An engaging evocation of Jordanian life

A perfectly accurate if totally inadequate description of Dima Bader’s debut novel Dance Around the Dandelion would be something like: “Nuha, a middle-age, married Jordanian woman, has a steamy affair with a much younger man.”

Accurate but insufficient to convey the depth and richness of Nuha’s life and family and contemporary society in Amman, Jordan, where the novel is set. The family is affluent enough they can send Nuha’s half-sister to Houston for cancer treatments. Ultimately the cancer returns, and the girl dies. The parents divorce, the mother returns to Kuwait City, and remarries. The father, Sameer, remarries and fathers Nuha and a son. 

Bader covers this history in the novel’s first section, which she tells in the third person. The adult Nuha narrates the rest of the book, broken up by brief—and ultimately poignant— diary entries by own 8-year-old daughter.

For much of the book, indeed until Nuha falls passionately, overwhelmingly, and unexpectedly in love with a darkly handsome young man who manages his family’s furniture store, she is going through the motions of life. Somehow (and I’d like to know how she does it) Bader is able to hold the reader’s interest while a depressed Nuha walks through her days. We learn about her extended family and life in her grandmother’s Big House, her marriage to Khaled, and her life as part owner of a bookstore in Amman’s Old Town.

Like most families, Nuha’s has secrets. I wouldn’t call Nuha an unreliable narrator, but even as she seems forthcoming the author reveals information carefully, naturally, and when it will have the most effect. And again, somehow the story—Naha’s history—grows in depth and richness as we learn more and more about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dance Around the Dandelion for the craft and for the story. Bader includes just enough Arabic (with translations) to let us know these characters are not speaking English. I would not have included the footnotes to explain Jordanian dishes because they tend to throw the reader out of the story. Nor would I have included the italic sections, but that may be a personal preference. Neither of these quibbles diminish the book’s undeniable and pleasant effect.

The Thursday Murder Club strikes again

 Richard Osman says idea to set his Thursday Murder Club mysteries in a retirement village caught off guard as it came to him on a what he thought would be a perfectly pleasant but uneventful lunch visiting to a friend of his mother in one such community. (He also denies that the character Joyce is modeled on his mother.)

"The setting felt familiar because you're in beautiful countryside, but I was surprised because it was really busy with people everywhere. Then, when you start talking to them, 70 and above, you think, 'My god, there's some talent, wit, wisdom and sense of mischief in this generation, everything is there'. I thought this would be a great setting for a murder story. Let's throw the worst at them and see how they deal with it." 

He says seniors make good detectives because younger people tend to ignore them or not take them seriously. They have a wealth of experience to draw on; they’ve seen everything and done everything at least once if not more. So he created four feisty seniors who, to entertain themselves, begin to look into local cold cases and become entangled in current murders.

The four main characters he’s created have different backgrounds, personalities, and abilities and their skills compliment one another. Joyce is a former nurse. Ibrahim is a retired psychiatrist. Elizabeth was an agent in England’s intelligence service. And Ron is a former labor organizer. During their working lives they would not have become friends. Finding themselves together in a senior development they have become close. 

Osman has now written four mysteries involving the four, each mystery giving one of the four a leading role. I reviewed the first in December 2021. All have been best sellers in the UK and the US, and a movie starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, and Ben Kingsley is in the works.

Osman began his career working as executive producer on British game shows, including Deal or No Deal. He was the creative director at TV company Endemol UK, pitching the idea for Pointless to the BBC. In 1999, created and wrote the Channel 4 sitcom Boyz Unlimited with David Williams and Matt Lucas. In 2005, he co-created and co-wrote the animated Channel 4 sitcom Bromwell High. In 2013, he created the short-lived ITV gameshow Prize Island

While you do not have to read the four books in order to enjoy them, and while one might argue that the first in the series, The Thursday Murder Club, is a little clunky as Osman was getting his bearings, they are all thoroughly entertaining.

The short stories of a writer's writer

Because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed James Salter’s novels, I snapped up a copy of Last Night, his 2005 collection of ten short stories in a library book sale.

I’ve read that Salter is known as a writer’s writer, which I take to mean that his sentences, his paragraphs, his stories are, at the craft level, exquisite.

That may be, but Salter's writing is not so carefully crafted that it calls attention to itself. You don’t stop in a Salter story—I don’t stop—to admire a perfectly turned phrase, a beautiful description. You often do finish one of his stories struck by the impact and wondering how he does it.

He manages to evoke people at their most profound and significant moments: A book dealer faces the truth about his life, as it is and as it will never be again, when he is visited by his brash former girlfriend.

A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party, finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate, a huge tawny-eyed dog.

A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wife’s request to give up what may be his treasured relationship.

Salter, who died in 2015, was extraordinary in his ability to evoke a place, a person, and a plausible situation in a few pages. I don’t know if he was a writer’s writer, but I do know that his best stories are worth studying to see how he created characters and suggested entire lives.