{"id":7919,"date":"2018-07-09T11:33:17","date_gmt":"2018-07-09T11:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7919"},"modified":"2018-07-16T11:28:36","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T11:28:36","slug":"elsewhere-home-by-leila-aboulela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7919","title":{"rendered":"Elsewhere, Home by Leila Aboulela"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Telegram Books, 2 July 2018<\/strong><\/p>\n

224pp, paperback, \u00a38.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This collection of stories by award-winning Sudanese\/Aberdonian novelist and playwright, Leila Aboulela, spans almost twenty years.\u00a0 The earliest one, \u2018The Museum\u2019 (1999), won the first Caine Prize for African Writing, and is alone worth the cover price of this volume. \u00a0It is a study of awkwardness, as two young people –\u00a0 Shadia from Khartoum, Bryan\u00a0 from Peterhead, both studying for an MSc in Statistics –\u00a0 take the first steps towards a mixed-class as well as mixed-race friendship.<\/p>\n

Shadia\u2019s self-awareness and inner questioning (in the old-fashioned museum, she reckons that she would not make a good exhibit herself: \u2018She wasn\u2019t right; she was too modern, too full of mathematics\u2019) carry all the hallmarks of Aboulela\u2019s writing, to be seen in her subsequent novels.\u00a0 Among these is an extraordinary sensitivity to, and articulacy about, the prices of voluntary exile in whichever direction.\u00a0 In one of the stories published almost twenty years later (\u2018Summer Maze\u2019, 2017), the central character, Nadia, has become an outsider in her country of origin: \u2018the language had started to evade her\u2019; she was \u2018eager to hurt her mother\u2019.\u00a0 She sees things with eerily detached sharpness, describing a legless beggar as a \u2018roaming, wanting man, half human, half skateboard\u2019.<\/p>\n

Aboulela is as sharp on the gulfs in understanding, the touchiness, between men and women from such different cultures.\u00a0 In \u2018Something Old, Something New\u2019 (2003), a young Scot converts to Islam, falls in love with a young Muslim woman and, expecting her country to be one of \u2018elegance and reason\u2019, finds \u2018melancholy, a sensuous place, life stripped to the bare bones\u2019.<\/p>\n

Not all the stories here are of equal strength, but the flavour is unmistakeable and the subject matter (displacement, religious faith, cultural rivalry, love despite the weather) as urgent in 2018 as it was painful in 1999.\u00a0 For readers new to this writer, all three of whose novels (The Translator<\/em>, Minaret<\/em> and Lyrics Alley<\/em>) were shortlisted for the Orange Prize, it is worth quoting a Telegraph<\/em> review from 2001: Leila Aboulela \u2018is a remarkable fruit of the Scottish realist school: that bleak, resolutely unprivileged, documentary eye is guided here through new terrain.\u00a0 Aboulela turns the fact of cultural difference round and round until it becomes in her hands a perfect sphere.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

The earliest story here, \u2018The Museum\u2019 (1999), won the first Caine Prize for African Writing, and is alone worth the cover price of this volume. It is a study of awkwardness, as two young people – Shadia from Khartoum, Bryan from Peterhead, both studying for an MSc in Statistics – take the first steps towards a mixed-class as well as mixed-race friendship […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7919"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7922,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919\/revisions\/7922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}