Short Takes

Chicago
By Alaa Al Aswany
Translated, from the Arabic, by Farouk Abdel Wahab
Harper, 342 pp., $25.95

"Life in America . . . is like American fruit: shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless," says a famous Egyptian heart surgeon who has lived well in America for 30 years to a young new Egyptian medical student in Chicago. The many characters of this ambitious novel have come to the United States to earn advanced degrees and to better themselves in ways that are impossible in their oppressive homeland. Many of them live with the restrictions and values of their original Muslim society: respect for elders, for name, title, reputation, honor, and belief in sacrifice and hard work. These values translate into an uneasy success.

The young student, who plans to write poetry rather than practice medicine, attempts to protest against the oppressive regime of his homeland, as does a former 1960s radical who befriends him. A proper, veiled Muslim girl also studying medicine falls in love but is obsessed by fears of losing her honor. Even compromised success evades most of these characters, who lose their nerve or their faith, die, divorce. While the characters fit a formula - older-younger, male-female, cautious-courageous - they nonetheless engage a reader's sympathies and should expand an American reader's perceptions.

Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman
By Francine du Plessix Gray
Atlas, 248 pp., $24

Born into a family of wealth and power (her father was Jacques Necker, minister of finance under Louis XVI), Germaine Necker was educated with rigor by her strict mother. Allowed, even as a child, to attend the intellectual salons at her parents' home, she learned early the value of conversation, wit, and charm. For an unattractive girl with social and political aspirations these were necessary and powerful assets.

She used these gifts exceptionally well, first marrying Baron Eric Magnus de Staël Holstein, Sweden's ambassador to France, then seducing a string of powerful and brilliant men, including Louis de Narbonne, Benjamin Constant, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Engaged with the issues of the time as well as the men, she created the salons where the fate of the nation was discussed, disputed, and frequently decided. She wrote prolifically defending the principles of the French Revolution. Tirelessly struggling to assure "the establishment of a representative government towards which the human spirit everywhere aspires," she was alarmed by Napoleon's disregard for this fundamental principle and unafraid to express her disapproval. He became her lifelong enemy, exiling her and banning her books. In exile for 12 years, she continued to entertain, write, and impress, and, although fat and flamboyantly dressed, continued to attract suitors, including a husband 22 years her junior.

Du Plessix Gray accomplishes a remarkable narrative feat - presenting the French Revolution as it unfolds and ultimately collapses from the point of view of one extraordinarily prescient, prodigiously gifted, and devoted patriot. The author attributes de Staël's violent mood swings to manic-depressive disorder, a malady that made her dazzle and despair. Schlegel wrote of her, "If she could govern herself, she might have governed the world."

Amarcord: Marcella Remembers
By Marcella Hazan
Gotham, 307 pp., illustrated, $27.50

As she tells it, Marcella's life has been one of good fortune. After surviving World War II with her family in Italy and struggling to attain her higher degrees in science, Marcella met and married an American from a well-off Jewish family and moved to his native New York City.

There, nostalgic for her own cuisine, she starts to cook. Friends, who delight in her authentic Italian meals, persuade her to teach them to cook, and thus begin her cooking classes. By chance, it seems, food critic Craig Claiborne drops in for lunch and writes her up in The New York Times. A publisher asks her to write a cookbook, which becomes a bestseller. She expands her culinary classes to Bologna and then to Venice. She writes more books and travels the world while entertaining and teaching stars like Danny Kaye, Burt Lancaster, Vincent Price. She cooks with Julia Child, James Beard, and Nobu Matsuhisa. Her marriage to Victor, a demanding partner, seems to have had its bumps, but she alludes to these more than she tries to explore or explain them. Some of her professional and personal relationships turned sour, and she uses the memoir to settle some old scores, but she more often uses it to thank and praise supporters and friends who helped to make her life a very sweet one.

Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.