Call number
FIC MAN
Collection
Genres
Publication
Holt Paperbacks (1997), 288 pages
Description
Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, a maker of maps, but when her husband's work takes her to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map the Kingdom's areas of internal darkness. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive, watchful. The streets are not a woman's territory; confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self begin to dissolve. She hears whispers, sounds of distress from the 'empty' flat above her head. She has only rumours, no facts to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease. As her days empty of certainty and purpose, her life becomes a blank - waiting to be filled by violence and disaster.
User reviews
LibraryThing member brendanmoody
Masterfully blending gothic horror tropes with a careful study of the intellectual dislocation and resulting eccentric behavior of Westerners working in Saudi Arabia, Hilary Mantel's Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is a riveting and remarkable novel. Mantel has the great novelist's eye for telling
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detail, and she describes the many strange landscapes and uncertain moments confronting her protagonist in such well-honed, immediate language that the character's confusion and sense of disorder are carried over to the reader. A stylistic triumph. Show Less
LibraryThing member catapogo
Disappointing. The author does a good job of creating an oppressive atmosphere but I didn't feel like there was much else to back it up. VERY slow and pretty darned boring, which partially I think was intentional (to make you feel like the main character) but it is still slow and boring. The
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resolution of the "mystery" is recounted in the same tone and seems like it could almost go unnoticed. A weak end for something that is not that fun to read and at the same time mildly anxiety provoking. Show Less
LibraryThing member JulieStielstra
Slow, stifling, claustrophobic, depressing... but that's the idea. Mantel has made use of the years she spent in Saudia Arabia (and how she managed years, when eight months feels like a life sentence) to inform this novel of thirty-ish professional Frances, who joins her construction engineer
The unfortunate jacket copy on this edition bills this novel as horror / suspense / tense / forboding / chilling, a Saudi "Turn of the Screw." It isn't. Frances is miserable, lonely, and depressed. She broods on incidents and rumors. There are dreadful dinner parties with her husband's colleagues, swilling down home brewed wine. The company starts to have trouble being paid. You can't leave without permission. Buildings and streets are thrown up and torn down so fast that maps are useless and going anywhere is a nightmare of traffic and disorientation. Then a mysterious crate appears on the balcony of the unoccupied flat. Government flunkies sidle in and out, obscene amounts of money change hands, are laundered. Is the woman across the hall the secret mistress? What's up with that crate? A man with a rifle is stationed on the corner. And all the time I'm reading this novel, published in 1988, I'm thinking about Jamal Khashoggi.
I will refrain from further spoilers - partly because the ending is murky. But it never quite crescendoes into a revelation or epiphany or resolution. Mantel is still finding her feet, I think, in this novel. She certainly evokes Frances's trapped and miserable daily life - but it makes for a lot of pages of pretty dreary and somewhat repetitive reading. Jeddah sounds like a truly horrible place to exist. But dialog is often stilted, contrived, and Frances's limited conversations with her Muslim neighbor serve more as info-dumps than exposition of the culture and people of it. She does manage to convey some digs at the failings of the British and American expats who collude in this shady world of lies, greed, threats, deceit, and violence all while feeling rather smug and superior. But what she does do - and has gone on to do with brilliance - is portray the evils engineered and inflicted by governments, by belief systems, by corporations, by systems, on individuals.
And I still keep thinking about Jamal Khashoggi.
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husband for a temporary, extremely well-paid (or so they are told) gig in Jeddah. Trapped in company-issued housing with every window facing a blank wall, Frances cannot get a job, go out without her husband, or even speak to her Muslim neighbors in their apartment building unless they initiate it. There is an allegedly empty flat in the building, and rumors are it is a trysting place for some Saudi official to meet his mistress (in a nation where adultery is a bloodily capital offense). But is that in fact what's going on there?The unfortunate jacket copy on this edition bills this novel as horror / suspense / tense / forboding / chilling, a Saudi "Turn of the Screw." It isn't. Frances is miserable, lonely, and depressed. She broods on incidents and rumors. There are dreadful dinner parties with her husband's colleagues, swilling down home brewed wine. The company starts to have trouble being paid. You can't leave without permission. Buildings and streets are thrown up and torn down so fast that maps are useless and going anywhere is a nightmare of traffic and disorientation. Then a mysterious crate appears on the balcony of the unoccupied flat. Government flunkies sidle in and out, obscene amounts of money change hands, are laundered. Is the woman across the hall the secret mistress? What's up with that crate? A man with a rifle is stationed on the corner. And all the time I'm reading this novel, published in 1988, I'm thinking about Jamal Khashoggi.
I will refrain from further spoilers - partly because the ending is murky. But it never quite crescendoes into a revelation or epiphany or resolution. Mantel is still finding her feet, I think, in this novel. She certainly evokes Frances's trapped and miserable daily life - but it makes for a lot of pages of pretty dreary and somewhat repetitive reading. Jeddah sounds like a truly horrible place to exist. But dialog is often stilted, contrived, and Frances's limited conversations with her Muslim neighbor serve more as info-dumps than exposition of the culture and people of it. She does manage to convey some digs at the failings of the British and American expats who collude in this shady world of lies, greed, threats, deceit, and violence all while feeling rather smug and superior. But what she does do - and has gone on to do with brilliance - is portray the evils engineered and inflicted by governments, by belief systems, by corporations, by systems, on individuals.
And I still keep thinking about Jamal Khashoggi.
Show Less
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
Bizarro-World Islamofascism and conspicuous consumption all up in your teeth in the Saudi Arabia of the 1980s, filtered through expat alienation and with a creepy gothic mystery thrown in for no reason except to be awesome.
LibraryThing member readyreader
Thoroughly enjoyed this book...the setting, the characters, the atmosphere, the tension...all of which would be a challenge for any marriage. Published over 25 years ago, I would bet things have not changed much in the Saudi culture in all that time. Author Hiliary Mantel did spend some time in the
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Middle East, so I am sure she did draw on her experience there to create this story of intrigue and suspense. Show Less
LibraryThing member japaul22
When Hilary Mantel passed away earlier this year, I wanted to make an effort to read her novels that were still on my shelf. [Eight Months on Ghazzah Street] looked interesting so I picked it up. Frances and her husband, Andrew, move to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. They know it's going to be a
They move into an apartment building and Frances immediately realizes this is going to be harder than she thought. Andrew leaves for work every day and she is trapped inside, both because women can't move about freely and because of the heat. She can't work or even go out to shop or sight see. For independent, intelligent Frances, this is tough. After a month or so she begins to develop relationships with the other women in her building. As she gets to know them, she also gets to know some of the other expats that Andrew works with. And a mystery about the empty apartment above her begins to develop. Though it's supposedly empty, there is noise up there and obviously people spending time in the apartment. And then things start getting dangerous. It's no longer just the foreign culture that is upsetting Frances, it's clear that there are nefarious activities going on as well.
Hilary Mantel is masterful at layering a book with interesting plot and characters with deeper themes and cultural observations. I really enjoyed this and definitely recommend it.
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culture shock, especially for Frances considering how women are restricted there, but they'll be making a considerable amount of money, so it's deemed worth it. Also, they've lived several places in Africa and are used to adapting to different cultures. They move into an apartment building and Frances immediately realizes this is going to be harder than she thought. Andrew leaves for work every day and she is trapped inside, both because women can't move about freely and because of the heat. She can't work or even go out to shop or sight see. For independent, intelligent Frances, this is tough. After a month or so she begins to develop relationships with the other women in her building. As she gets to know them, she also gets to know some of the other expats that Andrew works with. And a mystery about the empty apartment above her begins to develop. Though it's supposedly empty, there is noise up there and obviously people spending time in the apartment. And then things start getting dangerous. It's no longer just the foreign culture that is upsetting Frances, it's clear that there are nefarious activities going on as well.
Hilary Mantel is masterful at layering a book with interesting plot and characters with deeper themes and cultural observations. I really enjoyed this and definitely recommend it.
Show Less
Pages
288
ISBN
0805052038 / 9780805052039