The Map of Salt and Stars

            The Map of Salt and Stars impressed me with its poetic language and deeply magical metaphors and images.  Early on, lines like, “My words sunk down like seeds, my vowels and the red space for stories crushed under my tongue.” (Joukhadar 3) and, “I imagine the vibrations of my voice traveling thousands of miles, cracking through the planet’s crust… where the world is all colors at once, where nobody dies.” (Joukhadar 6-7), caught my attention and kept me listening very closely to what the narrator was saying, since it was so interesting and beautiful.  The color-sound pairing gave the book another layer of descriptive detail that I haven’t seen in another novel, even Nabokov only mentions his abilities, he doesn’t try to translate them for the reader in Speak, Memory.

            I really enjoyed Rawiya’s parallel journey.  Side by side, it’s easy to see what creates a narrative with complex characters, (Nour and her story), and what create a fairytale, (Rawiya’s story.)  The author chooses to tell Rawiya’s in past tense, and in the third person, which helps the reader put some distance between themselves and Rawiya, whereas with Nour we are inside her head and in the present tense, heightening the emotions we feel from her.  I wouldn’t have noticed it if the stories weren’t side by side, but it’s clear how different the amount of details are in each girl’s life, as well as the kinds of memories and relationships they have with the other characters.  With Rawiya, I get some lines about what her body is feeling, and the kinds of things she’s worried about, but it is kept to a minimum.  With Nour, I feel every swell of emotion, every doubt, and I feel like I’m seeing the world through her unique lens.  Rawiya has memories of her home and family, but these are brief, and she only lapses into them momentarily.  With Nour, we dive headlong into the pain of losing her father, the coyote she saw in central park, and the dead falcon she found on her building’s roof.  There isn’t much that is spared from her experience, and her sections go into memory often, sometimes once every page or two, to help round out this real human being.  Nour’s relationship with those around her are also more complex, sometimes she is angry with her mother, her relationship with Zahra is very strained, and she changes her opinion on people over the course of the book, like Yusuf.  Rawiya’s relationships are fairly simple.  She loves Khaldun, who loves her back, Al-Idrisi is angry with her for not being upfront about her gender, but gets over it after a minute or two, and her mother and brother love her when she returns home and not much has changed.  They each have the same kinds of elements and technique running through them, but it’s easy to see how much deeper Nour’s story goes when alternated with Rawiya’s. 

            Something that fascinated me the most about this book were Nour’s memories.  We go into Nour’s earlier memories very often, I was surprised by how much at first.  I expected to hear more about her father, he’s so important to her, but I was surprised with the variety and frequency of other memories.  The author slips into them with no hesitation, with no prompting, and lets Nour’s mind wander to memories that are brought up by what she’s experiencing in the moment.  When she’s helping her family search the ruins of their house in Syria, she remembers when she lost her doll as a child.  When they’re walking around their neighborhood, trying to see if Abu Sayeed’s house is in any better shape than their own, Nour remembers a coyote she saw in central park.  The memories build, and very soon we have a clear and deep connection with Nour that goes beyond the time we spend with her in the book.

-Iris