Book 17 - Camilla Gibb "Sweetness In The Belly"

I quickly devoured this fascinating account of a protagonist in another time and place, and very alien to my world view.

An unusual setting for a novel - Morocco, Ethiopia and London from 1970 to 1990, amidst the carnage and destruction of Northern Africa. But it's not a horror story, more a story of survival against the odds.
Well written and totally engrossing.

Lily is born of English / Irish parents and after their tragic deaths is raised as a devout Muslim in the shrine of the Great Abdul. Her childhood has been spent travelling from country to country like a gypsy but when she is orphaned she is in Morocco and makes her home there until political unrest forces her to travel East. Hussein, her travelling companion is a few years older than her but not much more worldly wise. Together they arrive in Harrar, Ethiopia.
Then follows a fascinating account of her efforts to integrate as a "Farenji" or foreigner.
Interwoven with this account is her subsequent life as a refugee in London. Here she struggles with the effects of the war and copes by helping others search for loved ones - all the while living in hope that a certain person will appear on the lists of refugee names.

After a slow start I was riveted, finding it difficult to drag myself from one existence to the other as the chapters changed. Some of the politics lost me a bit, I wish I knew more about this history, but this was a fascinating start.
Highly recommended

The Seventies

Fine documentary on television this evening courtesy of BBC 2 from Dominic Sandbrook, author of late fifties “Never Had It So Good” and the sixties “White Heat” addressing the decade of the seventies. The half hour music programme following it concentrated on the art-rock of the period, so we had Bowie, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, The Kinks, Sparks , and just two low points in it for me, New York Dolls, and the overblown pretentious Queen.

It got me thinking back to when I did the Arts Foundation course for the O.U years back, and at summer school (UMIST) we had a project to do, and I concentrated my project or thesis on the sixties, after reading the late great Arthur Marwick book on the same period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Marwick

Arthur Marwick was a critic of postmodernism, seeing it as a "menace to serious historical study". It was also the methodology of the postmodernism to which he was opposed, "the techniques to deconstruction or discourse analysis have little value compared with the sophisticated methods historians have been developing over years". In some ways I have tended to err towards his critique although I have found postmodernistic discourse to be very invigorating in historical discourse vis a vis from the strands of analysis by Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida, et all.

I must try and get a copy of his book “The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (1998) “, which was one of the books I used as background to the project.

Meanwhile, just nearing the end of “How To Live, A Life of Montaigne”.