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anovelobsession's review against another edition
2.0
I like the premise of the book, but I didn't find the characters very believable. A young Italian photojournalist, suffering from anxiety, decides to take an assignment to Afghanistan. The writer she is traveling with is overbearing and definitely not likeable. I think the author showed the difficulty in covering this kind of issue, but I didn't enjoy the overall story.
jennaemeyers's review against another edition
5.0
well fuck. I put off reading this book for a year bc it was the last Francesca Marciano book I hadn't read and I wanted to save it but also it was the one I was least excited about and didn't want to be disappointed. well friends, that did not happen. I don't really understand how the author has a way to truly transport you to places all over the world in a way no other author has for me. the writing is truly magical. every story is one I want to curl up and live in. anyway, this book was great and I hope and pray she writes something else soon bc I am now lost.
komet2020's review against another edition
3.0
"THE END OF MANNERS" is a story focused on the experiences of 2 Western women in war torn Afghanistan --- Imo Glass, a self-assured, successful British journalist and Maria Galante, a self-effacing, award-winning Italian photographer who had been content to stick to the straight and narrow by specializing in taking photographs of fine cuisine for magazines --- who have been given an assignment to highlight the plight of Afghan women who've attempted suicide rather than be married off to much older men.
In reading this story, the Afghanistan I was seeing in my mind's eye was very much like that depicted in the movie "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", which I had watched in the cinema a couple of years ago. And that is a country riven by internecine conflict where past and present often collide. As well as a country in which its people bravely go about the business of everyday living with the prospect of death hovering nearby.
Francesca Marciano does a very skillful job as a writer in sharing with the reader the inner conflicts and complexities of some of the novel's main characters. Examples: Hanif, an Afghan who acted as a protector, driver, and guide for both Imo and Maria during their journeys to neighboring villages outside Kabul; and Shirin, a young Afghan woman who acted as interpreter for Imo and Maria in their interviews with women in these distant villages.
On the whole, this was a compelling novel whose writing kept me engaged throughout. I look forward to reading more of Marciano's works.
In reading this story, the Afghanistan I was seeing in my mind's eye was very much like that depicted in the movie "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", which I had watched in the cinema a couple of years ago. And that is a country riven by internecine conflict where past and present often collide. As well as a country in which its people bravely go about the business of everyday living with the prospect of death hovering nearby.
Francesca Marciano does a very skillful job as a writer in sharing with the reader the inner conflicts and complexities of some of the novel's main characters. Examples: Hanif, an Afghan who acted as a protector, driver, and guide for both Imo and Maria during their journeys to neighboring villages outside Kabul; and Shirin, a young Afghan woman who acted as interpreter for Imo and Maria in their interviews with women in these distant villages.
On the whole, this was a compelling novel whose writing kept me engaged throughout. I look forward to reading more of Marciano's works.
nikkigee81's review against another edition
4.0
I recently started an International Book Club, and this is our first selection. I wanted something from Afghanistan that wasn't by Hosseini; he is a good writer, don't get me wrong, but he is generally the go-to person when "books about Afghanistan" are mentioned.
I have never read anything by Ms. Marciano before, but she has a good style and is eminently readable. Although this is a work of fiction, the ground situation described in Kabul felt very real, as if I were actually traveling with our protagonist, Maria, an Italian photographer who ends up quickly thrown into an assignment with a English journalist named Imo Glass. The subject - arranged marriages and the high rate of suicide among Afghani women. Danger is everywhere and will they even be able to do what they set out to do, given how cloistered the women are?
I have never read anything by Ms. Marciano before, but she has a good style and is eminently readable. Although this is a work of fiction, the ground situation described in Kabul felt very real, as if I were actually traveling with our protagonist, Maria, an Italian photographer who ends up quickly thrown into an assignment with a English journalist named Imo Glass. The subject - arranged marriages and the high rate of suicide among Afghani women. Danger is everywhere and will they even be able to do what they set out to do, given how cloistered the women are?
juliechristinejohnson's review against another edition
4.0
As a western journalist I have to decide each day which portion of these people’s suffering is going to be my theme of the day and which is the portion I’m going to have to ignore so it doesn’t get in the way.
This statement comes in the final pages of The End of Manners, but it is the theme around which this intense, resonant novel rotates, as it circles in and out of the boundaries of professional ethics.
Maria Galante is living quietly in Milan, shooting photographs of food for high-end lifestyle magazines, when she is offered the opportunity to reclaim her former glory as a photojournalist in some of the world’s most treacherous places. A bout with anxiety and depression took her out of the field and into the safety of a well-lit studio, but her agent presses. The assignment is for a woman photographer and writer Imogen “Imo” Glass has requested Maria, believing she can best capture the delicate situation.
That situation is the plight of young women in Afghanistan who have attempted suicide to escape forced marriages. Imo intends to track down one young woman in a remote village who survived self-immolation. But it is the mid-2000s and Afghanistan is a place so dangerous, Maria must spend a week at a survival training camp outside London, learning how to patch together bodies shredded by bullets and shrapnel and how to respond if she is kidnapped.
The characters of Maria, Imo Glass, and Hanif, their Afghan “fixer”—the guide paid for his connections to government officials and villagers alike, who will shepherd the women through checkpoints and hostile encounters—are three points on the story’s triangular frame, distant but connected, at angled purposes that run together and pull apart. Maria and Imo are physical and emotional opposites: distant, circumspect Maria is a bony, pale, red-headed reflection of her Irish mother. She cringes at the antics of her colleague, the darkly voluptuous, scented, euphuistic, worldly Imo. Hanif is diligent and seemingly unflappable, even when his eight-months pregnant wife is sent to the hospital. These three spend a mere week together, chasing an impossible story, driven by Imo’s ambition and Hanif’s tottering old Ford sedan. The shift in tone and regard between them is subtle, until it isn’t. Maria is initially spellbound by Imo’s confidence and comfort in the face of danger, until the woman’s absurdity is fully exposed; Hanif’s devotion to his clients becomes a tragic question that forces Maria to tilt her own moral compass for an answer.
For all its action, including the harrowing week of orientation; a wretched bout of Afghanistan’s version of Montezuma’s Revenge for which Maria seeks treatment by text with her ex—a physician—in Italy; a trip deep into the wilderness, past fields where hundreds of tiny green flags mark the graves of fallen mujahideen and red stones mark the presence of land mines; and an imminent attack that closes the airport, stranding Maria in a country she is desperate to leave, The End of Manners is a quiet, thoughtful book. For all its depiction of war, of Western men displaying their testosterone and arrogance and Afghans their restrictive cultural mores, it is also a deeply humane and warm story. The opportunity to see two female journalists navigate a war zone is rare and enlightening, and for this reader, a profound coda to the just-read memoir, A House in the Sky about a young journalist’s eighteen months in captivity in Somalia.
There is a consummate, assured artistry to Francesca Marciano’s writing that is so absorbing. Her dialogue is natural and her characters are knowable and true, that even in the most foreign settings, you are present and engaged.
The author holds us up to the window of external and internal conflict, but doesn’t tell us what to see or how to interpret the events. She shows us the great and terrible beauty of Afghanistan and lays out the moral ambiguities of war and journalism, where best intentions run afoul of ambition, and it is always the innocent who pay the highest price.
Highly recommended.
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