Bead Bai by Sultan Somjee

Lady Pamela Hicks Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten Simon & Schuster Described as “Downton Abbey meets Oscar Wilde,” this colorful autobiography by Lady Pamela Hicks is worthy of her illustrious family’s many achievements. Involved in several critical moments throughout twentieth-century Western history, Hicks gives us privileged access to such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth, Gandhi, and Nehru. Gaute Heivoll Before I Burn Don Bartlett, tr. Graywolf Press Based upon the historical Norwegian fires of 1978, this novel is as much about the author’s own life as the arsonist’s who staged the drama. Written in a clear, precise style, Gaute Heivoll uses diary entries, letters, and haunting prose to tell the story of being born and raised in the shadow of the fires and his own fascination with the stories, events, and people they affected. Nota Bene adultery, and her eventual divorce. It is rather a detailed analysis of how Frida’s world collides with that of her foreign husband at both a personal level, as she comes to term with her unfulfilled desire, and at a more nationalist level, as she realizes that she is first of all a dóttir (daughter) of Iceland. At the same time, on the national level the reader sees the economic dénouement Iceland suffered during the early 2000s, a period of scandal and political upheaval. Hence, the reader is privy to the double meltdown: on the one hand, Frida’s psychological and matrimonial fractures and, on the other hand, the shocking realization in Iceland of the social, economic, and political inequalities endemic to the country. As Frida battles to make sense of her life, Iceland battles to overcome the unequal status quo of a society held captive in an age-old paradigm of serf versus feudal lord. The two events mirror each other—both Frida and her country are stuck in a time warp from which they desire to escape. Alda Sigmundsdóttir captures the nuances of Icelandic society well. She describes the country in all its beauty with obvious affinity, and she depicts the similarities and disparities of two European nations: Iceland and England . She also manages to shed light upon the intrinsic debilities of both societies: the underlying negativity and hypocrisy of Icelandic small-mindedness and the pervasive hypocrisy of English aristocrats and diplomatic personnel whose moral weaknesses, sexual deviation, and illegitimacy continue to be disguised, ignored, or purposefully hidden from public view. As a first novel, Sigmundsdóttir ’s Unraveled is an inspiring debut well worth reading. Janet Mary Livesey University of Oklahoma Sultan Somjee. Bead Bai. Charleston, South Carolina. CreateSpace. 2012. isbn 9781475126327 To the growing list of East African literature focusing on the heritage of that region’s Asian population we may now add the title Bead Bai, a historical novel about the Ismaili community in Kenya during the first part of the twentieth century (see WLT, July 2012, 14–18). This is the first novel published by Sultan Somjee, whose career as an anthropologist began in Kenya and continues in his present home in western Canada. Readers familiar with the novels of M. G. Vassanji (author of The Gunny Sack, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall [see WLT, Sept. 2005, 84], and other titles) will find themselves on familiar terrain with this novel. Like Vassanji, Somjee grew up in the heart of East Africa’s Ismaili community—a branch of Shia Islam originating in Pakistan and India whose spiritual head is the aga khan, and whose members have migrated around the world. Somjee peoples his novel with characters and situations from that community. Somjee’s novel, like Vassanji’s works, explores the diasporic experiences of Ismailis who migrated to East Africa. Part ethnography, part history, Bead Bai recounts the particular experience of Ismailis, even as it highlights the remarkable variety of the Asian communities of East Africa, all within the context of the politics of resistance to colonial rule. The protagonist , Sakina (“Saki”), is born in the Jugu Bazaar neighborhood of Nairobi in the early 1920s. Her family belongs to the Satpanth branch of Nairobi’s Ismaili community, and through her we become acquainted with the phenomenon of the

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