These questions have a powerful significance for the heroine of the book's second story: Isabel Parkman, an American divorcee and a descendant of Anna and Sharif. In 1997, Isabel meets and falls in love with Omar-al-Ghamrawi, a New York-based Egyptian who also has blood links to the Anna-Sharif marriage. Isabel decides to make a trip to Egypt, looking for answers to questions she has scarcely framed yet. She carries with her an old family trunk, which she delivers to Omar's sister Amal in Cairo. In the trunk are the notebooks and journals in which Anna confided the story of her love affair with Sharif and with Egypt. As Isabel, with Amal's help, pieces together the story of Anna's relationship, she finds that it has far more to do with her own than she had realized.
Ahdaf Soueif's triumph in this subtle, wise and moving novel is two-fold: she unerringly illuminates the historical and political intensities that govern even the most personal relationships, but she also makes us understand that "what will survive of usis love". This is a heart-piercing story of two love affairs: one fiercely up-to-date, the other long-ago but no less passionate. It is a story of Empire, of Egypt, a story of the century captured in compelling close-up.
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Together the two women begin to uncover the stories embedded in the journal of Lady Anna Winterbourne, who traveled to Egypt in 1900 and fell in love with Sharif Pasha al-Barudi, an Egyptian nationalist. To their surprise, they stumble across some unsuspected connections between their own families. Less surprising, perhaps, is the persistence of the very same issues that dogged their ancestors: colonialism, Egyptian nationalism, and the clash of cultures throughout the Middle East. The past, however, does offer some semblance of omniscience:
That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you--unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.With its multiple narratives and ever-shifting perspectives, The Map of Love would seem to cast some doubt on even the most confident historian's version of events. Yet this subtle and reflective tale of love does suggest that the relations between individuals can (sometimes) make a difference. "I am in an English autumn in 1897," Amal confesses at one point, "and Anna's troubled heart lies open before me." Here, perhaps, is a hint about how we should read Soueif's staggering novel, using words as a means to travel through time, space, and identity. --Vicky Lebeau
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