The Marriage at Antibes: Stories

Northern Irish author Azadeh's first collection, five near-novella-length stories, exhibits a deliberate yet serpentine lyricism, a perfect style for her tales of world-travel and world-weariness. The stories are unlinked, yet follow a kind of ideological trajectory: characters journey from conformity to independence, from safety to identity-forging challenges. The first tale, ""The Country Road,"" movingly conveys an eight-year-old girl's fearful sense of ""inconsolable defeat"" after she realizes that her overworked, exhausted mother and dying laborer father will never fulfill the dream of emigrating to America from their 1950s rural town; the closing, title story concerns an Arab woman discovering that the marriage arranged for her years ago can never make her happy. The latter narrative takes place on the C te d'Azur, and the author describes the Mediterranean as a ""saucer of blue varnish under a benign sky."" Such sparkling language appears throughout, often acquiring the powerful fluidity found in ""Bronagh."" Here the eponymous protagonist, newly graduated from Cambridge, spends a summer in an Andalusian village, where she nearly falls in love with an idealistic farm girl named Pilar. Looking back on that time, Bronagh recalls recoiling from Pilar's touch, a fearful retraction that besmirched their friendship, and which she still regrets. The politics and history of the regional settings are impressively but not ostentatiously woven through the characters' lives. In ""A Recitation of Nomads,"" a 30ish unmarried couple (she English, he American) travel to Morocco where their compatibility, patience and love are tested. This journey is especially gripping, as the English woman deals simultaneously with her identity as an artist and as a tourist, enduring gender-based rough treatment from Marrakech locals. Azadeh's prose is euphonious and beautifully evocative of her settings, and the organic progression of the collection spotlights the female narrators' transforming abilities to cope with autonomy and responsibility, risk and romance. (Oct.)