i have been very impressed, lately, by muriel spark’s the mandelbaum gate, written in the mid-60s, and by the 2007 novel by helena maria viramontes, their dogs came with them. on the other hand, i just finished hisham matar’s in the country of men and i found it to be nothing to write home about.

the mandelbaum gate is a thriller-pastiche that in setting (israel and palestine), plot intricacy and playfulness, and some very specific details (keep on reading), reminds me so much of a. b. yehoshua i feel innerly certain he was inspired by it. i am thinking of the fabulous the liberated bride, a book i heartily recommend to anyone who loves da literature and de books. spark’s protagonist is freddy hamilton, a middle-aged, bland english diplomat stationed in jerusalem. every week or so he goes thorugh the gate into palestine to spend time with some friends who live “on the other side.” since jerusalem is split, these trips are within the same city, yet at the same time they seem fraught with momentum and even a degree of peril. this is emphasized by the fact that while travel back and forth is easy for freddy, it is close to impossible for jews or arabs living on either side of the border.

the novel is set more than ten years after the end of the british mandate, but the british influence still seems to carry some weight. clearly, there’s a lot of intelligence and counter-intelligence going on on the part of the brits, but the greatest sense of their lasting influence shows in the assuredness and sense of easy belonging displayed by the english characters who live there, both as diplomats and not. it also shows in the way the locals, arab and jews, treat them — which is not exactly deferential, but rather contains a sense of their being a factor to be seriously reckoned with. about deference: well, it is there, but it’s a sort of manipulative deference, of ex-subjects now on good terms with their ex-rulers but also aware that those ex-rulers have lots of power and money. it’s a bit of a game of cat and mouse, with both the cat and the mouse feeling they are getting the better of the other, while in fact they seem to be pretty evenly matched. it is interesting, by the way, that the issue of language should be so prominent. all the locals freddy deals with speak english, but he himself is working hard, and failing, at learning arabic: the young man who’s teaching him cannot be convinced to teach him anything he can actually use, rather than highfalutin literary phrases that belong more in a poetry book than on the street. so poor freddy knows all sorts of useless arabic but couldn’t order a coffee in a shop if his life depended on it.

equally prominent, strangely, is the issue of age, everyone being older than they should be or than they look. age is discussed quite a bit, both by the narrator and by the characters themselves. this is also yehoshuan, not necessarily in the sense that he devotes much time to age in his books (though he does, in the liberated bride and other books too, mostly in terms of aging and sexuality), but because it is so yehoshuan for a novel to become fixated with something that serves no apparent thematic purpose whatsoever.

besides being proper and bland (though not, it turns out, as bland as one would have thought), freddy is also bacheloresquerly tethered to his elderly mother and her also elderly live-in companion/maid, both living in england, who write to him almost daily about their little problems and conflicts, and to whom he replies with equal regularity trying to smooth things over and keep everyone on good terms and happy (they are all “there there” kind of letters).

the second english protagonist is a teacher in her late thirties (i think) who is in israel because a) she wants to have a pilgrimage in the holy land and b) her boyfriend, an archaeologist, is working at the dead sea scrolls site and she’s going to meet him there. barbara vaughn, the woman, had a jewish mother and a gentile father, so she’s technically jewish. she has however converted to catholicism, and her insights into catholic doctrine and practice are among the most interesting, deep, and intelligent parts of this extraordinary book (to me, they seem to be its palpitating heart, but i may be partial here — and by the way, muriel spark is also a catholic convert). since she’s been single so long, everyone around her perceives her as rather spinsterly, while she doesn’t feel herself to be anything of the sort. at first she’s presented as ungainly in looks and curt in personality, but, like everyone else, grows later in the book to become a really strong and totally fetching character.

it is a strength of this book that its characters (there are many more, but i can’t give away too much) should be all so interesting, complex, and, also, that they should reveal themselves as different from what we at first and other people who know them superficially or who pigeonholed them should perceive them to be. in this sense, the book is permeated with great generosity and compassion — with an attitude towards people that one feels one should have oneself, in real life — and is, in this way, rather eye-opening and inspiring.

the same openness and generosity operate not only at the individual level, but also with respect to people as members of ethnic, political, or religious communities. in their respective, comically intersecting adventures on “the other side” of the border (a world that seems to be as complicated, bizarre, devious, and mischievous as the world on the other side of the glass in alice in wonderland), freddy and barbara meet quite a number of amazing characters who encompass jews, arabs, muslims, christians, spies, traditional people, and modern people. the depiction of the micro-world of the holy sepulcher in the old city is wholly indicative of the hodgepodge of peoples and purposes that is jerusalem and the combined (and everchangingly reconfigured) states of israel and palestine (the latter, of course, is not a state, but it will be soon, in my lifetime if i’m lucky). if you have been to the holy sepulcher, with its mosaic of faiths and uneasy partitionings, you know what i mean. but if you haven’t been, no worries. spark does an excellent job of describing it. (a small fact that is not in the book: there are several christian denominations sharing the large and sprawling church of the holy sepulcher, but the key to the church’s door is in the hands of a muslim, to keep the christians from fighting with each other: a perfect metaphor for the middle east).

on the “other side” there is intrigue, espionage, shady business, flight, dissembling, impersonating, and a healthy amount of sex. the part of the novel that takes place on the other side (about two thirds, if i’m not wrong) is absolutely delicious. people part and reconvene in the strangest, most unexpected combinations. like in yehoshua’s novels, they fall asleep in strange beds and sleep the best sleep they ever slept. they wear strange clothes and pass for people they are not. they have conversations they couldn’t have had on “this side” and then remember nothing of them. they fall in love unpredictably and get married when marriage seemed impossible. women get crushes on women and men establish tender bonds with men. family bonds are dissolved and recreated anew in different configurations.

but i’m saying too much. spark portrays old jerusalem as a site of happy carnivalesque misrule, but this is a 60s english book, so everything is mostly plausible and coherent and well laid-out. the plot is really excellent and the writing as crisp as freshly fried falafel. spark plays with a different idea of civilization, with what we’d now call the very fact of the postcolonial, but, because she does it in the sixties, this alternative, crazy, happily mixed and mixed-up postcolonial world is viewed with a levity and optimism that would not be possible nowadays. this is a most def. recommendation.

i’m going to talk about the other books later.