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Meg's Reviews > Married to a Bedouin
Married to a Bedouin
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My partner went to school with the authors son, so when the book came out he made sure to pick it up. Unfortunately he found it hard to get into. However, after I read a few lines of the first chapter I found myself interested in seeing what happened next.
This book provided a straight-forward account from a european person integrating into Bedouin life-a very different culture. I found it interesting and the author provided a pretty clear picture of every day life. The on thing missing from this book was emotion, a confiding voice. How did such an independant person feel about suddenly living in a culture where she couldn't speak the language? Was she lonely? Was she scared? How did she feel, sleeping under an open sky/living in a cave/married to a man from a very different culture? I would have loved to know more about how her relationship with her husband worked. Despite somewhat dry narrative, I did enjoy this book and found it a fairly easy read/
This book provided a straight-forward account from a european person integrating into Bedouin life-a very different culture. I found it interesting and the author provided a pretty clear picture of every day life. The on thing missing from this book was emotion, a confiding voice. How did such an independant person feel about suddenly living in a culture where she couldn't speak the language? Was she lonely? Was she scared? How did she feel, sleeping under an open sky/living in a cave/married to a man from a very different culture? I would have loved to know more about how her relationship with her husband worked. Despite somewhat dry narrative, I did enjoy this book and found it a fairly easy read/
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
September 9, 2007
– Shelved
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as for me, only one star, because i didnt feel character and emotion on this book. i believe she had strugyes its dry narrative and kinda boring. i believe she had struggled to live her life (like me) but yes she sounded so much like tourist
can't agree more! I was just waiting for something, something more insight of the feelings/emotion. But that was just it. Anyway, this book was well written, with parts well connected in a wise logic. I enjoyed it.
Mary has quite a lot of personal assumptions about me based this one book review. It was indeed a rant and a confusing one at best since I made no assumptions about Bedouin life or the land. 12 years later it’s still annoying.
Marguerite is actually explaining what she did, to overcome the cultural barriers. She learnt to speak Arabic without the help of written language - she had to memorise most of it. She learnt to cook bread, conserve water, live in a cave with no power (in the beginning) and many other things that Bedouin people have always done.
After reading this book, I always look at the city of Petra, as if it has lost its most valuable resource - the Bedouin people who once lived in the caves and brought the city alive. I got all of that - just by reading the book. There is a saying that you never really understand the people of a land, until you speak their language(literally).
Too many Westerners go to arab lands and think that they are doing them a favor, when in actual fact, it is the other way around. Their customs may seem draconian to us, but we have nothing to brag about in the West, when our cities are full of crime and our women are treated like meat in the media. Sorry for the rant, but I just couldn't help noticing that you sound so much like the tourists i saw on television once, from new zealand, who went to Jordan and kept talking about the people as if they backward and whispering to the camera that they weren;t terrorists afterall.