A Review: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen

8:23 am - January 18, 2012: 7 notes

A Review: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen

For those who choose to remove themselves from the Western world, the expatriate experience is singular and, often, inexpressible. The experience varies by country and the time spent there, by finances and by open-mindedness, but the expatriate will always be an outsider. After a year of wandering village markets in Africa and staring over the Atlantic from the wrong side, I have continually tried to explain my experience to others and have failed. But with The Ruins of Us, Keija Parssinen, who was a third-generation expat in Saudi Arabia, has succeeded and keenly captured the haunting separateness of the expatriate.

Rosalie al-Baylani leads this story of cultural difference and family sacrifice. After spending more than half of her life with her oil-rich Saudi husband (and college sweetheart), she discovers that he has overlooked contemporary cultural changes and wed a second wife, who, insultingly, resides mere minutes from the al-Baylanis’ mansion. With sharply drawn details and a knack for writing emotion, Parssinen tells the story of Rosalie’s realization that, after so many years, she is still a stranger in her country. This scene occurs just after Rosalie confronts her husband, Abdullah:

Her voice was filled with cruelty and contempt, which surprised her. She had never spoken to her husband in that tone before, but then again, she had not known that she was to become the senior wife, mother of his children, or whatever title he would give her as appeasement. Abdullah was silent for several minutes. Outside, she heard a lawnmower kick on. She closed her eyes, willed herself to faint. It was too painful that the rest of the world kept moving while her life was ravaged.

From the uncontrollable malice in her voice to the lawnmower’s drone, every detail proclaims Rosalie’s helplessness and horror at her newfound status. Meanwhile, the other members of the al-Baylani family struggle through their own forms of isolation. Though Abdullah stands firmly on the foundation of his marital decisions, privately they haunt him. Rosalie, once a lover worth defying tradition and his family for, seems changed—seems so much like a Saudi wife now. Their son, Faisal, a devout Muslim, loathes his parents’ choices and resents his mother’s American background (and, thus, his own); he represents every young man straddling the border between boyhood and maturity, but, even more achingly, he must negotiate the two countries in his blood. Here, he struggles with both separations:

Parking the car, he checked the glove compartment for his sunglasses, slid them over his nose, and eyed his reflection in the rearview mirror. Tough guy, he thought. Bruce Willis. Harrison Ford. Tom Cruise. He admired those men for their boldness. It was too bad they were all kuffar unbelievers.

Many young persons rebel in the imbalanced time between youth and adulthood, opposing the rules that stifle them. But Faisal’s frighteningly fervent religiosity does not lend itself to drugs, alcohol, sex. Throughout the novel, with his parents’ attention diverted by their troubles, he treads a precarious line between faith and fury.

And Mariam, the youngest and sanest al-Baylani, who pens a popular blog, True Confessions of a Saudi Teen, also suffers from the family’s distractions, albeit least of all. She is the only one happy to be a part of their disheveled family, but in their neglect she wonders “why no one wanted to live with her anymore.”

In strong prose, brilliantly peppered with Arabic, the author teases out a story about isolation and action: moving across the world, creating a blog, wielding a knife. The Ruins of Us reminds readers that not only expats feel isolated. I was not prepared for this story about what it means to be a family, and its strength and torrential emotion swept me away like waves in the Persian Gulf.

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BONUS: Parssinen will be on tour throughout January and Feburary. Check her calendar for details. New Yorkers, she will be at BookCourt on January 30, 7:00pm, with other writers from the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.