Zaki Bey has also slept with women of all classes – oriental dancers, foreigners, society ladies and the wives of the eminent and distinguished, university and secondary school students, even fallen women, peasant women, and housemaids. Here’s a passage about the womanizing aristo Zaki Bey.įrom Lady Kamla (she of the inexorable appetite) he learned how to start and when to desist and how to ask for the most abandoned sexual positions in extremely refined French. If you haven’t read it, it’s a lively ensemble novel peopled by a doorman, his family, a gay newspaper editor, Islamists, and the other motley inhabitants of the building on Suleiman Basha Street. My choice of modern foreign masterpiece is the perfectly scrutable The Yacoubian Building. Which is to say that I don’t recall any spooning. By comparison The Shrimp and the Anemone is rather dull. While the lad was naïve by today’s standards, the book is still fresh for 1953 and nicely captures Leo’s post-traumatic stress. I knew what he was going to say, but for form’s sake I asked: “What is it?” I’ll tell you all about spooning, but on one condition.” Twelve-year old Leo figures out the facts of life. Yes, the past is a foreign country in L P Hartley’s The Go-Between. Also, not to turn into a bloke, especially not one with a frosted tache and a balalaika.Ĭ atch-22 may not be on this list, but I treasure another novel that gave rise to a very current phrase. Then I figured out the real lesson: to avoid becoming as self-absorbed as Pasternak’s hero. I even studied Russian and tried to write poetry.

I loved Doctor Zhivago for its action, its setting, its characters, its lyricism (and Omar Sharif). It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, When I first read it, I was neither a medic nor a writer, whereas Yuri Zhivago was both. Sorry to disappoint, but my choice of Russian blockbuster is by Boris Pasternak. Maybe you’re waiting with bated breath for Rosamund Bartlett’s new translation? Her Anna Karenina, due to be published in August, is already ranked about two millionth on Amazon (how does that happen? Tolstoy pulling rank again?). an angst novel (Philip Roth often fits the bill).one Jane Austen title (choice depends on intellectual criteria, such as which film hero was most fanciable).an inscrutable foreign masterpiece from the present-day.It’s usual for a list of great novels to include

The yacoubian building book review