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Between two cultures

The Fascination of Evil

By Florian Zeller

Pushkin Press, 2006,

153 pages, $12.95 U.S.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

By Laila Lalami

Harcourt Book, 2005

188 pages, $13 U.S.

With the Booker Prize awarded last week to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk for his book Istanbul: Memories and the City that explores Islamic and Christian tensions in the city that has always been caught between the two, it is fitting to explore two recent novels that firmly wedge themselves between the very same religious and cultural divides.

The Fascination of Evil , Florian Zeller’s third novel, is described as “diabolically cunning” and for once a book’s back flap testimonial lives up to its trumpeting.

Zeller is not yet 30 but is already a literary tour de force in his native France. A playwright, university lecturer and contributor to Paris-Match and Vogue , Zeller has produced an ostensibly simple small novel that manages to trip not only its characters but its readers with its changeling sensibility.

An exploration of the West’s ignorantly perplexed attitude to Islam, Fascination of Evil is four days in the life of a young, talented French author blessed with literary and physical brilliance yet still in emotional isolation, reeling from his parents’ death five years previous. The author, who remains nameless throughout the novel, has travelled to Cairo along with a second French author diametrically unblessed with looks or grace to take part in that painful authorial exercise, the writer’s festival.

Suffering by day through ridiculous moderator questions in inane forums (“In France, are young writers younger than those who write and are older than the young ones?”) the two writers along with unwitting embassy attaches cruise Cairo’s denizens nightly trying to recreate Flaubert’s sexual extravagances.

But this is not the 1800s, it’s 2000 and something and Islam, in response to western narcissism, has thickened its sexual taboos to such an extent the men, both Western and Muslim, are seethingly disappointed. Undercurrents of jealousy and envy spew over in a tipping point seduction scene when a nuanced Muslim femme attache chooses the French pretty boy.

Not just a road trip gone bad, Fascination of Evil is a shifting parade of literary concave mirrors that both confuse and illuminate the reader with a self-referential structure that triplicates itself, crafting a novel with a novel in a novel. When the evil author twin Martin Millet is pillorized after he publishes a cryptic account of the four nights of failed debauchery and cloaks it with a critique of rising Islamic fundamentalist hysteria Zeller’s nameless protagonist falters, his missteps mirroring the character’s impotence as either imagined human or literary creation.

In exploring the novel, with its ability to make whatever it touches ungraspable, as a battle ground for two cultures Zeller has produced an elegant literary Rubik’s Cube that questions both Western and Muslim fertile propensities for intellectual and sensual persecution and fittingly comes up with no answers, only more perplexities.

An equally satisfying but less structurally complex novel is Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits . Born and raised in Morocco but now living in Oregon, Lalami has written a clear-eyed first novel that examines Morocco’s and Islam’s attractions and detractions.

Hope, both the novel and the emotion, follows the lives of a half-dozen boat people, those who try to escape the rigid, shiftless, corrupt and dirt poor Morocco that nevertheless is also an aromatic and vibrant family-focused hubbub. Over-educated Murad, uptight Faten, pragmatic Aziz and determined Halima and others share the story’s prologue, an attempt to cross the 14-kilometer strait between Morocco and Spain with each equally failing and succeeding.

“I think it’s a shame that we always value foreign degrees over ours,” a grumpy Faten tells a friend’s horrified father in an admission that preludes her flight to Spain. “We’re so blinded by our love for the West that we’re willing to give them our brightest instead of keeping them here where we need them.”

Single-minded as only righteous youth can be Faten finds a shabbier but resilient enlightenment when she resigns herself to not only drop her hijab but her clothing in order to survive in Spain.

With not allowing her characters to achieve their dreams but unveiling other experiences that teach more, Lalami has produced an eminently readable novel about the tensility of compromise, the comfort of shared beghrir and the infinite loneliness to be found sipping outdoor café coffee surrounded by desultory masses of yammering humanity.