The Book of Trouble: a Romance
By Ann Marlowe
The Book of Trouble is Ann Marlowe's novel about love, marriage, sex, age, cultural and religious identities, family and country. It is both the story of her love affair with an Afghan man and her commentary on the state of love, religion and culture in America and other countries.
Using her affair with Amir, an Afghan man with whom she has a brief but passionate affair, Marlowe delves into observations about the differences between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, between America, Iraq and Afghanistan. She explores the concept of falling in love, comparing today's "relationships" with Victorian courtships of years gone by.
I didn't always agree with Marlowe's conclusions and observations, and more than once I seriously questioned her judgment as she pined for Amir, but I kept reading, enjoying her writing style and the tales she was telling about places I've never been and likely never will see. Knowing that her novel is a memoir made it all the more intriguing as I tried to picture the things she describes.
And I wondered what the people around me ate, and what kind of power they had in their world. It seemed that just by existing, with my American dollars and job, I had entirely too much power over people like this man.
It is hard to fathom why Ann stayed with Amir, why she obsessed about
him as she did given the way he treated her in public. Denial seemed
to run rampant when it came to his drinking and his behavior towards
her when out with friends. He tells her he wants to marry a
seventeen-year-old virgin. He says he wants to sleep with one of her
friends (although he phrases it much more crudely). He says he'll call
but doesn't.
So while I'd forgiven him, he'd gone on hating me. This was even worse than the fight at the movie theater. At least then I was sure I didn't want him. Now I wanted him back and he refused.
Ultimately, however, the book pulled me in and
kept me reading until the very last sentence. I needed to know what
happened - would they work things out, or not? And how would Ann
change, regardless of the outcome? How would her travels to
Afghanistan and Iraq shape her views on love, marriage, religion and
family?
I came to Iraq to escape my failed romance and my grief, to escape the whole topic of love, to concentrate on politics instead, but I've ended up seeing love as more important than I did before... But it's also part and parcel of a still half-traditional Muslim culture that takes love more seriously than Americans do now... And it's another reason to believe that American men today are repsonding to cultural cues, not biology, when they avoid marriage.
I was losing hope in Marlowe and her capacity for growth
until the very end, when her writings finally took a turn toward some
truly personal and seemingly honest introspection and observations.
The book became less about a troubled romance with cultural, religious
and age differences and finally about Marlowe's own realizations about
why she may have been pursuing such things as Farsi, cousin marriage
and understading Afghanistan's cutlure all along.
Also read Afghan Family Ties, an excerpt from
The Book of Trouble
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