Word: schiemer
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...entrenched grafters whose platform is to bleed the poor. Equip its army with inadequate and defective weapons and have its soldiers humiliatingly defeated in the field. Result: revolution. So goes the very recent history of Egypt, and so goes the theme of this first novel by Author Maarten Schiemer. The Cry of the Kite is a fictionalized account of how fat Farouk's restive Egypt became the spitfire Egypt of Soldier Gamal Abdel Nasser...
...half of a two-man news agency, Java-born South African Author Schiemer, now 23, was a fledgling reporter of the Cairo scene for a year beginning in March 1953. He met Nasser and Naguib, original front man of the coup, and made friends with members of the Arab League, the Moslem Brotherhood, Egyptian army officers and plain people of the poor native quarter where he lived. With its probing look at Egyptian attitudes, motivations and customs, the book is written more between the headlines than on top of them...
...around him, Dirk feels the romantic pull of the minarets, the call of the muezzin, and the wheeling of the slender-winged kites in Cairo's twilight sky. He falls recklessly in love with a raven-haired Coptic 16-year-old named Aziza. Their furtive courtship gives Author Schiemer a chance to explore Egyptian domestic customs from cuisine to boudoir. One custom: the exhibiting of the wedding-night bedsheet to the bridegroom's parents as proof of the bride's virginity...
Anathema on Foreigners. Tampering with history, Novelist Schiemer brings his officers' revolt to a bad end, and with it Dirk's romance. The bloody mob riots that result in the burning of Shepheard's Hotel lead Major Khaled and a few other hothead officers to try an overnight coup. Dirk is jailed briefly and ordered to leave the country. When Aziza and clan hear of his disgrace, he gets an even quicker brushoff. As Aziza screams her parting words, they seem almost like an Egyptian anathema on all foreigners: "Son of a dog! I'll find...
...Author Schiemer sometimes clumps through his plot in Hollywooden shoes, but redeems himself by capturing the sights and sounds and smells of Egypt with the freshness of a documentary filmed on location. Like Paul Bowles's more accomplished novel, The Spider's House, set in French Morocco, The Cry of the Kite is a blend of the harsh and the exotic, and an entertainingly readable way of catching up on one's global homework...