50 pages • 1 hour read
Ahdaf SoueifThe Map of Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Amal
The book’s main narrator, Amal, is a middle-aged Egyptian woman who has become increasingly sad and isolated after the end of her marriage and the dispersal of her family. She feels both intense loyalty to her home country and a sort of homesickness for it, even as she lives in it: so much has changed over the course of her life that she feels detached even from the relative familiarity of Cairo.
When Isabel arrives in Cairo with a trunk of heirlooms that reveals a strange connection between her and Amal, Amal becomes obsessed with tracing the story of their shared ancestors. Her research reveals her vivid imagination and her identification with the people of the past: she is not only deeply invested in these stories but imagines them in intense physical detail. Her obsession with filling in the gaps of these stories leads her toward many new forms of connection. She not only develops a relationship with Isabel, but with their shared familial dead—and this connection with the dead begins to pull her inexorably back into her own life.
Anna
Anna is a romantic Victorian Englishwoman. Initially timid and conventional, she is motivated by overwhelming grief over her husband’s death to retrace the journey to Egypt that destroyed him. There, she finds a version of herself that is less oppressed by habit and custom when she goes adventuring disguised as a man and falls in love with the dashing Sharif.
Anna’s letters and diaries are passionate, earnest, and loving; she has a warm heart and a strong curiosity about the wider world. She serves as an exemplar of what it is to open oneself up to the world, working against ingrained Victorian colonial stereotyping to discover a love of Egypt and its peoples.
Isabel
Isabel is Anna’s great-granddaughter, and thus Amal and Omar’s distant cousin. She’s a researcher and filmmaker from New York who comes to Egypt with a project on the millennium in mind. American to the bone, she becomes aware of how little she understands about Egyptian culture through her visit and develops her curiosity and her Arabic as Anna once did. Swept up in the romance of the rediscovered chest, she becomes infatuated with Omar and Egypt both. Isabel’s reactions to her Egyptian experiences both underscores and complicates the difficulty and importance of cross-cultural communication; her desire to understand is sometimes muddled by her romantic ideas. The narrative is sympathetic to her mysticism, and when she eventually has a child with Omar, there is a sense that she understands the larger human pattern she’s recapitulating.
Layla
Omar
Amal’s brother and Isabel’s beloved, Omar is a dead ringer for his uncle Sharif. A cultured, charismatic man, he emigrated to America so young that Amal feels he has lost some degree of contact with his native Egypt. Isabel’s intense passion for him recapitulates the romance between Anna and Sharif, but Omar is reluctant to play along with the fantasy—not least because he suspects that Isabel might be his daughter from an affair he had with her mother, Jasmine. His realism and doubts stand against the full-throated romantic mysticism, introducing a note of complexity: the present always looks less inevitable than the past.
Sharif
Sharif is Layla’s dignified and courtly brother and Anna’s lover (and eventual husband). Sharif is a member of colonial Egypt’s “talking classes,” an educated, principled man who ended his first marriage because he did not feel his first wife could truly meet him as a partner. He is not only a political forward-thinker, but a deeply romantic figure who casts a spell over Anna (and over Amal and Isabel as they explore accounts of their affair). In many ways, Sharif stands both for the reality of Egypt—that cultured, complex, sophisticated, and ancient civilization—and its stereotypes and myths, appearing like a romantic hero out of the desert.
