My Review of Guapa: My favorite book of 2016

Guapa by Saleem Haddad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was written by my good friend Saleem Haddad - I met him when we worked together at Medecins Sans Frontieres and I recognized a special guy in that crowded London office. My review: I still think about things in this novel 10 days later - something that hasn't happened to me in a while. I recognized so many things in it that called out to me: Rasa's relationship with his Teta- their morning rituals, the silence around his father's fate, the living in a type of mausoleum but also the pain he felt around his mother and the suffocating silence. I'm not Arab but I grew up in a British household and felt many of those same emotions choking inside of me which I think is what makes me so hellbent on being open and speaking about all my taboos now. It made me really thing about the burden of being closeted and what it does to your emotions.

Things I loved: I felt so frustrated and angry at the scene in the wedding. it was so realistic - the whispered drunken asides from his shallow female friend, the mess of angst and emotion and love swirling around inside Rasa as he steadily drinks and argues with the waiter over his change. I just wanted a Hollywood happy ending - run off together! Be together. But that's not life. And the chaos towards the end was necessary. His mother crying as she chopped onions. His self-centered French friend and being forced out of embarrassment to accept the homeless man as his roommate.

Like some other reviewers, I think I would have liked more life inside Guapa. His friend Maj was the most uplifting character but I also wanted more of everything - more lush descriptions of falling in love, more lazy nights tangoing in a sequestered bedroom, more driving around tense parts of town, more revolution. I guess we can't have it all.

I also felt as if I shared Rasa's fatigue at the end of the novel - and that makes me think that the author did his job. My emotions were everywhere as I read it. And to me that is what I am looking for in reading - plunging into another world.

Thanks Saleem- for a fantastic novel. Can't wait to read number 2.




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Review of "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remember very clearly reading this book while living in South Carolina, dreaming of a different life. I was 22, working as a bartender, and already pushing the limits of what was acceptable at the time. I sat in some crappy Hardees or Lizard's Thicket eating by myself obsessed with the prose. The zooming enthusiastic embrace of the everyday and the possibility that you don't know what the next day will bring. Through the lens of the book, I saw my crappy surroundings as an adventure.


I'm afraid to re-read it. It's a book for the young and the confused. It's a book to inspire you to find beauty in a place like Hardees. In 2005, when I was 38, I went to the famous La Cucaracha in Mexico with a woman I met at my guest house there. She loved Jack Kerouac. We talked to 18 year old punk american kids fleeing the law, toothless drunk guitar players with heroin problems, and horny Mexican waiters trying to pick up gringas. I didn't enjoy it. I wanted to go someplace nicer with better service and more sophisticated people. I had grown too old for Jack Kerouac.


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Review of "A Moveable Feast"

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What a gossip Ernest Hemingway was - his character assassination of F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were amusing but so petty. But the idea of traveling through Europe so cheaply and writing and drinking and knowing fantastic people still inspires. Oh to live on $5 a day and travel from France to Spain.


I'm staying in the ghostly remains of Hemingway's Paris - I am living in a friend of a friend's apartment four houses up from where George Orwell lived in "Down and Out in Paris", I've walked past Hemingway's apartment on 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine yesterday for a glass of wine, I felt like I saw a pale wan Fitzgerald drive past yesterday... but oh how its changed - touristy restaurants, rowdy british football showing bars, expensive fromageries... but still the allure and the romance remains.


I still feel that Hemingway's descriptions hold up and like American aspiring writers - I too long to live in Paris, write the great American novel, and drink wine and hold forth with likeminded individuals... vive Paris!


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