Arabic Literature

From Arabic Literature – Iraqi Literature in Translation: A Brief Introduction

~ bythefirelight

Arabic Literature in English has compiled another one of her excellent lists on books in translation, this time Iraqi Literature in Translation.

My list is anything but comprehensive. (For instance, several authors who made the Arab Writers Union’s “Top 105″ list are not here because they haven’t been translated.) If you’re looking for more seasoned authors, check the list. If you’re looking for more young authors, visit Blasim’s “Iraq Story” website. I also recommend the anthology Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology (edited by Shakir Mustafa) and Banipal 37: Iraqi Authors, for writers who are sometimes a bit off the beaten path.

I’m still working my way through Banipal 37, but I have already come across some interesting writing. There is definitely some interesting work coming from Iraq.

Arabic Summer Reading Challenge at Arabic Literature (in English)

~ bythefirelight

Arabic Literature (in English) is having a summer Arabic reading challenge. There are prizes too!

To participate: Simply post at the bottom which ONE of these Arabic books (in translation or not) you will read this summer.* I will select a reading-challenge winner on August 20, 2010** and ship her (or him) a bundle of Arabic fiction new to English in 2010.***

It is a nice list of books and I know several are classics and worth the read. I’ve read these and if you have any doubts, they are all great booksa dn it would be a good addition to any summer reading list.

Season of Migration to the North by Tayib Saleh

Elias Khoury, Yalo

Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Trilogy

Zayni Barakat,

The 100 Best Arabic Books – According to the Arab Writers Union – via Arab Literature In English

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

The blog Arab Literature (In English) is running a feature on the 100 best Arabic Books according to the Arab Writers Union. You could go to the Writers Union page and run Google Translate and you would get a list with a few errors (The Cairo Trilogy by Mahfouz is the most egregious). But in addition to the correct translation of titles, the blog is indicating if the book has been translated into English, which is a great service. It seems about half the authors have been translated into English, although, not necessarily their book that is on the list.

So far the blog has done the first 30. Definitely, worth the look.

1-10

11-20

21-30

Updated:

31-40

Update II

41-50

51-60

61-70

71-80

Update III

81-90

91-100

Banipal – New Egyptian Writing (Spring 2006)

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

I only found out about Banipal a week or two ago and thought of buying a copy, but at 18 pounds for 3 issues (not too bad) and 17 pounds for shipping (ridiculous) forget that. Fortunately, I live near a major university and they have a subscription. I read through issue 25, New Writing from Egypt. First, I was impressed with the quality of the writing. Too often I have read journals that are compendiums of authors and they aren’t particularly interesting. The authors who I found interesting and have books in English were Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas el Abd (American University Cairo, 2006), which not only was an interesting story, but lexicographically interesting; and Hamdy Abowgliel’s Thieves of Retirement (Syracuse University Press, 2006). They bother were in the more seedy and criminal seeming vain but look worth perusing.

In addition to these writers, were several who were more playful in their stories, such as Haytham Al-Wardany’s Pissing on the World which is just about boys pissing on streets and seeing what they can get away with. Also of note was Ibrahim Farghali’s brief story The Monotonous Rhythm of the Years of Drought which describes the humiliation a man feels when he cheats on his fiancé with his old girlfriend. Safaa Ennagar’s Amoeba was about a woman who wears shapely cloths before her marriage, but after must wear baggy ones. One day in a private moment she again finds the freedom to wear the tighter clothes and has a moment of transcendence.

The collection is filled with interesting works, although having looked at a couple other issues, I do know they can be a little poetry heavy which isn’t bad, just something I don’t read much.

To finish I’ll quote Ennagar who comments on the state of Egyptian writing:

Literary production in Egypt today is either a way of releving the poetic situation of the writer or a kind of intellectual luxury that goes beyond reality. It is a literature of the “ghetto” that neither affects, nor is affected by, social and political movements. It is new on the levels of both form and content, but is presented only within the circle of the literati; there is no interest in spreading it outside the small elite. The print-run is limited (usually 1000 copies) as official institutions generally support works that are more traditional and lasting.

New Arablic Lit

~ bythefirelight

I have been enjoying the blog Arabic Literature (in English) recently (written by a fellow Quarterly Conversation contributor M. Lynx Qualey). The blog is full of information about Arabic Literature, usually noting what is available in English, but also mentioning issues that are going on in the world of Arabic writing. Recently the blog has been posting new works of note. I’m not going to post the works, but just links to the original articles. They all are interesting sounding.
Nomadics Translates Dib
Coming in 2010 from AUC Press: The Recommended and Not-as-recommended

Most Underappreciated Egyptian Lit (in Translation) of 2009

Neglected Treasures: Tawfiq al-Hakim’s /The People of the Cave

New Hanan Al-Shaykh Book, The Locust and the Bird Reviewed at Barnes and Noble

~ bythefirelight

Hanan Al-Shaykh finally has a new work available. It has been sometime since Only in London came out and I was quite excited to hear about the new book. The Barnes and Noble review is mixed, but I will be reading it none the less. The book is part biography and part novel and does sound interesting, especially in view of her complete works in English. As with many foreign language writers she isn’t mentioned too often, but with 6 or 7 books in English now she is one of the best translated Arabic writers.a

The novel’s only significant weakness is its sluggish pace. Inevitably, the poetry-filled yearning characterizing Kamila and Muhammad’s years apart begins to grate after a while. And al-Shaykh’s decision to chronicle Kamila’s countless attacks of jealousy and insecurity proves exasperating, repeatedly miring the story in protracted nothingness. Equally unoriginal is Kamila’s realization that married life with Muhammad is not all bliss, what with children and domestic chores multiplying almost unabated.

Of course, there are exceptions. Occasionally, al-Shaykh will inject a surprisingly powerful element into descriptions of her mother’s long days and quotidian duties, as when she depicts Kamila’s disturbing (and successful) attempts to miscarry, a ghastly homegrown solution to unwanted pregnancy. And after Kamila is widowed, al-Shaykh poignantly has her express her newfound anxiety: “During our marriage, my endless pregnancies and exhaustion had left me isolated from friends and relatives. I’d seen the world through his eyes. After his death, it was as if I started out all over again.”

What really matters, however, is al-Shaykh’s major twofold achievement with The Locust and the Bird. To begin with, she has written a stirring but never hagiographic account of a woman — her mother — who defies almost every major societal and religious stricture governing women’s behavior in her time. Yet al-Shaykh also manages the remarkable feat of unpretentiously capturing a character’s philosophical relationship with art. A close reading of The Locust and the Bird reveals that — perhaps counterintuitively — young Kamila does not in fact live vicariously through film; she pointedly refrains from transmuting her hunger for the real yet elusive man she loves into a complacent satisfaction with the honeyed images of romance flitting before her eyes. Indeed, far from allowing films to become her life, Kamila emerges from the theater spiritually refreshed but further impelled to achieve her dream. And that, aside from being a profound notion al-Shaykh deftly encapsulates in literary form, is probably both the wisest and healthiest approach to art.

Season of Migration to the North and Tayeb Salih Reviewed in Harpers

~ bythefirelight

There is an excellent review of Season of Migration to the North by Robyn Creswell in Harpers (via Powell’s). The review goes beyond the typical East-West polemic that usually comes out in reviews (something I noted in my own review).

Many critics have noted that Season of Migration to the North is in some sense a rewrite of Conrad’s novella, whose symbolic pilgrimage it cleverly reverses. Rather than following a white man traveling upriver into the heart of Africa, where he indulges in a fantasy of primitivism, Salih sends Mustafa Sa’eed down the Nile and into the heart of Europe. There he masters the ways of the natives — Fabian economics, but also race-think — the better to subjugate them. These mirror images are ingenious, but it is possible to make too much of them. Postcolonial critics, who have set the terms for the reception of Salih’s novel in the English-speaking world, read it as a classic example of “the empire writing back.” Salih’s inversion of Conrad’s compass is taken to be an act of resistance, a critique of the imperialist perspective that Heart of Darkness is assumed to represent. But this reading slights the complexity of both works, as well as the relation between them. It makes Conrad’s racism, which is obvious and conventional, the keynote of his fiction. And it imputes a narrowly political agenda to Salih, whose primary concerns lie elsewhere. The central drama of Salih’s novella is not Mustafa Sa’eed’s journey to the heart of Europe but the confrontation between Sa’eed and the narrator, who, like Marlow, feels himself “captured by the incredible,” faced with a character too big for the otherwise realistic fiction he inhabits. It is Salih’s understanding of this dilemma, which is ethical and literary rather than straightforwardly political, that makes his reading of Conrad distinctive.

What makes the article worth the read, too, is the additional context  Creswell gives to Salih’s works. Since little of Salih’s works are in English the quotes from interviews and his journalism. What is particularlly interesting, is his take on fundamentalists, which Season would surely fall afoul of.

Salih once spoke in an interview of his sense that the past and future are in “a continual conspiracy against the now.” In his fiction, Salih often associates the agents of this conspiracy with orthodox Islam. A scene in The Wedding of Zein. To be published in a new edition by New York Review Books in February 2010. Salih’s first novel, makes this point. The tale is set in the same Nile-side community as Season of Migration to the North. The titular hero is a kind of village fool, and the story of his marriage to the village belle is, for the most part, a sunny fable. But in describing the feelings of the villagers toward their imam, Salih lets a pall drop over the landscape. It is the shadow of the future:

Each would leave the mosque after Friday prayers boggle-eyed, feeling all of a sudden that the flow of life had come to a stop. Each, looking at his field with his date palms, its trees and crops, would experience no feeling of joy within himself. Everything, he would feel, was incidental, transitory, the life he was leading, with its joys and sorrows, merely a bridge to another world, and he would stop for a while to ask himself what preparations he had made.

Leila Abouzeid and Autobiography in Arabic

~ bythefirelight

Geoff Wisner has an interesting post at Words Without borders about Leila Abouzeid’s new book. He quotes her reasons for while autobiography isn’t as common in Arabic. What she talks about is interesting in how culture is reflected in the use of language.

In addition, autobiography has the pejorative connotation in Arabic of madihu nafsihi wa muzakkiha (he or she who praises and recommends him- or herself). This phrase denotes all sorts of defects in a person or a writer: selfishness versus altruism, individualism versus the spirit of the group, arrogance versus modesty. That is why Arabs usually refer to themselves in formal speech in the third person plural, to avoid the use of the embarrassing “I.” In autobiography, of course, one uses “I” frequently.

The full article is worth a look.

Season of Migration to the North – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

Season of Migration to the North is a difficult book to forget, one that posses difficult questions in the relations between the developed world and those from outside of it. A brief book, the economy and mystery create a view of the developed world that is troubling at best and hopeless at worst.

Season follows is the story of two men who have gone to study England from Sudan and have returned to after extended stays. The narrator is a young bureaucrat in Khartoum who spends part of his time in his native village where his parents and wife lived. One day he meets Mustafa Sa’eed who had been a professor of economics in England and has retired to the same village where he has married, had children, and become a respected member of the community. Mustafa Sa’eed, though, is a man with a dark and mysterious past and he slowly tells the narrator about his life in England where he would spend his free time sleeping with English women. He turns himself into the idolized African with incense and African artifacts in his apartment, and tells stories of lions and elephants so he can find English women to take back to his apartment. His interest is purely predatory. He doesn’t care about them. Instead, he uses them, turning their projections of what Africa is into a means to take what he wants. Ultimately, he comes to grief when he murders his lover, a woman who hates him yet wants to be around him. He is put on trial where it comes out that he not only has murdered his lover but two other women have committed suicide because of him.

Sa’eed doesn’t tell the narrator all of this at once. Instead, the narrator hears part of the story and he is curious but ambivalent and doesn’t purse his history. When Sa’eed dies in a flood of the Nile he leaves the narrator the care of his house and family. In the home that the narrator has inherited is a room that Sa’eed let no one enter and suggests that it holds his secrets. The narrator, though, doesn’t examine it and the mystery of Sa’eed permeates the novel.

Once Sa’eed has died the novel begins to play with the traditional and the western influence. In one particularly funny scene the elders of the village, including one woman, talk about the joys of sex. The conversation revolves around all the various wives and husbands the elders have had and how they have divorced just to sleep with someone new. One elder talks about the dozens of wives he has had and how he slept with them. At the same time the only woman of the group reminisces about her husbands in a sexual manner.  The group is at once free of English and western notions that marriage is supposed to be permanent, and yet at the same time the conversation is rooted in Sudanese notion that gives relatively little freedom to women, although the elder woman does suggest these roles aren’t quite so fixed.

For the narrator everything is proceeding as usual until the man who has bragged about all the wives he had decides he must marry Sa’eed’s widow. The narrator, who is responsible for Sa’eed’s family, won’t give his consent unless she wants to marry him. She doesn’t. The man insists she marry him, because it is not right for her to live alone. The narrator’s father suggests to the narrator that he should marry her so the man can’t, but he won’t do that either. In the end he returns to Khartoum to return to work. The man goes to the woman’s family, gets permission to marry and before he can sleep with her she commits suicide. It is a devastating event and the village is destroyed by it. Thus, if Sa’eed took his revenge in England, then England has its revenge in Sudan.

Throughout the novel there is a back and forth between the west and the traditional in Sudan. On the one hand Salih creates two characters who are alienated by their experience in the west. They have left Sudan and become something different, which not only sets them apart in the village, but sets them apart in the west. Each has taken on a role in the west, but the role doesn’t integrate them, it leaves them empty. Yet they are still attached to the west. Sa’eed constructs a private room in his house that is the perfect replica of an English study. Sa’eed, especially, is shaped by the duality of his lives and that duality, the feeling of emptiness in the west leads him to the cunningly profligate life in London. He uses women out of a vindictiveness as if to prove sarcastically that if this is what you think I am, then here you have it.

Neither the narrator nor Sa’eed can let go of what they learned, though. The narrator imports a western sensibility into the decision about Sa’eed’s wife. It seems clear that by tradition she would have been married off much earlier, yet he hesitates. However, Season is not a novel that wants to say the west is better, and the narrator is not interested in fighting for Sa’eed’s wife, he just thinks if she is not interested then she should be free not to marry. This conflict between the way of life in the village and that in England manifests itself as rage in England and scandal in Sudan. In each case the narrator and Sa’eed marked by their experiences abroad.

Season is a complicated novel and the issues are more than just sexual. Focusing on the relationships between Sa’eed and the women, though, creates scenes, those of the bedroom, that are easily transported between cultures. Moreover, the taboos Salih addresses create fundamental conflicts between all the characters that profoundly show the issues between the different cultures. Yet the use of the women in England seems slightly off. The women are not full characters, which makes sense since Sa’eed is only using them, but to have two kill themselves over him and the third use him as a means of suicide, Salih seems to using shallow caricatures at best. The silly notion that they are going to kill themselves over him seems to use some of the simpler cliches about women. While the women are not central characters, their suicides are the weakest part of the book.

Season is an impressive book despite its few weaknesses. It was for good reason that Arabic critics selected it as one of the best books of the 20th century in Arabic.

Season of Migration to the North is a difficult book to forget, one that posses difficult questions in the relations between the developed world and those from outside of it. A brief book, the economy and mystery create a view of the developed world that is troubling at best and hopeless at worst.

Season follows is the story of two men who have gone to study England from Sudan and have returned to after extended stays. The narrator is a young bureaucrat in Khartoum who spends part of his time in his native village where his parents and wife lived. One day he meets Mustafa Sa’eed who had been a professor of economics in England and has retired to the same village where he has married, had children, and become a respected member of the community. Mustafa Sa’eed, though, is a man with a dark and mysterious past and he slowly tells the narrator about his life in England where he would spend his free time sleeping with English women. He turns himself into the idolized African with incense and African artifacts in his apartment, and tells stories of lions and elephants all so he can find English women to take back to his apartment. His interest is purely predatory. He doesn’t care about them. Instead, he uses them, turning their projections of what Africa is into a means to take what he wants. Ultimately, he comes to grief when he murders his lover a woman who hates him yet wants to be around him. He is put on trial where it comes out that he not only has murdered his lover but two other women have committed suicide because of him.

Sa’eed doesn’t tell the narrator all of this at once. Instead, the narrator hears part of the story but he is curious but ambivalent and doesn’t purse his history. When Sa’eed dies in a flood of the Nile he leaves the narrator the care of his house and family. In the home that the narrator has inherited is a room that Sa’eed let no one enter and suggests that it holds his secrets. The narrator, though, doesn’t examine it and the mystery of Sa’eed permeates the novel.

Once Sa’eed has died the novel begins to play with the traditional and the western influence. In one particularly funny scene the elders of the village, including one woman, talk about the joys of sex. The conversation revolves around all the various wives and husbands the elders have had and how they have divorced just to sleep with someone new. One elder talks about the dozens of wives he has had and how he slept with them. At the same time the only woman of the group reminisces about her husbands in a sexual manner.  The group is at once free of English and western notions that marriage is supposed to be permanent, and yet at the same time the conversation is rooted in Sudanese notion that gives relatively little freedom to women, although the elder woman does suggest these roles aren’t quite so fixed.

For the narrator everything is proceeding as usual until the man who has bragged about all the wives he had decides he must marry Sa’eed’s widow. The narrator, who is responsible for Sa’eed’s family, won’t give his consent unless she wants to marry him. She doesn’t. The man insists she marry him, because it is not right for her to live alone. The narrator’s father suggests to the narrator that he should marry her so the man can’t, but he won’t do that either. In the end he returns to Khartoum to return to work. The man goes to the woman’s family, gets permission to marry and before he can sleep with her she commits suicide. It is a devastating event and the village is destroyed by it.

Throughout the novel there is a back and forth between the west and the traditional in Sudan. On the one hand Salih creates two characters who

A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature – A Review

~ bythefirelight

A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature truly is a brief introduction, but for anyone who is unacquainted with modern Arabic Literature, this book is a good introduction. The book covers literature from the 20th century and primarily from the eastern part of the Arabic speaking world. The book focuses heavily on Egypt followed by Lebanon and Palestine, while other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria rate an occasional mention.

The book traces the development of modern Arabic literature from the early 20th century, finding its first exemplar in Taha Hussein in Egypt. What makes the literature modern is its break from Arabic poetry, which was the primary form of literature, towards prose based, in part, on western models. The early works, especially in Egypt, were concerned with defining what the new Arab states would be like and what is the role of tradition and western influence. Usually these works were written in a realistic manner. Illustrating that point, the book focuses on the works of Mahfouz and shows how his earlier works fit that model.

Latter as disappointment and dissolution came to the Arab world, it too was reflected in the literature. Authors like Al-ghitani began to use more post modern (although in his case he goes to much earlier times for source material) approaches to describe the problems besetting the countries of the authors, such as the the power of the west, the despotism of Arab regimes, and an uncertainty about the future.

Each author he covers, with the exception of Mahfouz, receives about a page or two of coverage. A Brief Introduction sticks to works, primarily novels and short fiction, available in English and originally written in Arabic. This approach leaves out authors such as Assia Djebar, who writes in French, and doesn’t examine the breath of a writers work which would be useful to non Arabic speakers. However, in reading the book a reader will find a great list of books to read, if the reader can find them.

While A Brief Introduction is a useful introduction its brevity makes for some choppy sections and the inclusion of poetry, a subject in itself, seems forced and might have been left for a different book. That said, his descriptions of the books he does write about make for a good guide and should arouse one’s curiosity.

Review of Modern Arabic Fiction in Al-Ahram

~ bythefirelight

There is a good review of the Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthologyin Al-Ahram Weekly. Of particular interest is the process the editor used in having the stories translated. Instead of translating them all herself she uses a team.

Likewise, in her anthologies, she argues that only poets can render poetry and only fiction writers can render fiction from another language. Thus she is adamant about having two translators for each work: a scholar and a native speaker from the original to English, revised by a writer in the target language, with her editing the final version to make sure that no stylistic or semantic errors have crept in.

Jayyusi acquainted herself with the literary scene in the US and UK and got to know personally many English-speaking creative writers and convinced them to partake in her many projects of translation.

The article also comments on the selection of the authors and the quality of the translations. Since Gamal Al-Ghitani has just won the Zayed prize the reviewer’s descrption sounds even more intriguing.

Jayyusi’s approach to Arabic fiction is marked by an analysis of its content and technique. In content, she sees fiction as a reflection of the turbulent history of modern Arabs, with hopes and dreams followed by disappointments and breakdowns — what she calls a sense of the apocalyptic. She points to a few names that stand out as models of certain trends in Arabic fiction: the Saudi ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif for his petrofiction depicting how oil has changed the ecology and the culture of the Gulf; the Egyptian Gamal al-Ghitani for his sophisticated use of time — mythical time in Kitab al-Tajalliyat (Book of Revelations) and historical time in Zayni Barakat ; the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani for his sense of space and loss of place; the Egyptian Edward al-Kharrat as a modernist and an experimentalist; the Palestinian Ibrahim Nasralla as venturing into postmodernism; and the Iraqis Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman and Fu’ad al-Takarli for depicting the individual struggling against prevailing moeurs. As for the short story, Jayyusi concentrates in her introduction on two figures, the Egyptian Yusuf Idris and the Syrian Zakaria Tamir. Needless to say dozens of others are mentioned, including Ibrahim al-Koni and Radwa Ashour.

Gamal al-Ghitani Wins Zayed Book Award in Literature

~ bythefirelight

Gamal al-Ghitani won the Zayed Book Award for Literature recently. I don’t know how important the award is (are any awards important?) but there is a nice list of his works. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know what the Arabic names are, not that I can speak Arabic, but it makes it a little easier to compare different lists of his books. It also makes it easier for to figure out which books of his I have read. I only see three listed that I have read:  Zayni Barakat; Pyramid texts; Naguib Mahfooz Remembers. I have also read the collection of stories A Distress Call and the novel Incidents in Zanfrani Alley, or as it is known in German, Der safranische Fluch oder Wie Impotenz die Welt verbessert, which, if you can believe Google, means Saffron curse or how the world improves impotence, certainly a more fun sounding title and one that gives you a better sense of the book. As far as I know there is also one story in the collection Sardines and Oranges and one in the Columbia Modern Arabic Fiction, both of which I’ll be reading this year. A Distress Call and Incidents in Zanfrani Alley are almost impossible to find. I’ve never found them on the Internet. Fortunately, there is a large university near by if I were to want to read them again.

For someone who is one has been called one of the great Arabic fiction writers, it is too bad more isn’t translated. But then again since so little is translated it is a wonder this many of his works have been translated. I have posted a review of  Naguib Mahfooz Remembers (published as The Mahfouz Dialogs).

Fiction:

  • Chronicles of a Young Man Who Lived a Thousand Years Ago
  • Al Zayni Barakat
  • Pyramid texts
  • Siege from Three Directions
  • Stranger’s Tales
  • Book of Revelations (3 vols.)
  • Midnight of Exile
  • Jungles of the Town

Studies:

  • Watchmen of Eastern Gate
  • Naguib Mahfooz Remembers
  • Mustafa Ameen Remembers
  • Views of Cairo a Thousand Years Ago
  • Endowments in Cairo
  • Pigeon Fever

Arabic Translation – A History

~ bythefirelight

The Complete Review has a link to a review in the National of a new history of translation and Arabic, Prison-house of Language. The author raises some interesting issues about translation and power, but what caught my eye was this paragraph.

The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” That long thread of Arab language and culture unravels under the heat of the European gaze. “Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”

I have had the feeling at times when I read a story that was originally writen in Arabic, that it is so different in style and approach from the common ways of writing stories in the US and Europe that I’m not sure what to make of it. Is it good? Os it considered good there and I just don’t understand? Hassouna Moshbahi’s The Tortoise in Sardines and Oranges is a perfect example. Using the refrains “that was my first adventure” and “they beat me” the story mixes day dreams, boyish adventures and descriptions of everyday life in Tunisa. There is no ephinanic moment, no Frytag’s triangle, so what is going on? At such moments I think of the reverse, too, when Nagib Mahfouz talks about looking for models for his fiction. In each case, the cultural associations on each side make it difficult to know what the tradition is.

Alaa Al Aswany Reviewed in the New York Times

~ bythefirelight

The New York Times has a mixed review of Alaa Al Aswany’s new book. The reviewer doesn’t like it quite as much as the The Yacoubian Building. The book, which takes place in the US, does sound a little off and not as interesting as The Yacoubian Building.

Al Aswany writes about his Egyptian characters with charm, gentle humor and genuine conviction. It’s his depiction of Americans in their natural habitat that baffles. A beautiful young black woman is fired from her job at a shopping mall, supposedly because of her race; unable to find work, she succumbs to the indignity of posing as an “adult lingerie” model — for $1,000 an hour. A middle-aged woman, shunned by her husband, ventures into a sex shop to buy a vibrator and is treated to a lecture on the G spot and its role in female emancipation (“A woman is no longer a tool for man’s pleasure or his physical subordinate”), complete with bibliographic citations (Gräfenburg, Perry and Whipple).

New Arabic Literature

~ bythefirelight

Literary Salon has a nice write up of an interesting link to a new book on modern Arabic literature. It sounds interesting and has great promise.

When I was reading the article I went to the publisher’s site and if you are interested in Arabic literature the next year has some promissing offerings. I think the volume on post modern arabic literature looks the most intreging. Give Saqi Books a look if you are interested.