stopped reading. I will put it on the shelf and read it when my head will be touched by dementia. Probably then I will find it more thrilling.
Oh, and there are two families who because of some unknown reason hate each other to death. One family has a son, one family has a daughter. Guess what happens. Can u consider this a spoiler?
-Cuando algo es muy complicado, o lo rechazamos de plano o nos jugamos el todo por el todo.-
G茅nero. Novela.
Lo que nos cuenta. En la turbulenta Damasco de finales de los sesenta, el joven de familia cat贸lica Farid y la joven de familia ortodoxa Rana, se conocen y tratan de proteger su amor de un entorno hostil, mientras vamos conociendo el pasado y el futuro de la regi贸n y los protagonistas a trav茅s de los relatos de diferentes personajes.
驴Quiere saber m谩s del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
While at the beginning, I had some trouble getting into the story of the family feud between two Christian families in Syria which began at the end of the 19th century and keeps influencing generation after generation, the book and its characters started to grow on me after having ploughed through the first third of the novel. While I found the repetitiveness of violence and forbidden love a little bit tiring at first, it became one topic of many in the course of the book. I truly enjoy the Oriental way of telling a story - the narrator kind of meanders through urban Damascus and rural Mala, stopping here and there without obvious reason, thus creating a vivid image of the city, the country and its history. I've found this novel in a series dedicated to world's cities, and Damascus is definitely the hidden protagonist of the book. The prose is beautiful and evocative, and makes one smell the odours of the city, hear the chatter of the women and the noise of the children playing in the streets and the sheer vastness of the novel with its dozens of characters and sidelines reminds me of the labyrinth of Oriental medinas - definitely a book which makes one long for a journey to its settings.
Besides, I learned quite much about the history of this country and I believe Rafik Schami is a rather unbiased narrator - of course, most of his main characters are cristian Arabs, but there are Muslims and Jews as well and for me he did a good job in giving a voice to all the different parts of this complex society rather favouring a humanistic approach towards life. Especially women's lot is represented in a way that makes me admire his insight into the female point of view. Schami shows the beauty and the colours of Syria while at the same time pointing out the weaknesses of a patriarcal society in which tolerance and freedom of thought are not guaranteed. It's obvious that Schami's own biography has influenced this novel a lot and that parts of Farid's life is based on Schami's own experiences - like his main character, Schami had to leave Syria for political reasons and started a new life in Germany, writing this extraordinarily beautiful novel in a language not his native one which is quite a miracle to me.
Parts of this book made me laugh, others made me cry, and I'm sorry to leave Farid, Rana and the rest of the protagonists after the long journey I've shared with them.
Vor rund 20 Jahren habe ich gerne und viel Schami gelesen, damals war ich noch ein unerfahrener Leser und diese Geschichten, die wie Wasserf盲lle dahinpl盲tschern haben mich fasziniert. Irgendwann nervte mich aber, dass die Kernhandlung hinter Arabesken verschwand. Nun lange Jahre sp盲ter also ein weiteres Werk von Schami, das allerdings seinem Umfang nach alle anderen sprengt. Dennoch bleibt hier Schami seine St盲rken und Schw盲chen treu.
Wie der Autor selbst berichtet, versucht er seinen Roman wie ein arabische Mosaik aufzubauen, bei jedes der unz盲hligen Kapitel als eigenst盲ndiges Steinchen zu faszinieren geeignet ist und dabei kaum hinter dem Gesamtgebilde voll rankenden Arabesken zur眉cksteht. In der Tat bilden die vielen Mosaiksteine ein 眉berzeugendes Panorama der syrischen Welt der Jahre 1950-1970 in den unterschiedlichsten Facetten. Im Fokus steht die Analyse einer Gesellschaft, die die Freiheit des Einzelnen und insbesondere die freie Partnerwahl vollst盲ndig unterdr眉ckt. Besonders eindrucksvoll sind dabei die Kapitel, die das Leid der Frauen schildern, w盲hrend die Folterszenen recht stark von bekannten Vorbildern aus dem Holocaust inspiriert sind und an diese nicht heranragen k枚nnen.
Dabei tritt die Rahmenhandlung, eine Romeo und Julia Geschichte, erfreulicherweise immer mehr in den Hintergrund. Leider versucht der Autor auf den letzten 70 Seiten die Mosaiksteine zu einem Happy Ending zusammenzuf眉hren und nimmt damit diesem recht d眉steren Buch etwas von seinem Reiz.
The main story was interesting. However, there were too many side stories. I found them distracting. I read half of the book and just couldn't drum up the interest to finish it. I think it would have been an excellent book at half of its length and more focus on the main characters.
An dieses Buch werde ich sicherlich noch 枚fters zur眉ck denken. Ich habe es gelesen und zum Teil auch geh枚rt, wobei im H枚rbuch einige Anekdoten fehlen.
Es ist ein sehr umfangreiches Buch (mehr als 800 Seiten) und es besteht - wie der Autor am Ende des Buches schreibt - aus vielen Mosaiksteinchen, die am Ende ein ganzes Bild ergeben. Im Grunde genommen handelt die Geschichte von einer verbotenen Liebe zwischen Rana und Farid, die zwei verfeindeten Sippen angeh枚ren. Aber die Geschichte ist viel mehr als das!
In diese Grundgeschichte werden viele Anekdoten eingeflochten, die viele Aspekte des Lebens in Syrien zwischen 1900 und 1969 zeigen: die Sippen, die Religionen (Muslims, Katholiken, Orthodoxe, Juden), die Ehre der Familien, die Lage der Frauen und deren Rechte (zum Teil recht beklemmend), die politische Lage (Putsche, Rebellen), aber auch das Alltagsleben.
Ich habe fast einen Monat gebraucht, um das Buch zu lesen und manchmal dachte ich es geht nie zu Ende, aber am Ende hat es sich gelohnt. Vielleicht lese ich es irgendwann noch einmal. Auf jeden Fall, werde ich mehr von Rafik Schami lesen.
Spanning eight hundred and ninety-six pages and three sprawling generations of Syrian families, 'The Dark Side Of Love' is a massive, monumental paean to passion in all its tragic glory. Decades in its creation, Schami's work consists of three hundred and four separate fragments ordered together in the same intricate manner as the mosaics which adorn the Arab world's most splendid mosques. 'Each of these pieces tells a story, and when you have read them they show you their own secret colours,' says the author in his afterword, relaying the vivid dream he says finally presented him with the concept for this narrative form. 'As soon as you have read all the stories, you will see the picture.' Seldom have books this long and exhaustive remained so utterly compelling from the first page to the last. Schami has not left as much as a single tile out of place. 'The Dark Side Of Love' starts with a murder and ends with its solution. But this is no detective novel. This is first and foremost a book about Syrian love, unfurled in startling vignettes of tragic, forbidden trysts that sprinkle its pages like the sugar-coated fennel seeds which fall onto the streets of Damascus one night as if by magic. Two strangers gallop into the remote, mountain village of Mala in 1907, fugitives from a brutal arranged marriage, and inadvertently begin a feud between the Mushtak and Shahin clans which will spill the blood of generations to come. Some seventy years later in Damascus, the teenaged Farid Mushtak will meet and fall in love with a girl whom fate cruelly dictates is a Shahin. Their choice is stark: to deny their passion, or face death. Embracing a breathtaking array of characters, but managing to retain a clarity characteristic of so much translated Arabic fiction, Schami proceeds to fill in the gap of those three-score years, revealing why Farid and Rana's nascent love is doomed. Schami's work is in itself a love letter to a Damascus which in the course of his book survives the turmoil of occupation by the French, the terror of a never-ending series of brutal dictators and their Secret Service goons, short-lived union with Egypt and the birth of Israel. Yet so richly painted is Schami's picture of Damascene life that through all its turmoil and tragedies, the city never loses its allure. The novel develops through countless doomed affairs and periods of suppression, both individual and collective. In the 'Book Of Laughter', there are beautiful anecdotes about Damascene childhood; in the 'Book Of Hell', a nightmarish portrayal of life in Syria's secret prisons. It involves an extraordinary amount of sex, but this is not the kind of gratuitous or perfunctory copulation prevalent in so many philosophical modern novels - there are no 'Bad Sex Awards' here: the sex in this book is straight-forward and stallion-esque, which only the most tiresome prude would deny is not entirely in keeping with Schami's exploration of passion's extremes: the price for such ecstasy is often certain death. Schami's prose is simple and his outlook avowedly realist: beyond the occasional dream, he squeezes the whims of fate and fantasy from life itself. This realism makes 'The Dark Side Of Love' deeply affecting: haunting, heart-breaking and undeniably pertinent given the tragedy centred on Schami's beloved city today. Others have been right to question Schami's choice of title for his book, for this is not simply about love's 'dark side', but about love in all its glory - the kind of love that conquers all, even death.
An old storyteller tells his rapt audience:
"A woman once loved a man with a large wart on his nose. She thought him the most handsome man in the world. Years later, however, she noticed the wart one morning. 'How long have you had that wart on your nose?' she asked. 'Ever since you stopped loving me,' said the man sadly."
Some say this is the great Syrian novel. I haven't read enough Syrian novels to venture an opinion beyond declaring it almost unfathomable that many, if any, Syrian novels could possibly be this good. It's the kind of book you truly wish will never end, and mercifully it takes a long time to do just that. Like the mosaics in the mosque, its intricate colours will shine out for generations to come.
This took me far too long to read. The blurb on the back gives the impression it will be a murder mystery kind of story that it sent in Syria, so I figured I would see how investigations like that work in that setting. It's nothing like that. Around 95%, possibly more, of the book bears absolutely no relation to the original event at the opening of the book. There was, frankly, no need to tell a story going back over such a long period of time to only get to the original event and summarise the outcome of it in a few pages. And it even felt like there wasn't a proper outcome, like the author just couldn't be bothered by that point.
Like some other reviewers I was expecting to read descriptions of Damascus and other parts of Syria that would give a true feeling of the area and that was one of the reasons that I got the book. There didn't appear to be much of this, there was hardly anything to describe or give character to the areas it was set in.
The story isn't even consistent in its timeline and jumps all over the place for at least the first third of the entire book before settling on the characters whose story is to be told. As it goes on the spelling and grammar gets worse - I can't tell if that's just a lack of proofreading, a poor translator or because there isn't quite a direct translation of what is being said. That said, it was written in German - a language that is easily translated to English.
For all of the hours that I put into this book most of them feel like they were wasted. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless you like banal families that go back multiple generations without anything worth sharing.
I gave it the old college try, but decided to abandon this novel after 100 pages. The Dark Side of Love is a story of Rana Shahin and Farid Mushtak, whose love story is similar to Romeo and Juliet, only this tale takes place in Syria, and the fighting between the families is much more violent. The novel begins when a body is found 鈥� a high ranking Muslim officer, and I presume that the remainder of the story unfolds like crime fiction, which is not really my cup of tea. There are many reviewers who gave this book high marks, but perhaps they were lovers of crime fiction.
At over 800 pages, this book just didn鈥檛 capture my interest enough to stick with it.