Calligrapher's Secret Book

Well. It's hard to know what to think--this novel is all over the place. While I appreciate that in many ways this is deliberate, it's still hard to read and often not worth the effort. Schami has a gift for describing all things Syrian as well as fleshing out characters. The problem lies in stringing lush, poetic characters and events into a cohesive plot. Schami likes to digress and introduce tangentials, much like Scheherazade, but his spells do not bind. The Christian/Muslim star-crossed love plot does not work, despite the charm of both characters. Hamid, (the calligrapher), had more potential, but one cannot be drawn as a villain for an entire first half of a novel, only to become the hero of the second half. His traits do not hang together, and his actions (seen mostly in flashbacks) and motives are inconsistent. I feel like with a bit more work, this could have been a novel to rival A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Sadly, it is not. I enjoyed reading and learning about Arabic calligraphy, and I am interested in novels about the ME, but I won't be rereading this one. I give 3 stars for the richness of language and for the window into 1950s Damascus, but not for the novel as a novel.