Book Review: OF STRANGERS AND BEES by Hamid Ismailov

Of Strangers and Bees by Hamid Ismailov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Now I understand something: all my searching -- in truth, it had all been a search for myself, for how I belong to something more important than the small, idle details of everyday events in this inhospitable world. We find ourselves only when we lose ourselves in the Other."

What do two men -- one an Uzbek author in the 1990s, and the other the great medieval polymath, Ibn Sina ("Avicenna") -- and a bee have in common?

They all hold within poison and honey, with the power to either kill or bring life. It now boils down to individual choice: which essence will we choose to spread around us?

This is my third title from Tilted Axis Press, and they're always, always INTERESTING reads! This was my first Ismailov, and it's a refreshing change from the usual Western literary fiction. For one thing, the dates are not in common era ("in the year of our Lord" etcetera), but rather in the year of the hijra. It's a wonderful thing, to be reminded that a big part of the world measures time differently, with a different historical epicenter than what a Westernized education has.

Three very different main characters make for three different stories told in an interwoven style, but done in such a light manner that it was easy going, and not at all mentally taxing, despite the serious themes dealing with religion, philosophy, and of course, the existential. There are threads that bind us all together, man and bee, Christian and Muslim, with God / Allah and our brothers and sisters in Creation. And while Ismailov writes of the pain of an exiled author (his work is banned in his home country and so he has stayed away for years, bemoaning decades of separation from family and his home library in interviews), this particular book is more hopeful than sad. When one sees one's life as important as that of one busy bee in a hive, dancing as dervishes do to tune themselves with the Divine harmony of the cosmos, it is both a relief and a reminder. For if God cares so for each bird and bee, then there is hope yet for egotistic me.





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