A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz

This was one of my favorite books of this Contemporary World Literature Class. I grew up being gently forced to read biographies by my mother, who used to choose one mandatory book for us from the library in addition to many books of our choosing. She always chose helpful, boring books like biographies. I appreciate it now for being non-fiction and expanding my tastes in elementary school, but at the time those books were dry and pale in comparison to the colorful Boxcar Children and Goosebumps and Little House on the Prairie stories. I rarely read biographies after elementary. I was apprehensive about the memoirs and autobiographies in this class but was pleasantly surprised by all of them. I particularly enjoyed reading Istanbul: Memories and the City for its historical richness and overwhelmingly detailed analysis of one's childhood. The blatantly honest switches between city and self was a different way of autobiography that Pamuk accomplished very well. For that reason, I also enjoyed A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz. Again, a complicated and rich history of a city against the backdrop of a personal (Pamuk's) story (or the city a backdrop for his childhood).

Oz deals with gender roles and expectations as he did in My Michael in the character of Hannah. He recalls his aunt's saying that she cannot be sure of what to think of the current culture as she may have been "brainwashed, like all the girls in [her] generation" (180). Chastity could disappear with any slight misstep and "women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home - but only until the children are born" (178). It was interesting to note similar gender restraints in Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mom, in which Mom pushes her children (even including the daughters) to pursue education and sacrifices her own comfort, as she did not receive education as a young girl.

As I've mentioned before in the final exam presentation, one reason why I resonated with Oz's memoir is his accurate retelling of the tension he experienced as an aspiring thinker/writer: the balance between the rational and irrational; secular and spiritual;' reality and ideals. He talks about his admiration for Jules Verne's Michael Strogroff who wins the battle for his country with tears of pure passion and emotion, not masculine stoicism and intellectual musings: "And now here was Michael Strogoff, a flawless hero, a man of iron who could endure any hardship or torture, and yet when he suddenly thinks of love, he shows no restraint: he weeps...not weep from fear, or from pain, but because of the intensity of his feelings" (457-8). Oz is cultured to think with the "pioneering ethos of Zionism that [he] received from [his] father: secular, enlightened, rationalistic, idealistic, militantly optimistic and progressive" yet his heart strains for the "miracle-laden logic", charm, mystery, and grace of his mother's stories (459). He is caught up with dichotomous thinking as he is caught up in the middle of his parents' relationship as a young child. Strogoff's choice to bare his soul (femininity) instead of fighting back to defeat his enemies shows that there is a way to reconcile the seemingly contradictory mechanisms: "And so this manliest of men defeats all his foes thanks for his 'feminine side'...without impairing or weakening his 'masculine side'...on the contrary, it complemented it and made peace with it" (458). Likewise, there is hope for Oz to bring together his parents' mismatched lives (he likes to think they are living together in "perfect harmony" in the after life) as there is much reason to shy away from hard dichotomous thinking towards a holistic and personal integration (461). 

Echoes of an Autobiography by Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz's autobiography is unlike any other biography I have read. As it's title suggests, the book contains echoes of what has passed. Mahfouz has managed to capture the dim lights and the faded photographs of his life and settle them into short epitaph-like stories. A more accurate word to describe Echoes of an Autobiography is "vignette". Merriam-Webster's Dictionary has three definitions of the word "vignette". Firstly, as a "running ornament" or a decorative design placed on the title page or chapter. It wouldn't be a stretch to consider each vignette or story as a carefully placed design or motif on a larger story. The second definition describes a vignette as a picture or engraving that shades off into the surrounding paper; the third definition, "a short literary sketch".

In a way, Echoes of an Autobiography attempts to capture "the essence of the essence" Naguib Mahfouz's life through riddles, aphorisms, and passing thoughts (ix).  Several of the vignettes speak on the major themes of human nature and living, such as jealousy, love, hatred, fickleness, justice, morality, judgment, death and dying, and the transient quality of life. As with Arabian Nights and Days, a cursory reading of the text provides a plain story or background - a skeletal structure without the flesh and connecting ligaments of a functioning body. It's up to the reader to fill in the framework with muscles and joints and a covering of skin through collaborative discussion (as we did in class) and reflection. The vignettes are often not easy to swallow, such as "Justice" (13) and "A Lesson Learned" (11) as they seem too bare bones from which to construct a proverb from. Perhaps Mahfouz errs on the side of too little than too much, choosing to led the readers think and realize what it is the story could tell them. Nadine Gordimer's foreword emphasizes that the essential quality of a writer is in their words, not in their appearance or personality: "The essence of a writer's being is in the work, not the personality, though the world values things otherwise...The persona of the writer is the vessel" (viii). Likewise, Mahfouz himself is the backdrop against which his vignettes stand up from.