 |
 |
||||
 |
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Books A Tale Best Left Untold Tariq Ali’s novel, The Stone Woman, is heavy on historical detail and light on storytelling. By Naziha Syed Ali
|
 |
|
|
Set amidst the decline of the Ottoman empire, The Stone Woman, the third of Tariq Ali’s planned quartet of historical novels, is redolent with decadent passions and political intrigue. The protagonist is Nilofer, who belongs to the aristocratic house of Iskander Pasha, and is visiting her family home near Istanbul after a nine-year absence following her elopement with a Greek school inspector of rather less distinguished lineage. The following months see the Pasha family, buffeted by political events that inexorably threaten to turn their existence upside down, lean upon each other for solace and advice. The book derives its title from an ancient, weather-beaten stone statue in the grounds behind the house whose identity is intriguingly ambiguous. “As children we used to confide in her, ask her intimate questions, imagine her replies. One day we discovered that our mothers and aunts and women servants did the same....in this way, the Stone Woman became the repository of all our hidden pain.” In fact, the story is almost in the nature of a confessional; against the backdrop of momentous political events, long suppressed confidences are divulged, forgotten yearnings expressed and unpleasant truths confronted. In a period of transition where all that lies ahead is uncharted territory, it is as though the characters are running out of time. While on one level the story stays firmly moored to the family home by the sea near Istanbul, on another, it moves back and forth in time and from place to place through digressions, or stories within the story, a technique characteristic of the classical epic style. The tale of the ill-fated Circassian maid forced to serve as mistress to Mahmut Pasha, Nilofer’s great-grandfather, and that of her mother Sara’s lost love, are but two of many such interludes. Through this stylistic device, the pantheon of characters in the novel is broadened beyond the principal ones ? the autocratic patriarch Iskander Pasha, his Jewish wife Sara, his brother Memed and his German lover, Baron Hassberg, his placid elder daughter Zeynep, Nilofer, the younger and more temperamental one, with her two children and lover Selim, and Iskander’s sons, Salman and Halil. Love, both heterosexual and same sex, and usually doomed, is pivotal to most of the stories. The novel’s fictional content is frequently suspended by discourses on history and theories of political philosophy current at the time. The protagonists in these sequences are usually Nilofer’s paternal uncle, Memed and the Baron and sometimes other male members of the Pasha family. Tariq Ali writes here with a passion and conviction that is missing elsewhere. The Baron in particular, with his caustic wit and razor-sharp intellect, may well be a vehicle for the writer’s own opinions. Irreverent allusions and opinions abound. “Your Ottoman Empire is like a drunken prostitute, lying with her legs wide open, neither knowing or caring who will take her next,” he says. States Iskander Pasha, “It is the clergy that provided our Sultans with the moral power to impede progress for so long.” The often astute observations notwithstanding, the political interludes are heavy-handed and pedantic and more in the nature of harangues than part of the story’s intrinsic motif. On the other hand, the writer appears distinctly ill at ease with his characters’ emotional lives. For instance, while reflecting upon her marriage, Nilofer says: “I was tired of Dmitri. Tired of his jokes. Tired of his bad poetry. Tired of his resentments. Tired of seeing him wear the same style of clothes every single day and what made this all doubly bad, I had tired of his body. It no longer gave me pleasure. There was nothing left. My life became a burden. I felt stifled.” The stiff and clumsy phraseology is also apparent when Tariq Ali has his characters divulge their secrets to the Stone Woman, compounding the essential absurdity of the situation. In short, interjections of Sufic verse and snatches from Dante
and Verlain’s poetry cannot rescue what is essentially a collection
of short stories, most of which neither move nor inspire, loosely
strung together on a bedrock of turgid political polemics |
||
|
E-mail:
newsline@cyber.net.pk
|
||
