Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1900725 in Books
• Published on: 1993-10
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Awful, dreadful, terrible
This is probably one of the worst books I have ever read. Although the themes may sound interesting it is totally boring and dull. Basically it is all about a sad lonely man who somehow manages to find himself a wife and beget a daughter before the whole world turns upside down and hardly any women are born because people have been eating magic beatles. The sad stupid old man and some of his boring friends think that they can save the world by creating a league of intellectuals who moan about things. After a period during the daughter's adolescence which has some pretty incestuous overtones, the girl's mother nearly gets killed by maniacs in a third world country. Some of the other boring characters die, the daughter gets married, has a child of her own and the book ends. Thank God! The only good thing about this book is that it is only 150 pages. Avoid.

Great...! but Maalouf has written better
I have read a fair few of Maalouf's novels and I have enjoyed every single one of them and have him top of my favourite authors list.

He is a truly gifted author, always writing beautiful and hypnotic tales, mixing fact with fiction. With The First Century After Beatrice, he doesn't let us down on these points. A very scary scenario, based along demographic change - through the simple idea (based in fact) of the affect of certain beans causing more males to be born than females - is skilfully and brilliantly presented to us, through excellently intertwined plots based through the individual protagonists and then at the global level around them.

It sounds... for lack of other words in my vocabulary... a wierd idea to build a novel around, but Maalouf does it incredibly well - grabbing us into the story and gripping us as we read it. I don't believe that any other author could do this to such a subject.
He makes the scenario transpire as incredibly scary and when we think about it, when one looks to the one-child policy in China (and the subsequent increased proportion of male-to-female in the population), he allows and helps us to open our eyes to such policies and such social trends and desires. This skill is something that Maalouf oozes in and demonstrates in all his work.

You may wonder why, after having said such good things about this work, I have only given the novel three stars. I have simply done this because I am judging it by the other novels he has written. Though I enjoyed this greatly, had I not read other books by him previously, I may not have continued to be so eager to buy his next piece. Maybe it is because I was left decidely uncomfortable by the realness of the scenario that unfolds. However, I have prefered his books where Maalouf has mixed historical fact with fiction - Samarkand and The Gardens of Light are simply incredible and much stronger and more powerful than this.

I certainly would strongly suggest that you read this novel, yet if you are new to Maalouf, I think it would be best to read Samarkand first to truly gain insight into the author's enormous talent.

A beautiful 'what-if' novel, like nothing else I've read!
This is a beautifully written book, lyrical, perceptive, original, unnervingly insightful, and a page-turner as well. A shy affectionate Egyptian entomologist meets an ambitious beautiful journalist who has a daughter with him. They are devoted to each other, but the journalist's career keeps her traveling around the world while he raises the daughter he always wanted, Beatrice, and the larger plot unfolds - everyone in the world who wants only sons is suddenly able to have their wish, and the resulting imbalance in the gender ratio worldwide has catastrophic cultural, social and political effects, all disturbingly believable.