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Summary: A Well-written historical fiction
Review: A friend of mine recommended this book to me and I am so pleased that he did - the story covers a vast region in the Middle East and informs the reader of the geography, history, politics, and poetry of Iran and what is now called Turkmenistan. I not only learned more about Omar Khayyam, arguably one of the finest poets and philosophers of Persia, but I was entertained from the love stories, friendships, deceit, revenge - all the ingredients for a great novel. I highly recomment this novel - it takes you to another world and makes you realize how art and culture play such integral roles in our lives, and how the poetry and philosophy written ten centuries ago are still present and relevant today!
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Summary: Greaaaat!!
Review: After reading the Arabic brilliant translation of Amin Maalouf's Samarkand I really look forward to read the english translation now. Just Greaat!
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Summary: Wonderful mixture between history and fiction...
Review: Definitely one of my favourite authors... Maalouf took me along on a magical ride! Introduced me to Khayyam and his contributions to science, astronomy... I couldn't put this book down!
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Summary: Good
Review: I only know Omar Khayyam is a poet. But after reading this book I started to read his peoms. Maalouf's book is exceptional. After reading this book I read another 4 book of his and this one is still my favourite.
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Summary: Oddly Compelling
Review: I won't lie: you have to have a basic knowledge of Persian history to fully enjoy this book (I'm a month into a college course). If you know about bit about the region, though, the story of Omar Khayyam does for Persia what Voltaire's Candide did for France.
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Summary: A Great Journey!
Review: It is a beautiful story looking for the lost book of one of the greatest poet's of all times, Omar Khayyam. With the amazing story-telling of Amin Maalouf, the reader will take this trip search for this book, trom Samarkand to on board Titanic. Great blend of east and west, time warped and wrapped together.
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Summary: A vivid and inspiring historical novel
Review: Not since "I, Claudius" have I read so riveting a historical novel. Maalouf transports the reader to the 11th century with the ease of a well-designed time machine. The reader then gets to follow scientist and poet Omar Khayyam as he moves from country to country and court to court, jotting down his innermost thoughts in his book of quatrains, the "Rubaiyat".One of the central themes in the book is, to use Maalouf's words, "A woman and a man." While this theme is moving in Maalouf's account of the 11th century, where Khayyam is hopelessly in love with Jahan, a scheming court poetess, it is much less so in the tale of love between the American narrator and an Iranian princess in the early 20th century. The latter subplot is unlikely and contrived, but perhaps Maalouf realises this himself, for the narrator, Benjamin O. Lesage, is eventually left wondering whether the princess ever existed. The subplot about Iran's struggle for democracy against an oppressive shah and his cohorts is inspiring to me, coming as I do from Belarus, which is facing a similar struggle today. However, I feel that Maalouf overplays the involvement of Western internationalists in the defence of Iranian freedom. Whatever its shortcomings, though, "Samarkand" would be a very readable addition to anyone's Middle Eastern bookshelf.
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Summary: Of verse and violence
Review: Omar Khayyam's wondrous Rubaiyaat elicit from their audience a passionate uproar, which is either felicitous or fomenting with violent rage. Since centuries, Muslim imagination has been clouded with the myth of Khayyam's warped genius, the candid ardor of his verses, outpouring like a subtle brook under the sun. The shroud of his persona concealed a sanity teetering between abyss and surfeit; love and loss; celebrity and insularity. Yet who was this strange, young man, whose fiery spates of celestial lust bequeathed an anthology of jewels to the world?
In this exciting volume, Amin Maalouf dwells upon the poet, interweaving fact and fiction in order to de-mystify the historic haze which veils our perception of the Ottoman past. The book begins with Khayyam arriving in Samarkand, to find Jaber, the mathematician being victimized by a horde of bullies for indulging in `profane Greek sciences'. Shielding Jaber against the tormentors nearly costs Khayyam his life, when his provocative poetry, taken at face value incites the crowd to brand him as an alchemist, leaving his fate hanging in qadi Abu Taher's court. The qadi, by a stroke to luck befriends Khayyam, and offers advice: `We live in the age of secret and of fear. You must have two faces. Show one to the crowd, and keep the other for yourself and your Creator...' Indeed, the notebook he provides Khayyam for secret scribbling becomes a hotly contested property, most eagerly snatched out his clutches within his lifetime.
Gaining renown in his day as a mathematician, Khayyam's poetry breathes solely in midnight shadows. His love affair with the poetess Jahan emphasizes the difference between the two lovers. Khayyam pursues non-worldly aims by writing poetry because it `never negates what has come before it and is never negated by what follows.' He claims to worship his Lord by admiring the order of His Creation: the universe, the plants, and the marvel of the human body. He is troubled by the intransigence of the written word, of his poems being reduced to `shards, fragments, the detritus of a world buried for all eternity.' In contrast, Jahan's intrigues in the Sultan's palace surreptitiously perforate the bifurcation between the public and private spheres, brazenly establishing her niche in the material world. Their love for each other bridges the gulf of their differences, as they realistically strive to comprehend each other's lives.
Maalouf questions whether Khayyam's religious and creative identities can be conflated together for judgment. Criticized for his irreverence and intoxication, censored for his sacrilegious verses, Khayyam is spared Jaber's fate by turning to Isfahan, after the fall of Samarkand to Seljuk troops. The ensuing violence between different factions of the Ottoman Empire signifies an era of decadence of Muslim intelligentsia, with different state actors contesting for legitimization of powers by dictating their own religious interpretations on others. For Maalouf, finger-pointing the exact moment in Muslim history when scholarship began to careen off the path of reason-oriented disciplines such as science, philosophy and mathematics, towards dogma is difficult. Khayyam's Rubaiyyat celebrate the diversity of textual interpretation, forging a unique umbilical cord with the Creator, encouraging us to peer into our own souls and fall silent.
Nothing prepares Khayyam for his meeting with Hassan Sabbah, the cultist leader of the Assassins and the occupier of the seized fort of Alamut, whose followers' blind devotion, propels him on a terrorist spree.Most pointedly, Maalouf criticizes the `militant virtue' which Sabbah propagates within his community. Aiming to regulate every second of his disciples' lives, he bans music and alcohol. Overcome with megalomania, he throws his wife and daughter out of the fort, when they protest over the execution of his own son. Stealing Khayyam's prized notebook, he adds it to his library, which is torched by the Mongols.
The novel offers a twin-story: Khayyam's manuscript encompassing his biography, and carrying his legacy to the depths of the ocean. Benjamin O. Lesage, the protector of the manuscript's life almost parallels Khayyam's, as he falls for the beautiful Persian heiress Shireen, giving Maalouf further opportunity to offer jabs at Orientalist avarice and the distorted lens through which it judges the East. He considers whether an understanding between the Orient and the West can ever be accomplished, given the plethora of misunderstandings between the two. In either case, intolerance and ignorance become the chief targets of his diatribe.
The centrifugal theme regards the loss of the written word, leaving behind a vacuum which is filled by the perpetuation of myth. The miracle of the manuscript is embodied in the historical context within which it was written. Can the author be dissociated from the text, or is the text the working of the event which makes its revelation possible? For Maalouf the connection between text and context must be severed, as Omar Khayyam is dispossessed of his own writing, which passes multiple hands before finding its repose on the sea bed. His poetry at last gains freedom from ownership and arbitrary interpretation by opening the floodgates to infinite readings.
Maalouf is overly meticulous and melodramatic. His clichés spring from his proclivity to write in superlatives. The spectacle of historic dash across civilizations and dynasties, with which he begins the book, begins to wear thin as the reader gets sensitized to the factual bombardment. Amidst dry, racy narration he leaves little room for the mental states of his characters. By the end of Book Two, the glitter surrounding both Jahan and Omar Khayyam begins to flake. Some of the themes appear too overtly, lacking subtle stylistic guile. Nevertheless, Samarkand is a breath-taking read, which lets the reader fly on a magic carpet through centuries of lost Ottoman history.
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Summary: Samarkand - A Tale of Mystery, Intrigue, and Revelation
Review: Once again Amin Maalouf has applied his prodigious story-telling ability to illuminate a slice of history with details hitherto unknown to this reader. Samarkand is a richly textured novel with all the right elements to capture and hold the reader's attention: Plot, adventure, romance, poetry, sex, cloak and dagger assassination, and international intrigue. But one should not be fooled by the genre, for, barely concealed behind the search for the manuscript of the famous Rubbaiyat of Omar Khayyam, purported to have gone down with the Titanic, is a well-researched chronicle that does justice to its author. It is a scholarly work that thrills like a mystery, tingles like a romance, tickles like a children's story, and educates better than those dry and boring books they handed out in school! Samarkand takes you to 11th and 12th Century Persia where one learns that the word assassin, though Arabic in Origin, became the symbol for the most feared underground terrorist group then known to man. They were the vanguards of today's desperados who willingly suffer martyrdom for a cause. The account of events chronicled by Maalouf opens a window into a world so exotic that we can hardly imagine its influence would reach across space and time to affect our own lives now in the 20th Century. I could hardly put it down and was very sorry to see it end. But I do not despair; three more of Mr. Maalouf's books are stacked on my nightstand!
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Summary: A wonderful, absorbing read and very topical too
Review: This is like a gorgeous Persian manuscript, full of light, colour, action, adventure and intelligence. And not only is it a wonderful double story, about Omar Khayyam and his life and work, and centuries later, the American who becomes obsessed with finding the original ms, it's also a fabulous and extremely perceptive journey through Persian and Islamic culture, in both its positive and negative aspects. What Maalouf has to say about the tyranny in the Muslim world that too many people have to groan under, the lack of respect and yet the love felt for great literature and philosophy, and scariest of all, the way of the Assassins, the fanatics who love death-well, it's very, very topical. A lovely, thoughtful, extraordinary book that has really whetted my appetite to read more of Maalouf's work.
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