The Love of Strangers is a non-fiction book about students from Iran who spent almost three years in England beginning in 1815. It should be fascinating, but because of the author’s tendency to get bogged down in minor details and the lack of insight into anyone’s personality, it’s weirdly boring. Given the intriguing facts on which the book is based, it’s truly astounding to me that the book is so dull.
In 1815, six Muslim young men from Iran came to London to study various aspects of English science. One wanted to study advances in medicine, one was a metalworker who studied advances in metalworking, and so forth. One of the students was named Mirza Salih. Mirza Salih was there to study English, printing, and diplomacy. He kept a journal, which became the primary source of inspiration and information for this book.
Mirza Salih’s journal was not a private diary in which he revealed his innermost thoughts; instead, his intent was that the diary be read by others. As a result, he was careful about what he wrote, and perhaps that’s why the author can’t convey much of his personality or that of the other students. Still, I was nonplussed to find that all the students are presented in a pretty blank way. We know what they wanted to study, and what they enjoyed about those studies and what they didn’t, but otherwise I had absolutely no insight into their personalities.
The other problem with the book is that it doesn’t flow well. The students struggled with lack of funds and with lack of acceptance but eventually succeeded in making friends among the English as well as meeting their goals. This should make a compelling plot arc, but it keeps stalling out. The author has a tendency to dwell on details that bring the story to a complete halt. A paragraph on the spelling of someone’s name, for example, would be better off in a footnote. Attempts to tie the students’ experiences to the life of Jane Austen fall flat because the author is a tad condescending towards Austen. The book ends up presenting a series of facts that happen to involve a story, instead of a story that compels the reader to keep reading, absorbing facts along the way.
A book about six highly motivated young men from Iran travelling through England and interacting with English people from all walks of life should be fascinating. For heaven’s sake, one of them, the metalworker, married an Englishwoman and she went back to Iran with him. Please, someone write that romance novel! Please! For me! I need details, and if there are not factual ones to be found, then I’ll take fiction (properly labeled, of course).
Sadly, the book is deadly dull. It is well researched and meticulous, but boring. The book is packed with facts about Regency England, but I had already learned most of those facts from more entertaining material. If there are gaps in the primary source material, then it’s certainly not the author’s fault that there are gaps in the book, but that doesn’t change my frustration as a reader.
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This is the first time I’ve ever read a review here without a grade. Granted, it sounds like a D, and I’ve absolutely no interest in reading it, but still.
Yeah, I was wondering about the lack of grade as well.
What a shame! That sounds so fascinating. I might try it anyway, because that is a seriously great premise. It drives me crazy how poorly written so much non-fiction is, but they kinda have you over a barrel. I doubt there’s a well written alternative (in English anyway), so if you want to know more about what happened, you slog through it.
@Kitkat and Cat: That was my fault! Forgot to check a box to get all the book info to show up!
What a shame the author didn’t make much out of this material. Some historians,are really good at taking sketchy sources, imagining their way into the time and setting, picking up on little details, and putting it together to say rather a lot. I’m thinking of Kathryn Shevelow’s biography of Charlotte Charke, an eighteenth-century actress who played “trouser roles” and wore men’s clothes offstage. Charke actually wrote an autobiography but it was pretty unrevealing, not the intimately confessional sort. So the book paints a vivid picture of the eighteenth century theater world with plenty of info about other actresses, and keeps tying Charke in to say more about her than she intended to say about herself.
Sold! I’ve been tracking down research materials on Muslim immigrants/visitors to western Europe in the early 19th century (for a future novel) and hadn’t encountered this source yet. I was a little worried from your review that the material had been fictionalized and so made less useful for research, but a check of the publisher’s listing makes it clear that it’s a scholarly reference. (Given that, the lack of engaging plot and characterization is not entirely surprising.) The only pity is that the visitors are all male, but that’s a common problem for my research projects.
If people are interested in a related subject, check out Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831 by Ian Coller, which examines a community of Egyptian immigrants to Napoleonic France.
In a bit of Baader Meinhof complex, I just yesterday read a mention of Mirza Saleh, in a review on The Economist of a book called The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason, by Christopher de Bellaigue. Sounds like Saleh’s travels are only a small section of it, but it does sound pretty interesting!