The Girl from the Golden Horn

Rating:
Summary: Love and the clash of cultures in pre-war Vienna
Review: "The Girl from the Golden Horn" is an insightful novel about two mismatched but well-meaning people. Asiadeh, an upper class Turkish girl living in European exile meets a Hasa, a Viennese doctor. They fall in love, marry, and try to overcome the cultural differences between them, He cannot comprehend her "wild" Turkish nature, and she cannot understand his "modern" outlook, let alone the behavior of his friends. Always in the background are Asiadeh's sense of duty to the Ottoman prince to whom she was betrothed as a child and and Hasa's memories of his unfaithful ex-wife. Although Said wrote the book specifically about expatriate Muslims in a Christian Europe, there is much about the loss of the past and the longing for home that transcends the specific characters and situations. The story is told with wit and lyricism and is a good read for anyone trying to understand the dislocations of losing one's homeland and culture.