The End of Manners (Vintage)
by Francesca Marciano
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Book Summary Information
Author: Francesca MarcianoEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-05
ISBN: 0307386740
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The End of Manners (Vintage)
Book Review: Authentic and Evocative
Summary: 4 Stars
Powerful and unassuming, "The End of Manners" has an exotic locale and nail-biting suspense but is the polar opposite of your everyday genre thriller.
With a tangibly authentic premise, well-drawn characters, evocative sense of place and deeply affecting point of resolution and redemption, there are plenty of ways to celebrate Francesca Marciano's latest novel.
With two critically acclaimed novels ("Casa Rossa"and "Rules of the Wild") and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay ("Don't Tell") behind her, Marciano has here taken on the complexities of today's Afghanistan and succeeded with grace and heart.
Two women, an English journalist and an Italian photographer, go to Kabul, Afghanistan for a magazine story about young women who have attempted suicide rather than submit to arranged marriages in which they are sure to live lives of abuse and servitude.
The journalist, an experienced but flighty war-zone careerist, pushes ever forward in the quest for a possible Pulitzer, but the photographer has second thoughts about the cultural appropriateness of their quest.
Maria Galante had long ago left behind the sad dramas of crisis reportage for quiet assignments photographing food for cooking magazines in Milan. She knows she is wildly out of her element in dangerous and chaotic Kabul, yet for a time she gamely trails along behind the effusive and charismatic reporter Imogen Glass.
Maria is the narrator of "The End of Manners," and she filters her experiences, first in a "hostile environments" survival training camp, and then in Kabul and its outlying village, through the lens of her tender, recently broken heart. She yearns to move past her break-up funk and reclaim a sense of adventure and dignity in her life and work, but she eventually realizes that using Imo Glass as a role model might not be the best option after all.
Of her first meeting with Imo in London, she notes, "She wore an oversized cashmere cardigan with rolled-up sleeves that could've been left behind by a lover (she didn't look like the marrying kind). Thick Indian silver bracelets clinked at her wrists and as she hugged me I caught a whiff of patchouli. Imogen Glass emanated body heat, female humors and fluids. She appeared to be someone who loves to walk barefoot and doesn't burn in the sun."
Maria's week at survival camp , meant to prepare her for the dangers she most likely would encounter in a war zone, leaves her feeling even more vulnerable. It doesn't help that the larger-than-life Imo Glass, who appears to be in charge, has the unsettling habit of downplaying their circumstances. Satellite phones are left uncharged, flak jackets are forgotten in the hotel.
Imo has hired a fixer, a Kabul television reporter named Hanif who moonlights as a guide, an arranger, someone who can be counted on not only to drive them around but make payoffs, navigate mine fields and checkpoints and make himself available for whatever increasingly dangerous or culturally insensitive plan Imo or Maria comes up with, including those that wind up being of extreme personal hardship. Skillfully drawn as a man of dignity and honor, Hanif is as much a gounding presence for Imo and Maria as he is a symbol of the best of Afghanistan to the reader.
Marciano's descriptions of the rugged beauty of Afghanistan are startling; in the midst of danger and chaos, there are still blue skies.
"I got out of the car and felt the dry gravel crunch under my shoes. The effervescent air, as light as a wisp, caressed my neck. I looked around. Three hundred and sixty degrees of azure and earth, mountains and valleys, blue morphing into purple, then strips of green, yellow and ocher. I started taking pictures, it didn't matter really where I pointed my camera."
Best of all, perhaps, is Marciano's careful handling of the culturally insensitive Westerners who expect to show up in a remote tribal village for a magazine story about women's rights--with photos!
"I saw Zuley's image through the lens: her jutting shoulder blades, her bandaged arms, as she pressed her face against the wall. An oblique ray of light picked out the pale blue of her veil, the flaking, faded moss green of the wall, the russet blanket. They were velvety, powdery hues, already discolored like the pigments of frescoes of the trecento. Even though you couldn't see her face, it would be a magnificent photo. A dying Madonna, shot from the back."
The opportunity for redemption in this situation is clear, and it is no spoiler to the plot to say that Maria makes the right choice.
Summary of The End of Manners (Vintage)
Maria Galante and Imo Glass are on assignment in Afghanistan: outgoing Imo to interview girls who have attempted suicide to avoid forced marriage to older men; and shy, perfectionist Maria to photograph them. But in a culture in which women shroud their faces and suicide is a grave taboo, to photograph these women puts everyone in danger. Before the assignment is over, Maria is forced to decide if it's more important to succeed at her work ?and please Imo?or to follow her own moral compass. The End of Manners is a story of friendship and loyalty, of the transformative power of journeying outside oneself into the wider world.Literary Books
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