A story with no ending: Crescent

reviewed by Sally Bland

The Jordan Times (used w/permission).

THE MOTIFS of Diana Abu Jaber's new novel denote the sensual pleasures of life - food first and foremost, but also rain, flowers, storytelling and music. However, the themes she weaves among these motifs are of a much more serious and sometimes dark nature: love, doubt, betrayal, loneliness, exile, and social and political repression. In both cases, whether building on the sensual motifs or the underlying themes, the author's descriptions are intense and powerful.

Abu Jaber is an Arab-American of Jordanian and Palestinian descent who gained recognition with her first novel `Arabian Jazz', published a decade ago. She is also a professor of creative writing, and the structure and themes of this new novel convey a subtle message about the art of storytelling itself.

Throughout the book, Abu Jaber demonstrates her ability to keep the reader hanging in suspense: the story is seldom what it seems and, moreover, it never ends. This makes `Crescent' a bridge between the myths and folktales of classical storytelling and contemporary realistic fiction.

Each chapter contains an instalment of a reinvented Arabian Nights-type story, followed by the modern-day story of Sirine, an American with an Iraqi father. It is not until close to the end of the book that the link between the two narratives becomes apparent. Nor does the reader have an inkling of what will become of Sirine's romance with Hanif, the talented but troubled Iraqi exile.

While characters in the reinvented myth travel from Aqaba to the Nile to Dhofar and finally Hollywood, the setting of the story of Sirine and Hanif rotates between flashbacks to Baghdad and the meat of the story in Los Angeles. Sirine is the chef at an Arab-owned restaurant on Westwood Boulevard, an Iranian neighbourhood near UCLA, which attracts a mixed crowd of Middle Eastern students, expatriates and locals - Anglos and Latinos - all of whom thrive on her handcrafted and carefully seasoned, Arab-inspired cuisine.

At the caf