![]() ![]() Sirine and the handsome Professor meet, talk, casually flirt at a party, like each other, hang around, make love, have their first scraps, reconcile, make love a bit more, and finally fall in love. Among the regular customers feature shop-owners from the neighbourhood, and students and teachers from the nearby University, amongst which stands out Hanif, a young, clever, intense, captivating, intellectual refugee from Baghdad. And that’s partly because she’s a gentle character, but surely also because she prepares, during seemingly endless shifts, every sort of Arab delicacy to please and consol a thick group of immigrants and exiles from the Middle East. However, she is revered as some sort of Goddess in Café Žadia, where she works as a cook. ![]() She comes across as so naïve and clumsy that it is hard to make her our heroine, especially when she receives, and at some point accepts, the advances of slimy poet Aziz. We follow Sirine, a 39.5 years old Iraqi-American spinster (a friend of mine has me convinced that you can be defined as ‘single’ only up until 35) incessantly bicycling from West L.A. I couldn’t resist and, despite the Mills and Boon style cover, I had to read it. ![]() The culinary and sexual pleasures of a spinster in Westwood, L.A.Ĭrescent, Portland author Diana Abu-Jaber’s second novel set within the Arab-American community in Los Angeles, has been compared to Like water for chocolate, the masterpiece of magic realism cum recipe novels. ![]()
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