From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Sun Jul 20 2008 - 00:02:10 EDT
>From The Times
July 18, 2008
The Consequences Of Love by Sulaiman Addonia
The Times review by Christina Koning
A boy meets a girl. They fall in love. They decide they want to be together.
These simple ingredients constitute the plot of Addonia's debut. What saves
the work from being just another sensitively realised coming-of-age story is
that it is set in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s, and what would otherwise be
a straightforward rite of passage is fraught with terrible difficulty.
When we meet him, 20- year-old Naser is working as a car-wash attendant in
Jeddah. The product of a liberal upbringing in his native Eritrea, from
which he and his younger brother fled ten years before, Naser is privately
appalled by the intolerance around him, based as it is on Wahhibist
ideology, which insists on the absolute segregation of men and women. For
the handsome young man, desperate to find a girl he can call his own, such a
view is anathema. Nor is he safe from the sexual overtures of other men.
In the street one day, a black-veiled woman drops a piece of paper at
Naser's feet that turns out to be a love letter. From this moment on, his
life changes for ever, as he and the girl he names Fiore - or “flower” -
embark on a dangerous flirtation that could end, if it is discovered, in
their deaths. Fiore takes steps to identify herself to her lover in the
ranks of women in their black abayas. This she does by wearing pink
high-heeled shoes, symbolising the contrast between the restrictive regime
under which the young couple are living, and the sexual freedom to which
they aspire.
As Naser and his habibati prepare to risk everything for love, he reflects
on the absurdity of the system that has placed them under restraint: “It was
a gloomy world where everyone feared something, a world where laughter was a
sin...(and) where looking at a woman's face...was a serious crime.” The
author allows his indignation to express itself through the thoughts of his
characters, making us see their predicament as our own.
The Consequences Of Love by Sulaiman Addonia
Chatto & Windus, £12.99 Buy
<http://www.tolbooks.co.uk/TBP.Direct/PurchaseProduct/OrderProduct/CustomerS
electProduct/FullProductDetail.aspx?productcode=9780701182410> the book
here
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rBdlucQHL._SS500_.jpg
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