"Like stepping back millennia," is the first thought of a modern woman arriving in a Gulf state. She has come to help establish Western tourism, but her proficiency in Arabic seems less useful when the veiled, cloaked women are invisible and silent. The Night At The Souk is the first story in this collection, a desert state being the first of TWO DESERTS. The newcomer feels that she is noticeable, stared at, so in the busy market she haggles for clothing to cover herself completely, even her pale eyes. Colour leaves her world and when she steps outside, nobody knows who she is. She feels invisible, but liberated from her own personality.
The next story, by contrast called The Cop, The Hooker and The Ridealong, presents an American city where abuse of all kinds is taking place and the fatigued police have to deal with extreme examples, such as domestic disputes turning violent. At the same time the protagonist of this story discovers her husband is developing a neuropathic disease, making movement difficult. She finds her job of psychotherapy increasingly challenging.
We then get alternating views of women in each of these worlds - these deserts, as author Julie Brickman thinks of them - from an Arabic woman whose recital of the accepted teachings is by rote, suppressing her longing to try new experiences, to a small gathering of women who try to cheer each other up by reminiscing about when their lives used to include sex, as they come to terms with the fact of their gradually dying husbands.
Some stories in this loosely connected set are less pleasant in theme than others, such as one set in a prison for terrorists, but in one humorous story a writer who discovers just how many writers' groups exist online: Writers Who Think they Are Better Than Anyone But Virginia Woolf; Writers Who Have Received Over Five Thousand Rejection Slips; Writers Who Like To Talk About Their Work More Than They Like To Do It and so on. Each type of desert has its own dangers for both men and women; quicksand in one, faculty meetings in another. Brickman writes very much in the personality of each protagonist, filling our minds with the sights and scents of Arabia, or the regret of a young marriage brought to decay by progressive illness.
TWO DESERTS will reward the thoughtful reader, saddening and gladdening by turns.
Deserts of sand and deserts of the heart, Middle Eastern deserts and American deserts: Two Deserts, a collection of stories, spans cultures and deserts. Adventure travel agent Emma Solace plunges into the impossible conflicts in an Arabian Gulf country. Her circles embrace her radically political lover Samir, 17 year-old Ayshah yearning for freedom, Muslim mother Maryam plotting to rescue her son from a jihadist movement. Writer Livia Skyer plummets into the heart desert when ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease strikes her beloved husband. Her circles include a hooker who is training her daughter for the life, an academic whose lust is depleting, a club of women whose husbands are dying, a priest who has fallen in love from the pulpit. A fierce and compassionate storyteller, Brickman’s ability to articulate the deep and invisible currents of life is eloquent and remarkable.
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