Desert Soul

While Isabelle Eberhardt may not be very rock ‘n roll, she could be considered part of the 27 club, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain & more recently Amy Winehouse. Most of them died of drug overdoses - or related factors, whereas the author drowned in a flash flood in Algeria, in 1904.

A complex background - her mother a Russian exile, her father a tutor employed by her mother's husband to tutor their three children in Switzerland until he could join her! He died before he could join his family. Unsettled in Switzerland, Eberhardt visited Algeria with her mother in 1897, although suffering ill health her mother died later that year. She briefly returned to her father in Switzerland, but when he passed away she mortgaged the house and returned to North Africa as quick as she could.

I had read a short biography about Isabelle Eberhardt previously in Lesley Blanch's The Wilder Shores Of Love, although it was fairly short and seemingly tacked onto the main stories in that book.

Likely as a result of her complex background, Isabelle herself was a complex character. She took to dressing as a man and travelling under the name Si Mahmoud Saadi. She converted to Islam, married Slimene Ehnni, a ‘native non-commissioned officer' in the French army occupying French northern Africa and lived in Algeria and Tunisia, writing short stories, then articles and columns for the press while also working on a novel. Eberhardt's journals and the texts of this book are recovered from the flood after her death. Many have been edited previously and are again arranged / edited here, as the first part of the book. The second is a long sequence of journal entries.

My hopes when I bought this, was it would compare to Sanmao's Stories of the Sahara, which was brilliant. It was similar in some ways, but lacked the narrative connection, and in the first half, was a lot more etherial and philosophical - not so much my cup of tea. In the second half - a journal from January 1900 to January 1902, really didn't captivate me.

From the first half of the book, I noted a good example of the beautiful writing which was all too much for a man of simple needs like me.
P63

But I remain leaning on the bridge, dreaming with resigned melancholy, of the unfathomable mystery of unknown tomorrows and of the obscure ends of things without actual duration that surround and govern our destinies, yet more ephemeral and furtive...