tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9878002.post4595163158065580911..comments2024-03-29T01:01:11.212-05:00Comments on PERPETUAL FOLLY: The New Yorker: "The Blue Djinn" by Téa ObrehtUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9878002.post-8021572714891445342010-09-16T17:24:37.206-05:002010-09-16T17:24:37.206-05:00I liked this story, with almost no reservations. A...I liked this story, with almost no reservations. Along with Nicole Krauss’s piece, this is my favorite of the series so far. And that’s a big feat, since Obreht is also the youngest author on the roster. (The pace of Joshua Ferris’s story was also commendable.)<br /><br />As you suggested, I do think Egypt is the setting of the story—more specifically, the Sinai Peninsula. The story mentions St. Catherine’s, and there’s a famous St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai. People there do blend habibi into their sentences. It wasn’t very clear to me what language they were speaking, though. I thought they talked in English all the time, which explains why the habibis went untranslated. But at one point, Fawad spoke to a tourist, and we are told he did this “in English.” If they weren’t talking in English, why not say “my friend” instead of tossing in the Arabic phrase? If they were talking in English, why clarify that Fawad’s response was in English? Strange.<br /><br />I share your distaste for dreams in fiction (“Tell a dream, lose a reader,” D. M. Kaplan quotes an editor as saying in his book Revision). However, I’m not sure what the ending was. Because of the elements of fantasy in the story, and the child-focalized narrative, I was willing to go along with a fantastical rapture at the end. But the symbolism of the trapped turtle (which I feared was a trapped shark until the shell globed up) dominated the ending. The shipwreck is also symbolically charged, as we are told, “For Jack, the ship is the edge of the world, and it has sat there, on the lip of his knowledge, for as long as he can remember.” So witnessing the Frenchman’s corpse brought Jack to the edge of his own experience, and showed him how limited it was. Puzzling, but provocative. I didn’t object to the ending’s possible indecipherability.<br /><br />I generally regard flashbacks with suspicion, and the story uses more flashbacks than is advisable. Despite that, it marches along well, convincingly, and Obreht uses flashbacks to heighten tension, which is not easy to do. On a different matter, there is a good helping of simple but evocative similes (“his stomach feels tight, as though something had pushed its way under his rib”).<br /><br />My objections are so minuscule that they may not even be worth mentioning. Little things, like how the narrator often uses more progressive verbs than is necessary (“Mr. Hafez is saying,” for instance, instead of “Mr. Hafez says”). And the narrator follows Jack, the boy, so closely, that the flashes of omniscience struck me as out of place. I found two; there may have been more. These are two things Jack simply couldn’t have known, so we have to conclude that they are allowed in by the narrator: “The turtle had been all night in the net, gulping air when it could, and was too tired now to fight when they stopped”; “He is wearing a gold watch to go with the glasses.”F. Escobarhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14518434944616309743noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9878002.post-3588225385784790512010-08-06T21:34:15.622-05:002010-08-06T21:34:15.622-05:00I loved this story and admired the way exterior ev...I loved this story and admired the way exterior events were stitched together with detail and image. I didn't question the end, maybe I should have. But by the time the conclusion arrived, I was so taken with how Tea fit everything in, I just started in at the beginning and read it again.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com