A thick book on Egyptian political history may sound dull, but The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif spans a century of time with letters, diaries, and characters that become so real they feel like friends. And it´s not so much about politics as it is about the people behind it, or the people affected by the people behind it. I´ve generally found books that use correspondence as a medium to tell the story to be rather tedious, but not this one. As the pages dwindled and I arrived at the last one, I wished that the story would continue and that the characters were not so short lived as the pages that contained them.
And perhaps, also factored into this, is my admiration for Anna--the historical main character and author of the majority of these chronicles--as she is seen through her writing and through the eyes of her posterity as they read the journals of her old trunk. I mainly admired her desire to experience a country and a people for what it is and who they are, while her compatriots cared for little beyond their own society and how they could benefit from their country´s imperialistic interests in Egypt.
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