In an Antique Land is a hybrid book, that weaves together a travel memoir and a biography of a Jewish trader in Cairo sometime around 1100 AD.

Not sure what to make of this book. It took me months to go through it. At times it was really, really interesting, but a big load of it is an info dump that wasn't very engaging.
What I liked were the parts where Ghosh tells a story about Egypt in the 1980s through the eyes of a non-Westerner, a Hindu Indian in a rural Muslim village, which was refreshing to me. I liked the author's subtle, but often snarky comments on colonialism and cultural relativism. ( )

An Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical. intimate biography of the private life a country, Egypt. from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm. Ghosh's book is extraordinary: a travel book that reaches back into the twelfth century as it touches on the dilemmas of our
own time.' Times

The vignettes from the life of a tiny poor Egyptian town are fascinating - a rare and vivid view into an isolated culture. The history part, however, is a disorganized, random info dump - it seemed to me he just put all his research notes into the book, without a narrative or cohesion. Too bad, because some part of it was interesting, but really, do we need a biography of everyone who came near the documents but failed to discover them? ( )

A lovely parallel account of the author's time as an anthropology student in a small village in Egypt, and his research into the life of a Jewish slave mentioned in some medieval documents found in a cache in Cairo. The story of how the research came into being is fascinating in itself -- his description of the cache of documents in the Cairo Ganizeh would have been enough to keep my interest, but his account of living in the farming village was equally charming -- especially his inability to explain the religious traditions of Hindus to the Muslims he was living among. He is not Hindu himself, but everyone assumes that he is, and thus that he worships cows, and burns the dead -- two things that are blasphemous to a Muslim. Ghosh comments at one point that he didn't know an Arabic word for "cremated" and thus, when describing Hindu religious traditions, was forced to use the word "burned" -- the same word Muslims used to describe the fate of sinners destined for hell.

There is little to no sense of Western superiority in the story, but there are a fair number of eye-opening observations on the politics of the Middle East as it is experienced by your average village farmer looking for a better life.This is in the early eighties, so a generation or so after the Egyptian revolution of Nasser in 1952, when serfs were freed and allotted their own land. Now the economy is in upheaval, the promise of the revolution has either been realized, if you were lucky, or dissipated if you weren't. There is an exodus to find work "outside" -- in Iran, mostly, which was at war and needed labor -- and a need for hard currency.

All in all a wise and touching account of a small village in the midst of economic upheaval and modernization, and at the same time a rather brilliant historical investigation into the life of a man known only via a few mentions in letters between 12th century merchants trying to do business across uncertain trade routes.

Interesting memoir of the author's time spent in Egypt and the people he met there, interspersed with the story of a 12th century Indian trader, the subject of the research that took Ghosh there originally as a student. A bit awkward at times, as the two stories didn't mesh for me as well as the blurbs and reviews suggest. Some of the transitions were pretty blunt. Overall, an informative and relatively engaging read. I gave it 3 1/2 stars.

Review written in August, 2011 ( )