Reviews for My grandmother's cactus

The average rating for My grandmother's cactus based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-30 00:00:00 Dan Jamson My reading of "My Grandmother's Cactus" occurred as the democratic hopes of generations of Egyptians foundered against the hubris of the Muslim Brotherhood and against the re-assertion of military power. So I inevitably sought understanding from the stories in this volume'an unfair burden for any book, let alone one originally published more than twenty years ago. What I found here instead was a group of stories, some of them very short, that gathered in strength as I read on. These stories lack the majestic scope of Naguib Mahfouz, or the unflinching eye of Alaa Al Aswany, but while often fantastic, even allegorical, they make up for it with a vision so concentrated and intimate that some characters are not even named. In the shortest pieces, lacking the space to develop even elementary character or plot, the focus is on the very abstract or the intensely personal'sometimes both, as in the case of Ibtihal Salem's "Smoke Ring", which has the allusiveness and sweep of poetry: "I cloaked myself in my unbound hair and wandered about aimlessly, picking up empty bullet shells, counting them, one by one. Maybe one of them still held a remnant of his blood." Neither the "he" nor the "I" is identified in this one page story. "'Don't wake up, or else you might see me stealing,' she said to the dead body lying on the floor of the empty room" begins Sahar Tawfiq's "Thing Cast Down on the Road are Lost", which does not in its few pages pause to identify the speaker, the deceased or their relation (or lack of one). Sometimes this compression leads to allegory, as with Mona Raguib's "The Sleeping City", in which people react to the inflation "that had sunk its teeth into their flesh" by eating only one kind of food. In her "When the Chickens Escaped", a funeral procession descends into chaos when the hearse hits a lorry carrying chickens and people begin chasing the freed birds. "Zeenat Marches in the President's Funeral" by Salwa Bakr is a caustic view of the Egyptian state's paternalistic inefficiency. Her "Woman on the Grass" shows the interaction of a detective and a prostitute who lives like many squatters at the cemetery. Poverty and hunger are almost constant throughout, but it is the longing in Seham Beyami's "The Sea Knows" or Etidal Osman's "A House for us" that most lingers in the mind. Some of the longer pieces lose the concentrated focus of the shorter ones and meander. I was sorry not to find anything by Nawal Al-Saadawi'she belongs to an earlier generation of women writers than the one documented here'whose "Woman at Point Zero" is an intense, sustained "J'Accuse" hurled at a patriarchal society.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-10 00:00:00 Dirk Van Den Brink Rather a weak read By sally tarbox on 1 December 2017 Format: Paperback Maybe *2.5 for an uninspiring read. A collection of 21 short stories set in the United Arab Emirates. They focus on everyday situations: marriage problems; parents and children; travel... The modern world with its affairs, divorces, career-minded youngsters is juxtaposed with a conservative, religious world. Although the cover blurb says that each tale 'has a sharp sting in the tail', I have to say I didn't find this at all. They tend to fade away to nothing, and you're left thinking 'is that it?' Might be OK for a mediocre magazine but how they got published is beyond me!