Sabiha Khemir

The Blue Manuscript by Sabiha Al Khemir is a tale woven of stories and miracles, of the sublimity of art and the crassness of art dealers, of human ambition and longing for connection. The novel, almost as intriguing for its apparent faults as for its definite virtues, is about an archeological dig in Wadi Hassoun, outside of Cairo during the 1980s. The purpose of the dig is to find the second volume of the priceless Blue Manuscipt, a Quran commissioned during the tenth-century Fatimid dynasty in Egypt by the mother of Caliph al-Muizz.

more at: http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue7/reviews_14.php… (meer)

"'What you hide digs a hole inside you.'"

Sabiha Al Khemir's first American novel (after her British only Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come) explores the myth of The Blue Manuscript. Based on an actual Islamic piece of art, Al Khemir's novel explores a "what-if" situation with a team of mismatched archaeologists, translators, professors, scientists, and tour guides who travel to Egypt to uncover it. As the team dig, not only is dirt removed, but also the character's true selves are slowly unearthed.

The key word here is slowly.

While the characters clash, each one is revealed as something sad, lost, yet redeemable (to certain extents) through their search for the artifacts. There's Zohra, a translator lost between two worlds; Glasses, who doesn't reveal his real name, too ashamed of his ethnicity; there's Professor O'Brien who is filled with ambition to prove his theory right; there's Mark who's anxious only for the money. As the novel progress, the walls that kept them apart slowly falls (again the key word is slowly) and the power of art and language becomes more apparent.

While Ah Khemir writes like an artist--at times, it feels like the words themselves are painted--the result is at times painfully sluggish. While not wordy, reading it is molasses-like at times and readers can easily become lost--the characters become unevenly drawn and reader's attention can die.

The Blue Manuscript succeeds as a meditation on art, language, and identity, as well as an exploration of Islamic art and culture, but the story itself is badly paced, slow, and tedious. What aspires to be a novel is lost.… (meer)