“The Map of Love”: Exploring love in Egypt, Britain and the U.S.

  

   “The Map of Love,” by Ahdaf Soueif, is an intricately-weaved story of love across place, time and ethnicity.

   It begins when Isabel, a young American journalist, meets Omar, a middle-aged Egyptian-American conductor. She finds a trunk of her great-grandmother’s belongings, and when she shows it to Omar, he quickly realizes they are first cousins and sends her to Egypt to see his sister Amal (without telling her what he has discovered).

   Think the plot is thick enough already? Only later, after Isabel becomes pregnant by Omar, does the reader find out that Omar had an affair with Isabel’s mother, further confusing the truth about Isabel’s real father.

   Once the characters become sorted out, particularly how each of them is related to the others, the novel’s rich details can be fully appreciated.

   The narration flips between Isabel and Amal going through the trunk of Isabel’s great-grandmother (and thus Amal’s great-aunt), and the diary entries of Anna Winterbourne, the great-grandmother/great-aunt who traveled to Egypt for vacation and never left.

   Each chapter begins with a quote pertaining to the contents, and embedded throughout the whole novel are details and history of Egyptian culture that one never learns in school. That is the reason why I read–to learn things that I wasn’t taught in school. (Sometimes it seems like all of the important things!)

   The end of the novel does not answer the begging question of who Isabel’s father is, letting the reader choose her/his own ending.

   Soueif has woven an intricate story of love that knows no boundaries–not age, nor country, nor ethnicity, and certainly not language barriers. But most importantly, her tale of love is believable. Yes, an Englishwoman in the early 1900s could travel to Egypt and fall in love with and marry an Egyptian man, despite the British occupation of Egypt in that time period. Yes, they could have a child who marries a Frenchman, whose child then marries an American. And yes, they could fall out of touch with their Egyptian cousins, only to be reunited by a trunk of the Englishwoman’s belongings.

   And the common thread weaving all of this together? Love, of course.

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