A Pure Heart: A Novel - Softcover

Hassib, Rajia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1984879413 ISBN 13: 9781984879417

Verlag: Viking, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

"Hassib, herself an Egyptian immigrant living in West Virginia, articulates the full-bodied chorus of Egypt's voices."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Exquisite. . . . Anchoring the story is a pair of Cairo-born sisters whose fates spin in radically different directions in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. . . . A lovely novel that does a remarkable job of bringing troubling realities to light, and life."
--Vanity Fair

A Real Simple Best Book of the Year (So Far)

A powerful novel about two Egyptian sisters--their divergent fates and the secrets of one family

Sisters Rose and Gameela Gubran could not have been more different. Rose, an Egyptologist, married an American journalist and immigrated to New York City, where she works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gameela, a devout Muslim since her teenage years, stayed in Cairo. During the aftermath of Egypt's revolution, Gameela is killed in a suicide bombing. When Rose returns to Egypt after the bombing, she sifts through the artifacts Gameela left behind, desperate to understand how her sister came to die, and who she truly was. Soon, Rose realizes that Gameela has left many questions unanswered. Why had she quit her job just a few months before her death and not told her family? Who was she romantically involved with? And how did the religious Gameela manage to keep so many secrets?

Rich in depth and feeling, A Pure Heart is a brilliant portrait of two Muslim women in the twenty-first century, and the decisions they make in work and love that determine their destinies. As Rose is struggling to reconcile her identities as an Egyptian and as a new American, she investigates Gameela's devotion to her religion and her country. The more Rose uncovers about her sister's life, the more she must reconcile their two fates, their inextricable bond as sisters, and who should and should not be held responsible for Gameela's death. Rajia Hassib's A Pure Heart is a stirring and deeply textured novel that asks what it means to forgive, and considers how faith, family, and love can unite and divide us.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rajia Hassib was born and raised in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was twenty-three. Her first novel, In the Language of Miracles, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and received an honorable mention from the Arab American Book Awards. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Marshall University, and she has written for The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker online. She lives in West Virginia with her husband and two children.

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1 

On her last night in Egypt, Rose waits for her parents to fall asleep and then sneaks into her sister's bedroom. She sifts through the clothes strewn on the back of the chair, examines the contents of each desk drawer, picks through every nook of the armoire, then slides the mattress to the side and goes through the things stored under her sister's bed. Her own childhood bed, still standing in the room she used to share with her sister years ago, is covered with clothes, books, CDs, and papers, and Rose goes through those, too. The items on the bed seem to be some of the ones her sister recently used-Gameela was never one for order-and from that pile Rose picks out a pastel-colored scarf, blue and green with Impressionist flowers that remind her of a painting of Monet, and drapes it on top of her head and across her face, inhaling deeply: her sister's favorite perfume, flowery and fresh. She ties the scarf around her neck and continues with her search. She sets aside two T-shirts, a small box of jewelry, and a string of black prayer beads engraved with the ninety-nine names of Allah, one name on each bead. Anything that seems potentially significant, she tosses onto the growing pile of things she intends to steal.
She assures herself that she is an archaeologist, not a grave robber.
She works as noiselessly as possible, and when the mattress grinds against the bed frame as she tries to lift it back in place, she pauses, mattress poised in the air, and listens. Her parents are former heavy sleepers turned insomniacs, who now resort to sleeping pills to get them through the night, and she hopes the effect of the pills will mask whatever noise she inadvertently makes. Rose, on the other hand, is still jet-lagged seven nights into her visit to Egypt, her biological clock stubbornly clinging to Eastern Daylight Time. Gently, she lowers the mattress in place and glances at her watch: 1:00 a.m. in Cairo; 7:00 p.m. in New York. She can stay up all night.
Under the bed, behind the desk, into each of the six dresser drawers, Rose looks, combing through papers, setting aside everything that seems potentially important. She takes the cup of fine china with the butterfly motif; the newspaper article featuring the boy with dark, piercing eyes; the turquoise stone on a delicate gold chain; the stack of unopened mail; the notebooks filled with scribbles; all the photos she can find.
She goes through the entire room in just over four hours.
By then, dawn has already broken, and Rose walks up to the window and pushes the wooden shutters open, letting the daylight in. Already people are stirring, walking up and down the narrow street below. Rose leans out, resting her elbows on the sill and letting the warm breeze caress her face, toying with Gameela's scarf, still tied around her neck. The room does not have the best view of Cairo her parents' apartment offers-that view is shared between the living room and dining room, both overlooking the Nile-but Rose still looks out, a bit nostalgically, at the alley below, which seems a lot narrower than she remembers. Dustier. Only five stories up, she can clearly see the faces of the few people walking down the alley, and she catches the eyes of a young man looking up, watching her as he walks. Reflexively, she takes a step back. Her tank top is stretched tight across her breasts and deeply cut, and Gameela's scarf does nothing to conceal her cleavage. Rose's first instinct is to reprimand herself for forgetting that she is in Egypt, that women here are not supposed to lean out of windows half naked, but then she steps closer to the window and looks out, and when she sees that the man is stopped, still staring up, she flips him off. He walks on.
Rose watches his back as he strolls away. For a moment, she is proud of herself, but then fear creeps up on her: What if he noted which floor she was on? Which apartment? What if he is so offended he comes back in a day or two, after she is gone, breaks into her parents' apartment in the middle of the night, and kills them? What if she just flipped off a psychopath?
She steps away from the window, her heart racing. Jet lag notwithstanding, Rose has been awake for over fifteen hours, and she knows exhaustion is partly to blame for her irrational fears. But then again, for the ten days since her sister died, she has had the butterfly effect on her mind, has been obsessed with minor events that lead to major ones.
An interview leading to a suicide bombing, for example. 
Or her own marriage leading to her sister's death.
She looks at the pile of things she is taking out of her sister's room and all the way to the U.S. with her. Theoretically, the things could help her trace the events backward in time, from the tornado all the way to the butterfly, and the butterfly may prove to be something other than her marriage. She hopes this is true, but suspects it is merely wishful thinking. Even though everyone keeps repeating that Gameela's death is the result of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, a freak accident similar to standing in the middle of a field only to be struck dead by a Cessna making an emergency landing, Rose finds that such a coincidence is highly unlikely.
The pile of things on the floor is pathetically small, and Rose tries not to think of how she is distilling her sister's twenty-eight years into a heap of possessions. Noiselessly, she carries her suitcase from the guest room where she has been sleeping to Gameela's bedroom and, one by one, places her sister's things among her own, tucking them in, hiding them from sight.
She wakes up disoriented, takes a few seconds to remember where she is: in the guest room, staring at her mother, who has one hand on Rose's forearm.
"It's nearly noon, habibti You need to get up," Nora whispers.
Rose sits up in bed, nods.
"I'll make you some breakfast," Nora says, heading out of the room.
"No, Mama, wait," Rose croaks. "I'll do it."
"Your dad and I are sitting on the balcony."
"I'll make us all some tea, then."
Nora stands in the doorway, looking at Rose. She has one hand resting on the door frame, and Rose stares at her mother's delicate wrist.
"Are you done packing?"
Rose glances at the suitcase, finds that she has brought it back into the guest room and closed it before she fell asleep. She remembers the things she took from Gameela's room and swallows to clear the knot in her throat.
"Yes."
Nora nods. "We'll be on the balcony," she repeats. She lingers at the door, looking at Rose, and then lifts one hand and touches her collarbone. Reflexively, Rose lifts her hand to her own collarbone, and is surprised to find she still has Gameela's scarf tied around her neck. She tries to pull it off, but it is tangled. Rose tugs at the knot, looking down, trying to see it-so close to her chin-and when she looks up again, her mother is gone.
In the kitchen, Rose waits for the water to boil, watches the lid of the copper teapot quiver under pressure, and munches on a triangle of pita bread stuffed with feta cheese. She scoops three full spoons of loose-leaf black tea, twirls them in the teapot, and gazes at the whirlpool. Once steeped, the tea will be black and syrupy, sweetened with sugar to mask its bitterness. Rose inhales the rising steam, opens a ceramic canister and pinches out a few leaves of dried mint, and tosses them into the teapot. Every time she reaches for something and finds it in its place, she is momentarily disoriented, unsure where she is or what year it is, the familiarity of her childhood home constantly jarred by the fact that, except for short, sporadic visits, she has been away from this home for six years. When she discovers that things have moved in her absence-the sugar is not where it used to be-she feels cut off. Foreign.
She pours the tea through a strainer into three cups placed each on its saucer on a silver...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1984879413
• ISBN 13: 9781984879417
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Zeitfracht Medien GmbH; info-medien@zeitfracht.de; ; Ferdinand-Jühlke-Straße 7; Erfurt; 99095; Deutschland