The Book Censor's Library

The Book Censor's Library / Bothayna Al-Essa
trans. from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman & Sawad Hussain
Read by Cindy Kay
Old Saybrook, CT: Tantor Media, 2024, c2019.

I listened to this one; it's a fever dream of a book in which a man in an unnamed dictatorship finds a job as a book censor. But his own young daughter is full of imagination and stories, causing him no end of trouble and angst. Imagination and whimsy is forbidden in this unnamed dictatorship. Only sensible (ie: government approved) information and behaviour is permitted. 

Another novel in an unintended streak of magical realist stories, this one was good but turned in a direction I was really not expecting. Our main character is a government employee who is placed in a book censor position. He must read books, searching out unwanted examples of imagination and other elements that the government thinks will distract citizens from daily reality (or give them ideas...). All history of the 'past world' is to be erased, denied and rewritten. Books that might place readers in the context of a past are considered unhealthy and need to be censored.  

The first job that our book censor is assigned is to read a new edition of Zorba the Greek and make his recommendation for censoring or not. This is considered an easy assignment, after all, many previous editions have already been banned. But our censor discovers through this book that he is after all a reader; the emotions and actions of Zorba inspire him and he can't stop reading. 

The story incorporates other novels, each with their own motifs and meanings that shape the book censor. Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, even Pinocchio -- many books are read and dissected by this character, even though this is a relatively short novel. The storyline does follow the outlines of 1984 -- if you've read it you may recognize some similar themes and stylistic choices. But it's a bit stranger, for me -- for example there are rabbits everywhere, even in the censorship building, and they seem to have a purpose. Our character finds an underground resistance movement, which even includes a vast subterranean library. But then his young daughter is taken away for reeducation, and everything spirals out of control.

The ending was a bit unexpected, and throws a new light on everything that came before. But the story brought up so many issues of freedom of expression, the power of reading, how a healthy society must include the freedom of the mind, and so on. And of course a book that discusses so many other books is always something I will find interesting. While I found it a little uneven, and a little strange that all the literature discussed is by men, it was still an intriguing read. Written by a Kuwaiti bookseller with experiences of her own of governmental censorship, it feels real, and communicates her love of books very strongly. 

 

Miral al-Tahawy's The Tent

 

The Tent / Miral al-Tahawy
trans. from the Arabic by Anthony Calderbank
Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000, c1995.
95 p. 

This is another novella I picked up recently, focusing on Fatima, a young Bedouin girl in the Sinai desert. She and her many sisters live in women's quarters while her wealthy and nomadic father is mostly elsewhere. Her mother suffers severe depression since she can only bear daughters - she has miscarried sons. Fatima's grandmother despises all her granddaughters for not being boys, and she is cruel and foul-mouthed about it all. 

Fatima is the youngest, and seems to have a gift for second sight, although it might just be a trauma response to everything she sees around her. For a brief time she's taken up by a French anthropologist, who seems to see her as another element in her collection of Bedouin items, like all of her horses. Soon enough Fatima's future ends as she is returned to her home, where she ends up unmarried and living in a small hut on the property as she continues to see things differently from everyone else. 

This was fascinating for its look at Fatima and her sisters; they spend time doing each other's hair, embroidering clothing (her sister is renowned for her skill, which seems a little obsessive, perhaps it's her way of dissociating) and seeing their cousins. As her sisters are married off, we also see some of the customs and rituals of marriage, and also some of the outcomes. 

This was interesting but again there was a little too much uncertainty about what was real or what was Fatima's imagination, at least for me. She isn't able to function well in the society she's stuck in, and while that is a theme that is explored here, and shown clearly, as a reader I found the timelines and situations a bit confusing. That could be because I am not familiar enough with the setting or the writer to get the allusions and deeper meanings of some of the symbols or metaphors here. I thought the writing style was overall really strong, and I may try one of her other books to see how I like it. 

A Long Walk From Gaza

 

A Long Walk from Gaza / Asmaa Alatawna
trans. from the Arabic by Caline Nasrallah & Michelle Hartman
Northampton, MA : Interlink Books, 2024.
180 p.

This newly released novel is quite timely, and it looks at a woman's life in occupied Palestine, and in Europe where she finds freedom. 

The book starts out in France, where the narrator, also named Asmaa, has ended up after fleeing her life in Palestine. She then works backwards, to explain how she left, and then takes the reader right back to her childhood to explain some of the why. The book ends at the point that she was making the connection that would give her a road out. This structure was really interesting, giving an unusual perspective to the narrator's decisions. 

She experiences the danger of living in an occupied zone; as a young girl she's a tomboy and sneaks out to play with the boys in an empty lot. Once she hits a certain age, this is absolutely not allowed. She and her sisters live in a tiny house in the Gaza Strip; their family is part Palestinian Bedouin. Their grandparents are also close by, but these are not warm and cuddly grandparents, they are strict and demanding. At some point, her father finds a job in the Emirates, so they all go to join him there in the desert. This section is brief, but evocative. When her grandfather becomes ill, though, they return to Gaza -- a harrowing experience to cross the border -- where they end up marrying off her 15 yr old sister.  

Asmaa stays in Gaza after this and studies English Literature at the university, which leads to her acquaintance with José, a Spaniard who takes her to Madrid with him; she soon leaves him to go to France. Her story is told from the perspective of this French life, after much adjustment. Much of this story is similar to Asmaa Alatawna's own biography, but this is a fictionalized account, published as a novel. It reads very quickly, and is engaging despite some of the awful things she relays. I appreciated the opening, in which Asmaa (the character) talks about her mental state when first starting to feel settled in France. 

I said that I had come here for one simple reason -- to find a few inches of calm, a safe space -- to live like an ordinary person with no extraordinary abilities. I wanted him to understand that I hadn't left the Gaza neighborhood I grew up in to carry my national cause in my back pocket. Nor to shape myself into the image of a militant woman of the Palestinian resistance. I left to find some personal space, a few square meters of my own where I could put a bed and a table. 

This was a different look at life in Gaza, from a woman's perspective, with all the issues of violence and oppression doubled for women in the occupied territories.  Really worth reading. 

Velvet

 

Velvet / Huzama Habayeb
trans. from the Arabic by Kay Heikkinen
Cairo: AUC Press (Hoopoe), 2019, c2016.
312 p.

I wanted to read this story as soon as I saw in the blurb that learning to sew helps the main character construct her life. I am definitely a sucker for books with sewing. But it's also the story of a woman raised and living her whole life in a Palestinian refugee camp.

Hawa grows up in the camp with her family; harsh mother, cruel father, sisters and two brothers. Their father is an angry man and beats his children and wife, and worse. One of Hawa's brothers grows up with this behaviour reflected in the way he lives his own life, as well. 

She learns to sew as a teenager after being apprenticed to Sitt Qamar, a  glamorous seamstress who lives in a nearby town. Sitt Qamar loves fabric and stitching, and during Hawa's time with her, Hawa learns about the luxury of beautiful fabrics, being a businesswoman, and a more independent way of life. There is a chapter that moves away from Hawa to tell us Sitt Qamar's tragic love story also. 

But as we meet the middle-aged Hawa at the start of the book, she has splurged on a length of pale blue velvet (silk velvet, no poly blends for her) for a wedding dress -- there is a sensuous description of velvet and the secret joy she has in it, imagining her wedding outfit. She has fallen in love with a gentle man, some years after being divorced by her abusive husband she was married to by her parents when she was young. She is now caring for her cruel but decrepit mother, and puts off marrying because she's afraid of what her brother and her son will say - she's been meeting her new love privately, a no no in the eyes of the horrible men in her family. 

The brother she protected all her life, and the son she cared for treat her like a food producing machine and money dispenser; they are utterly useless and disrespectful of all women, but somehow especially Hawa. She prepares a big dinner for them, planning to tell them about her intention to marry, but things do not go well. They have already heard. 

The violent ending was a shock and ruined this book for me, I couldn't take it. I was completely engaged in the story, and imagining one good thing for Hawa right alongside her. I understand the events of the story, I can see how it came to the conclusion that it did, but I didn't like it. It just seems like there was so much constant misery for all the women in this book, from Hawa to her mother and sisters and relatives. Only Sitt Qamar seemed to control her life, but in the end it was a man who destroyed both her business and her life. 

I thought this was a powerful book, worthy of its Naguib Mahfouz Literary Award, but I just wish that the misery was not quite so unrelenting, that these women were given even a ghost of chance. 

The Sea Cloak

The Sea Cloak / Nayrouz Qarmout
trans. from the Arabic by Perween Richards & Charis Bredin
Manchester: Comma Press, 2019.
106 p.

This collection of 11 short stories by Gazan journalist and women's rights campaigner Nayrouz Qarmout is beautifully written, while also hard-hitting.

The stories are all layered and poetic, with sensuous writing describing the realities of life in Gaza, prior to the current conflict. The collection focuses on women, sharing many perspectives of both young and old characters. It looks at patriarchy, colonialism, violence, religion, and women's rights, and how they all intersect.

Qarmout is able to build a life into just a few pages in these very short stories. The title story is one of the longest, and it is the gentlest one; in it a young girl wishes to wear the Sea Cloak, to simply sink into the sea away from her family and responsibilities. Others are more stylistically unusual; Black Grapes starts with the final moment and moves backwards to reveal the truth behind a political murder of a young man. The Anklet of Maioumas is another unusual story, shifting its setting between ancient Palestine and today, with a young woman dancing on a beach - it's hard to tell from moment to moment which girl and which year it is.

The brevity of the stories are their strength. Each gives a glimpse of a life, like snapshots, and many times they are told from multiple perspectives. In such tiny stories, it is striking that the structural decisions Qarmout makes support the story she's telling. I would say that this book will appeal to anyone who enjoys literary writing, and appreciates a poetic eye that can describe and evoke reverie, beauty, and violence at the same time. She writes with such compassion for the women in her stories, and can also point out how hypocrisy, patriarchal violence and war affects an entire region. It's writing that looks to the interior life of characters, but in a way that illuminates wider society and all its ills. Really powerful and evocative reading. 

Shubeik Lubeik

Shubeik Lubeik / Deena Mohamed
trans. from the Arabic by the author
New York : Pantheon Books, 2022.
518 p.

What would you wish for, if you knew your wish would come true? This is the question asked by Deena Mohamed in this imaginative graphic novel, set in an alternative Cairo, where wishes are real, regulated, bottled and licensed.

There are three classes of wish: first class, second class and the banned third class wish (due to their malicious unreliability). Wishes can be tricky and deceptive; the wording has to be just right for optimal results.

The story follows three characters as they each decide to use a First Class wish for different reasons, mainly non-material desires, like forgiveness or health. They each struggle with the ethics of wishing, with discussion of the religious or philosophical elements of a wish. How will it be interpreted, and will it actually give them what they need or want? Their stories cover a wide range of human experience, and bring up many aspects of the meaning of life, in a way that is accessible and sometimes humorous as well.

The artwork is a lively mix of colour and black and white, dependent on context. There are some extra nice touches – for example, when a wish bottle is opened, the Wish appears as a bubble of Arabic calligraphy. The translation (done by the author) has also left as much of the original unchanged as possible, with the book reading from right to left, as it does in Arabic.

With the engaging artistic style, and the deep themes that the storyline explores, this might be a great choice for any thoughtful reader interested in family stories, the Egyptian setting, or just the artwork itself. It might also raise philosophical questions about what we want, or need, out of life -- and what the right way is to achieve our desires.

The Queue

 

The Queue / Basma Abdel Aziz
trans. from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette
NY: Melville House, 2016, c2012.
224 p.

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time, and finally sat down with it this month. It's a story of an Egypt that is run by a centralized authority known as The Gate, and as many centralized authorities are, it's both opaque, intrusive, and completely bureaucratic. 

There has been an uprising only known as the "Disgraceful Events", and people injured during this time are being gaslighted and told that they have no injuries, that nothing happened at all. Yehya is a young man who has a bullet in his abdomen, but isn't allowed to have it removed unless it's at the authorized hospital with all the right papers (all of which is impossible anyhow). The doctor who first treated him, Tarek, is having an existential crisis, not sure whether to defer to the dictates of the Gate, or to defy them and operate anyhow. 

Meanwhile Yehya, his friend Nagy and girlfriend Amani are spending time in the queue, lined up in a crowd literally miles long waiting for the Gate to open so they can get their paperwork for whatever particular need they have. 

The queue is the setting for much of the book -- it's a cross-section of society, different kinds of people in need of different things, but all oppressed under the ever-present surveillance and total lack of care or assistance of the government. There's a religious zealot, a couple of women both drawn to and repelled by him (fearful of everything), an older woman who takes advantage of her position stuck in the queue to open up a little coffee stall and make some money, nurses, teachers, rural residents trying to get land papers, everyone trying to get attestation of their loyalty to the government. 

It's exhausting, ominous, and without any end in sight. Amani, with more self-confidence and initiative than many, tries to bluff her way into the official hospital to retrieve the x-ray that Yehya needs herself, but it doesn't go well -- she is arrested, and her harrowing experience changes her. She becomes as fearful and cowed as everyone else, and starts to believe the government propaganda that says no-one was hurt, that her beloved's injuries, which she herself has been advocating for help for, really don't exist, aren't really as bad as he thinks. It's the most chilling part of the book for me. 

It's a study of authoritarianism -- the control over daily life and the tiniest parts of personal existence, the mind control and propaganda, the lack of care for anyone, even the brainwashed supporters of its authority. Sounds all too familiar over the last few years. 

This book reminded me in some ways of both Vladimir Sorokin's The Queue and Olga Grushin's The Line, both examinations the Soviet life and the blankness of government and access to goods. In this book, the lack of access is to the very proof of life - the forms required to live in a world run by the Gate, and denied by the Gate. The hopelessness is palpable. 

This was a powerful read, and the last few pages need to be read again in order to make your mind up about what happened. The conclusion changes the way I read the book, and I had to think over it again in light of the final pages. Quite a book!

I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops

I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops / Hanan al-Shaykh
trans. from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham
NY: Doubleday, c1998.
267 p.

I picked up this collection at a used book store after having heard a few people talking about it last year during WIT Month. There are 17 stories here, set in a variety of locations, from Yemen to Lebanon to London, England. I thought that some of the stories were quite good, but as a whole this collection didn't really work for me.  

The first four stories caught me, as well as a later one, Funfair. But the rest, especially those set in England, just didn't. I felt that some of them were underdeveloped or just a little basic. The author is taking on themes of women, marriage, self-determination, fate, romance and sex -- and in some stories I really liked the approach. The first story, A Season of Madness, features a woman who is feigning madness to try to get her husband to divorce her, since she has found a man who she is really in love with. But unfortunately for her, her husband is kind and caring and swears to do whatever he can to heal her, he will never abandon her! A spectacular backfire there. The hint of irony and black humour appealed to me. The next two stories explore the importance of a man in his absence, first with a beloved deceased husband, and next with a girl who likes to flirt but never wants to marry. These stories develop the characters well and lay out interesting situations. 

The fourth story, Land of Dreams, is a longer one, about a Danish missionary in Yemen who finds that she is drawn further and further into the life in the village she's working in, and begins to forget her original purpose. She is enfolded into the village in the end, and somehow you can't see her proselytizing any longer. It's a situation that can stand for many things, and I liked the inconclusiveness of it, the open-ended feeling of the climax. 

I found the settings and some of the characters really appealing in this book, but didn't love all the stories. The writing style is straightforward, but sometimes felt a bit choppy or flat to me. So, a few gems here but not a complete hit. 

Celestial Bodies

Celestial Bodies / Jokha Alharthi;
trans. from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Inverness, Scotland: Sandstone Press, 2018, c2010.
256 p.

I had to be sure to read this year's International Man Booker prize winner. It's a slim book, comprising chapters told from different perspectives and focusing on different characters. 

It's the first book by an Omani woman to be translated -- that's a lot of pressure on her to represent everything about Oman! This book takes one family as its centre, tracing the lives of three generations to reveal changes in the culture. 

I did learn quite a lot about Oman and its inhabitants, and their expectations of life, but in an indirect manner. Alharthi talks about the family quite naturally, not lecturing or informing a foreign audience, but telling a story to those who would already know the context. 

The cover and the beginning of the book both suggest that this is the story of three sisters, which it kind of is, but also kind of isn't. The narrative makes a lot of space for their father's story, and there are also many interspersed chapters from the eldest daughter's husband's perspective. 

The middle sister fades away after her marriage and all we know about her is that she is having many, many children. The youngest sister's story is interesting but we only get glimpses of it, not the full story or any emotional connection. I liked all the sisters, though, and wanted to know more about them. 

There was a lot that I didn't know about this culture. The family has a slave/servant family, originally stolen and sold from Africa. The son is beginning to be vocal about this history, but the mother just goes along and feels Omani. There are Berbers living near the town; the patriarch gets involved with one of the women, to dramatic effect. 

It's a short book that was fascinating, but ultimately I found it just faded out in the end. The last chapter is from the contemporary voice of the husband, and I didn't enjoy that as much -- also, it left much of the narrative only partially complete. So, I appreciated this book, and it has stayed in my memory, but I could have read it at twice the length and enjoyed a bit more expansion of the sister's lives. 

Girls of Riyadh

My copy has this gorgeous cover,
 which is raised shiny dots in real life
 and is so satisfying to the touch. 

Girls of Riyadh / Rajaa Alsanea; translated from the Arabic by Rajaa Alsanea & Marilyn Booth.
New York: Penguin, 2007, c2005.
304 p. 

This was an unusual read - told in the form of emails sent out to a mailing list, purporting to be the story of four Saudi Arabian women told by another young woman with a modern flair for narrative, it's most famous for opening up the private lives of contemporary Saudi girls and young women and thus being banned in Saudi Arabia itself upon publication.

The book centres on the lives of four women: Gamreh, Lamees, Michelle, and Sadeem.

Each of them struggles differently with the conflict between living with modern desires and living within a traditional society with its resultant expectations and social mores. From wanting to become a doctor, or a career woman, or just to be happily married instead of betrayed and divorced, each woman has to manage her desires and efforts in light of the limitations set by societal norms. 

Despite the concept, and some of the more depressing things that the characters face, there is a very light tone to the book overall. The writer character archly speaks to her audience (the readers of her email newsletter) at the start of each episode, and keeps an ironic distance from much of the narrative. I've seen this slightingly referred to as Arabic Chick Lit - but I don't see a problem with that. Not everything has to be deep and serious all the time. Chick Lit is often concerned with both worldly success and romance, and those issues are both key to this story. The romance might be told a little differently than Western audiences expect, since there are specific ways in which men and women can interact in this segment of wealthy Saudi families. (yes, it's definitely a wealthy circle, with lots of global travel and money to spend for most of the girls - though not all). 

Each of the characters illustrates a different kind of life experience, and reveals the daily lives of these often bored Saudi girls. Perhaps the feeling that Alsanea was spilling secrets is why it was so scandalous by reputation when it first came out. I didn't find it scandalous at all from my perspective; nothing racy or shocking to be found here, but honesty about a woman's life seems to be able to upset a lot of people. 

I thought the format was an interesting choice - again, a reinforcement of the modernity of the fictional audience's lives, reading email installments each week. The only issue is that when the emails finally came to a close, not all the storylines were satisfactorily concluded, at least not for me. It's hard to create a powerful conclusion when there are four storylines going concurrently and none of them are at a crisis point any more.

But as a glimpse into a different kind of life, that of Riyadh's Bright Young Things, it was illuminating. Some of the characters' choices were a bit baffling at first glance, but in the English translation at least, there seemed to be enough background information added about Arabic culture to allow the reader to begin to understand these women. While I have no idea if this level of explanatory prose was in the original, obviously, it did help in the comprehension if not the flow of the story. 

I was surprised by which characters I grew most attached to, and which ones I hoped better things for. While it felt like a light read in process, I'm surprised by how much I've thought about it afterward.