The End of Manners

I love everything Francesca Marciano writes - her work is engaging and informative - check her out!

The thing that makes this novel really work is its limited ambition and I don't mean that in a negative sense at all. It describes a photojournalist's trip to Afghanistan to cover a story about women choosing to take their lives rather than being forced to marry men much older than them. The novel covers just this limited period of time spanning the trip and a week or so leading up to it and the few story lines from the past that are included are so uncomplicated that they seamlessly blend in with the present tense. This feature of the novel--that it is uncluttered by too many fancy writing devices like competing subplots or too much jumping around in time or the presence of too many secondary characters--is what makes this book succeed. Although the book is of average length, the feeling I was left with after reading it was that I had just finished reading a short story. Marciano uses a very sparse and clean writing style which accentuates the book's resemblance to a short story. But clearly, these very things that work so well for this novel can so easily fail if the plot itself is somewhat lacking. In this case, however, it is plausible, and fast paced, and, despite the several novels having been written about the devastation in Afghanistan, also seems very original. And even the people described in the novel, even the ones the author does not give too many paragraphs to, seem drawn--and drawn well--from real life. No effort is made to mask the grim situation in Afghanistan and this honesty only adds to this book's worth. Not a groundbreaking work of fiction, this, but well worth your time.

In Italian novelist Marciano's novel of European journalists delving into the hidden lives of Afghan women, narrator Maria Galante is a shy photojournalist. Having abandoned award-winning stories for food photography after a debilitating break-up, Maria reluctantly teams up with loud, outgoing Imo Glass, an ambitious British writer, to do a story on attempted suicides by Afghan girls trying to avoid forced marriages. They plan to interview and photograph the family and friends of a hospitalized girl in an isolated village who had attempted to burn herself. Initially bowled over and captivated by Imo's charm, attention and friendliness, Maria's spirits lift. "Essentially, I realized in a flash that anything done in Imo's company would take on a whole new light." But in the harsh glare of Afghanistan Imo seems more pushy, ambitious and focused. She will do anything, Maria realizes, even sacrifice others, to get the story. Marciano deftly portrays the gulf between cultures, the precariousness of life in war-ravaged Afghanistan, the fierceness of patriarchal culture and the isolation of tribal women. From physical danger and intimidation to a vulnerable woman's momentary recklessness, and the nightmarish isolation of finding oneself stranded alone in a hostile land, Marciano explores emotional nuances and moral choices that can in such extreme circumstances mean life and death. The inner landscape is as convincing as the lawless and unsympathetic countryside.

Francesca Marciano has taken her readers to Kenya in Rules of the Wild, and to Italy in Casa Rossa; this time, she takes her readers to the blighted, thrilling country of Afghanistan. The End of Manners is a captivating story of a mismatched pair of women journalists covering what they soon realize is an impossible assignment in a place most Westerners visit only through the morning headlines and the evening news. The narrator of the adventure, food photographer Maria Galante, is hand-picked by confident and successful journalist Imo Glass, to report on Afghan women who attempted to commit suicide to avoid arranged marriages. Maria leaves for Afghanistan prepared only with a brutal survival training course in England, and equipped with her camera and a series of ill-chosen articles of clothing. Maria's time in Afghanistan is a series of tedious and futile interviews with NGO workers who refuse to risk exposing women, men firmly rooted in tradition, and women who know the consequences of sharing their stories. Maria and Imo confront the complex dynamics with which Afghans grapple against the startling backdrop of a war-torn country decorated with cell phone advertisements. The End of Manners is a poignant depiction of Afghanistan as experienced by Westerners not entirely unlike ourselves. The beauty of the novel is in how easily and readily readers are caught up wanting the heroine to be braver, before realizing that they also would not be braver. Thus you are able to identify with the heroine, in contrast to familiar characters in similar novels that are too strong and too resilient to be real to Western readers. By making Maria real in this way, Francesca Marciano also makes Afghanistan real. This stunning novel takes Western readers behind our headlines and news clips to a place that does exist, that is not easily understood, and that, as Maria accepts, cannot be condensed into our photographs and articles. Armchair Interviews says: Up close and personal look at Afghanistan

Unpretentious and powerful, Marciano's novel is painstakingly honest and revelatory. Not just a frightening foray into a part of the world few experience, the author conveys a sense of urgency, coupled with the real horror of war, the daily battering of a country that endures a concentration of violence as various factions fight for ascendancy. Two important characters drive the narrative: the relentlessly curious journalist for London's "Observer", Imogen Glass; and the more circumspect and emotionally vulnerable Italian photojournalist, Maria Galante. In what would seem the perfect pairing of Western aggression and natural sensitivity, the two women's temporary intrusion into Afghanistan is but another wild story for the worldly Glass, life-changing for the Italian who is charged with photographing the suffering faces of females in a culture that rigidly defines their roles in a manner that outrages Western sensibilities. Retreating from the demands of photo-journalism after the demise of a long love affair, Maria has contented herself in a less demanding niche, photographing food for specialized magazines. Offered a unique opportunity to travel to Kabul with the larger-than-life Glass, Maria is at first reluctant to accept the assignment: a growing percentage of Afghan women have been self-immolating rather than submit to arranged marriages with much older men. The plight of Afghan women long a subject of interest to the public, it is Imo's task to write the back story and Maria's to capture the images of desperate women who would rather die than accept their fate. Fine on paper, the real time consequences of the assignment are daunting. Not only is Afghanistan dangerous, but to photograph such women is to court reprisal, dishonoring the victims in a culture as foreign to Imo and Maria as are the primitive conditions of this part of the world. Centuries-old traditions do not fall easily to the demands of journalistic curiosity, often heedless and disdainful of a way of life they cannot fathom. Even after an intensive week of survival training, Maria is intimidated by the daily brutality of a country overrun with journalists, mercenaries, NGO workers, international contractors and the usual parasitic opportunists who descend on Afghanistan with various agendas, most of them lucrative. Their "fixer", Hanif, is critical to the success of the women's venture, not to mention their security. Without Hanif the women would be lost, but his very commitment to his obligations costs this man dearly. In a rapidly disintegrating arena, where expedience dictates most critical decisions, Imo imposes the entitlement of her profession on the task. Galante is at first dwarfed by her companion's personality; yet it is Maria who finds her voice in a frustrating and humiliating experience where priorities are skewed at best, mostly tragic. A nightmarish wartime landscape is illuminated in this powerful novel, small pearls of wisdom brilliantly inserted where le