Kruse's Keys: Read 'Moving the Palace Slowly Because You Will Miss It (Majdalani)

(This book arrived in the mail with high marks from my younger brother in Chicago.  He'd gotten it from my grandmother in Seattle--a voracious reader of all things excellent).

Maidalani's Moving the Palace is one of the books that leaves you melancholy and blue because...it's over.  It's over and your relationship with the protagonist is severed--forever buried forever in the pages of the novel.

In Moving the Palace's case, we learn the story of Samuel (through the recollection of his grandson)--an erudite Christian adventurer who leaves his homeland of Lebanon amidst the country's wave of great migration during the onset of the 20th century.  Whereas many of his countrymen left for Europe, the Middle East and the United States, Samuel ventures down to the Sudan.  During a stay in Tripoli, he encounters a small Arabian palace by the city citadel.   Upon closer inspection, a plan hatches in Samuel's mind, a plan of what origin his grandson laments: "I do not know--nor will anyone, ever--what planted the seed of that incredible idea in his mind."

This plan, and its numerous iterations and evolutions, are the focus of the story.  We follow Samuel as he disassembles the palace and loads it onto a caravan, descending into Africa with a dream to sell it off to a rich prince.  Like any great tale, nothing goes as planned and Samuel's plan quickly unravels against the backdrop of the World War I.

Best of all, this story brought to mind a slew of other similarly striking novels which I've included before for your reading pleasure.


KEY QUOTES:

•  "But he is the kind of man to shoulder other people's whims, to make them his own, and here he is letting himself be swept along on Shafik's oddball odyssey."
• "It must be remembered that Cairo at that time, though far from Europe, is the first city to rival Paris and Vienna for its soirees, the richness of its salons, and above all the power of its economic and financial elite."
• "The inner circle belongs to dynasties that emigrated before the middle of the nineteenth century and built their fortunes in the first era of Egypt's modernization--like the Sakakini, Egypt's first manufacturers..., or the Soussas, builders of the Suez Canal and customs leaseholders at the port of Suez."
• The last paragraph contains some of the more beautiful sentences that I've ever read.  But I will leave that for you to discover.

KEY REFERENCES:

I put Moving the Palace in the same category as the two phenomenal stories below.  This trio could be read in succession as kind of a 20th century adventurers look at Africa.
The Zanzibar Chest by Aiden Hartley
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
For different reasons, Moving the Palace brought to mind Mahfouz' masterpiece The Cairo Trilogy.  Both stories draw the readers in and entangle them into the lives of the story's characters.

On Perception vs. Reality:
p. 59  Samuel leverages people's perception of him as they imagine a great authority than he actually possesses (i.e., "implementer of English policy").  There's also the idea of the value of items like gold as burdensome to the local chieftains who must worry about guarding it and transporting (versus something with more utility like camels, mules or slaves).

A description Samuel's nature:
p. 63  "But he is the kind of man to shoulder other people's whims, to make them his own, and here he is letting himself be swept along on Shafik's oddball odyssey."

Terms:
p. 90 zajals--form of Lebanese folk poetry, normally oral.  "A zajal is written in two columns, which can be read separately per column and then across—the result is three poems in one, with bountiful repetition."

Zajal rabbit hole:
When Competitive Poetry Was Better Than Soccer
A Boy Remembers Zajal
On Adapting Zajal Poetry for Modern Times
A Modern English Zajal Poem
UNESCO on Zajal

ZAJAL EXAMPLE

p. 91 villeggiatura--a holiday in the countryside.  In this case, Samuel thinks of this term as he enters the Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. 

Memory:
p. 90 The idea of preserving memories in couplets as Selim Atiyah does after a memorable evening.

For further research:
p. 05  author describes the 1880-1930 Lebanese emigration abroad.  Syro-Lebanese Migration (1880-Present): “Push” and “Pull” Factors.  In the story's case, the main character Samuel heads for the Sudan
p. 93  Nassib Ayyad (a fictional character it seems) is mentioned as a writer on the Arab poetry revival that occurred in concert wit the Arab cultural renaissance in the early 20th century.  This rebirth is properly referred to as Al-Nahda (awakening).  There's plenty on wikipedia for this but I hate to refer to that, so here are some links on the awakening: 
A Question of Arab Unity
Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective
p. 95  Cairo rivaling Paris in the early 20th century
Dissertation on Early 20th-century Cairo Coffeehouses Leads Penn Ph.D. Student to Egyptian and British Spy Reports
1882-Present Cairo
p. 95  Sakakini and Soussa dynasties: inner social circle in the early 20th century.  These families emigrated to Egypt before the 1850s and built their wealth through Egypt's initial wave of modernization.  Sakakinis were manufacturers and the Soussas were the Suez Canal builders.
Touring the Sakakini Palace

Praise of Savagery: Read It Because You Want To Learn About An Original Journey (Ethiopia)

In Praise of Savagery (Ethiopia)

READ IT BECAUSE:  You will learn about the incredible journeys that the original European adventurers made as they explored the previously "undiscovered" interior of Africa.  In Praise of Savagery is the memoir of a young man who befriended the great British explorer Wilfred Thesiger (see his books below).  Eventually, Cairns gets the opportunity to essentially retrace Thesiger's original steps when he first set out to find the origin of the Awash River in Ethiopia.  Cairns interweaves his journey with a retelling of Thesiger's own original journey.   It's frankly quite mind-blowing to consider just how brave/reckless one had to be during that time period to do this type of exploration and survive.  If you've ever been curious of Thesiger and adventurers of his ilk this is a great and accessible starter.

*One of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.
See our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

RELATED BOOKS:

KINDLE HIGHLIGHTS:
In Praise of Savagery by Warwick Cairns
Last annotated on January 5, 2016

The river flows on and on through the Danakil lands for mile after mile until there rises, in the distance, a line of purple hills known as the Magenta Mountains.  Read more at location 284

The river flows around Aussa on three sides, looking for a way out into the desert land beyond, where at some further point, before reaching the coast at Djibouti, it disappears.  Read more at location 291

the words of the great American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.’ Or, as he put it, rather more bluntly, to clients who had the temerity  Read more at location 329

A waiter appeared and pulled out a chair so that His Highness Asfa Wossen Tafari, Crown Prince of Abyssinia, eldest son of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings and Elect of God, and direct lineal descendant, it was said, of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, could sit down.  Read more at location 414

The story that Wilfred Thesiger heard of the events at the ruined Adoimara village by the Mullu River on his arrival Afdam Station was, in some ways, a remarkably similar one to the story of the MacDonalds of Glencoe; and yet, at the same time, it was very different indeed, and it revealed much about the culture of the Danakil peoples.  Read more at location 914

But the goat, which the moran led towards us by the horns, had done me no wrong.  Read more at location 1142

I wonder how deep the ancestral ties go. I wonder what it means to arrive, for the first time in your life, in a place where the people all look the way you look.  Read more at location 1247

Your typical pastoralist—your Samburu, your Rendille, your Turkana—he has a thousand hours more free time on his hands than you  Read more at location 1403

The Yanomami of the Amazon, meanwhile, get through their day’s work in even less time: two hours and forty-eight minutes.  Read more at location 1409

We pay dearly for them with our lives and with our freedom.  Read more at location 1425

And for all that, the Asaimara were, as he put it in his diary at the time, ‘A cheerful, happy people despite the incessant killing, and certainly not afflicted by the boredom which weighs so heavily today on our own young urban civilisation.’  Read more at location 1461

But here’s the thing: I had assumed that it was their pleasure so to do, just as it was my pleasure to do otherwise; and that the driving force in all human life, beyond the mere necessity of things, was pleasure. Or, better still, that living, as distinct from merely being alive, was the art of making pleasure out of necessity.  Read more at location 1578

he says, in essence, is that pleasure is the completion or perfection of human life.  Read more at location 1583

But these relentless, sensible, duty-driven people, they unsettle me.  Read more at location 1626

But in that part of the world the sheep and the goats look remarkably similar, to the point of being practically identical, and telling the one from the other was considerably trickier—apart from the sheep, from the back, having slightly fatter, more blubbery tails. But what if you had a scrawny sheep? Or what if you had a goat with a fat backside? Would they still be sheep and goat respectively? Or would they, in fact, become goat and sheep? And how would you know?  Read more at location 1722

While he was gone, Ali explained that the stick the head askari carried was the silver baton of command, which gave the bearer the authority of the Sultan himself,  Read more at location 1763

What they do is they take a water-container—in this case, one of our jerry-cans—and they fill it with water and tie it inside a wet sack. Then they hang it in the hottest place they can find—in a tree in full sunlight, say—and then, when the sack is dry they pour out the water and it is cold, as if it had come from a refrigerator.  Read more at location 1787

Among the Asaimara band, a man was expected to win his bride by organising a game rather like the one that small boys in England know as British Bulldog.  Read more at location 1808

At the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realisation of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.   Read more at location 1970

On the next day they saw, in the distance, the desert’s edge; and beyond it, far off, the blue of the sea. A day later they reached the coast, at Tajura. It was now six full months since the expedition began.   Read more at location 2208

The sort of people, in fact, who at another time might be content to spend their whole lives sorting cheques into account-number order, or else training all hours to be good at a sport that they don’t actually enjoy, because it’s wrong to quit things.   Read more at location 2284

And from there it was not such a big step to the cotton mills. That’s progress for you, though. And that’s civilisation.  Read more at location 2289

There are some that see life as a matter of departures—a process of moving on and leaving behind, of exploration and discovery.  Read more at location 2293

But for him there were more departures still. To Arabia, there to live and travel with the Bedouin. To Iraq, there to spend some seven years, on and off, in the reed longhouses of the Marsh Arabs. And the books he wrote about those years and the photographs he took, and the acclaim that followed. And after, to Kurdistan, to Afghanistan, to the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, to Morocco. To more fighting, still, on the side of the Royalists and against the communists in the Yemeni civil war. Then four expeditions, through the borderlands of Uganda, the Sudan and Kenya. During which he made a crossing of the deserts of the Northern Frontier District, climbing Mount Kulal and exploring the shores of Lake Turkana.  Read more at location 2307

But do you know how you tell the difference, eh? Between a sheep and a goat? Shall I tell you? Well, if the tail goes up, then it’s a goat. And if it goes down, it’s a sheep. That’s how you tell.  Read more at location 2349

‘Here’s a trick for you,’ he said. ‘It’s something the Bedu taught me. If you have no water, and no prospect of getting any, then you should put a little salt in the palm of your hand, like so, and then you lick it. That will help keep the thirst away.’  Read more at location 2352

In the country where I live there were once wolves in the mountains. There are none there now.   Read more at location 2454

His eyesight, now, had become so bad that his books were of no further use to him, and he gave them all away, so that his flat, once so full of them, now had, instead, row upon row of empty shelves. A short while later he moved from this flat to an old people’s home in Coulsdon in Surrey, run by the Friends of the Elderly, where he was given a room overlooking the lawn. In 2001 he began to be treated for Alzheimer’s as well as Parkinson’s. He began to lose his memory, and the shaking of his hands, which had been kept largely under control through drugs, began to return. He began, also, to dribble. This caused him great distress.  Read more at location 2477


Of someone standing by his bed, he demanded, ‘What is your tribe?’  Read more at location 2504

At another time he cried out, ‘For God’s sake, let me go.’ On Sunday, 24th August 2003, at just after five minutes past four in the afternoon, he died. He was ninety-three years old.  Read more at location 2505

No account of any part of Wilfred Thesiger’s life would be complete without a heartfelt plea to the reader buy, borrow or even steal his two stunningly beautiful master-works, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs.   Read more at location 2537

But the point is this, I think. The point is this. Wilfred Thesiger was a man who made a difference to the world. And for those of us whose lives he touched, things will never be quite the same again.   Read more at location 2550

Madagascar as the Proving Ground for D-Day and Sunken Midget Submarines in Diego Suarez

Did you know that Madagascar was essentially the proving ground for the Landing Craft used on D-day in WWII?

Prior to the invasion in 1942 Madagascar was nominally controlled by Vichy France and the Brits did not want the Japanese to potentially gain control of the deep water port of Diego Suarez.

I knew none of this until I heard this extraordinary podcast from History Extra.  If you don't have time to listen to it right now you can read a great summary of Operation Ironclad at the Perspectives on Africa blog.   This incredible multi lateral operation (Britain, Australia and South Africa) took more than 6 months to complete and indirectly contributed to Malagasy independence years later.  There's also quite a few Vichy submarines likely at the bottom of the ocean offshore from Diego Suarez (Antsiranana).

British disembark in Tamatave

More fascinating links down the rabbit hole:

Operation Ironclad – The invasion of Madagascar
~ OPERATION IRONCLAD ~ MADAGASCAR - 5 TO 7 MAY 1942
Battle of Madagascar (War History Online)
Midget Submarines at Diego Suarez, Madagascar 1942
Operation Ironclad: The British Invasion of Madagascar in 1942
British In Madagascar 1942
Pathe Gazette Special - Madagascar First… 1942