Categories
Culture

The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Gosh, this book is grim. It starts with the colonel being summoned from his house in the middle of a rainy night to collect the tortured body of his daughter from the secret police, and he is told to bury her before daybreak to avoid any kind of attention.

9217423268_1d1999b7c4_o

The story of that night and the following day is combined with flashbacks, and we learn of one child after another lost to violence: being tortured by the Shah’s regime or the Islamic Republic, or dying in the Iran/Iraq War. Each of his children belongs to, and represents, a different political movement: different flavours of communism and Islamism. But they all fall foul of the government sooner or later, as the political tides change. Except, I guess, for the one who dies in the war, who is celebrated as a martyr — but is no less dead.

I don’t know enough about the politics of Iran in the 70s and 80s, so the historically specific detail is lost on me, but it still works as a portrayal of a country suffering political turmoil and violent repression. Certainly an effective novel, if not an enjoyable one.

» The photo is of ‘the acoustic ceiling of the rooftop music room of the Ali Qapu Palace in Isfahan, Iran’. Not particularly thematically apt, but it’s a nice picture. © David Stanley and used under a CC-by licence.

Categories
Culture

Voices II: Contemporary Bahraini Short Stories, ed. & trans. Hasan Marhamah
Bras, Boys, and Blunders: Juliet & Romeo in Bahrain by Vidya Samson

I found these two books from Bahrain for the Read The World challenge, and I bought both because I thought they might offer an interesting contrast.

The Gulf states seem like a fascinating part of the world at the moment, but the rule I set myself — that books should ideally be by people who are actually from the relevant countries — is not helping. These are tiny countries with small publishing industries that do not translate a lot into English; and they have some pretty autocratic governments that probably restrict the kinds of things that can be published at all.

Bahrain Cityscape

So if I want to find books that address the full weirdness of the Gulf — the pouring of unimaginable amounts of money into international sport; the way that Dubai manages to be an autocratic Islamic state while also a favoured holiday destination of European playboys; the fact that Qatar has a population of 1.8 million, of whom only 278,000 are citizens; the planned outposts of the Guggenheim and the Louvre; the… ambiguous position of Saudi Arabia in the War on Terror — well, I’m probably going to have to look for something written by an outsider.

Vidya Samson is an outsider, and does provide an interesting perspective, although not the kind of perspective that would offer insight into, say, Qatar’s winning bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Bras, Boys, and Blunders: Juliet & Romeo in Bahrain is a teen romantic comedy about an Indian girl going to a multicultural Catholic school while her parents are working in Bahrain. At the school, white students have automatic cool status while the Indians and Pakistanis are at the bottom of the pecking order, mocked by the Arabs for their accents. Our heroine is a naive, shy girl dealing with boys, flat-chestedness, her parents; it’s fairly standard stuff, apart from the unusual setting. I’m clearly not the target market for this book, but it was likeable enough.

5445300397_019dccb46e_b

Hasan Marhamah is apparently Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Bahrain, which surprises me: partly because Voices II: Contemporary Bahraini Short Stories is lacking things like author bios or even publication dates for the stories, which is the kind of thing you might expect an academic to include. But especially because the English isn’t very good. There are quite a few errors of grammar, and more often the language is just clunky and unidiomatic:

As he bulged his eyes on the road, distressing blows recurred as if broiling him on calm fire. In the extreme hectic traffic commotions, and while his feet hesitated to move, a genius idea struck into his head; a difficult idea, but he would execute it. […] Fear choked the depths of his throbbing heart. The road ambience looked like a cemetery waiting for a coffin to carry him. He could not see any more but could hear the caution horns of the angry car drivers as he drew in his mind the picture of death. A rough hand prevented his advancement and a voice in a strong military tone addressed him…

When I was reading the first story, I seriously doubted that I would make it through the whole book, but actually I found if I read it quickly, and tried not to get hung up on individual sentences, it wasn’t too bad. The more straightforward the story, the better it worked; anything too poetic or ambiguous was much more difficult. A badly translated stream of consciousness is hard going.

Still, prose style aside, reading the stories for their content was interesting. For example, love stories are interesting in a culture where contact between men and women is restricted; there are stories about extreme poverty; there were several stories about divorce. Of course I knew that it was very easy for men to divorce their wives under Islamic law, but I’d never really thought about how brutal it could be for the wives and children, that men could just set them aside and move on to new women. Which is a failure of empathy on my part, admittedly.

So I ended up enjoying it more than I expected, at least.

» Bahrain Cityscape is © Mubarak Fahad and used under a CC by-nc-nd licence. Protests in Bahrain is © Al Jazeera English and used under a CC by-sa licence. 

Categories
Culture

Mirabella and the Pearl of Chulothe by Laila Al Bellucci

This is my book from Oman for the Read The World challenge. It’s a YA fantasy novel set in an English boarding school, so it’s a slightly odd choice for my purposes; but there weren’t many good alternatives, and it was cheap on kindle, so I thought I might as well read it.

Photo 09-09-2013 12 11 01

It’s not very good. For a start it’s unoriginal; that isn’t a disaster in itself, but the book’s other weaknesses are its prose style, plotting, characterisation, world-building, atmosphere, and dialogue. It’s even very badly edited.

Categories
Culture

Yes, (Saudi) Minister! A Life in Administration by Ghazi Algosaibi

This is my book from Saudi Arabia for the Read The World challenge. I was looking for Saudi novels, and found Algosaibi because, as well as being a government minister and then ambassador, he wrote poetry and novels; one of which, An Apartment Called Freedom, was translated into English. What intrigued me enough to buy this memoir is that some of his books were banned in Saudi Arabia, including An Apartment Called Freedom — which was published while he was the Saudi ambassador to the UK and Ireland, a post he continued in for another 8 years.

8390177870_7272635c40

That’s a weird situation, right? I guess it’s not necessarily actively hypocritical to keep serving a government which has banned one of your books, but there is certainly a tension there. So, that was intriguing, as I say.

And I just thought it might be interesting to read an insiders’ view of what is after all a very unusual country: one of the last full-blown monarchies, a virtual theocracy, a regional superpower, a brutally oppressive state given unswerving support by the US, the home of the holiest places in one of the world’s great religions, a sparsely populated desert state that became wealthy very quickly by an accident of geology.

Unfortunately, this book was written with his civil servant/diplomat hat on, and it is a very civil, very diplomatic memoir which confines itself strictly to his professional life and fastidiously avoids anything too controversial. Many of the aspects of Saudi society that seem intriguing to an outsider are completely ignored: the treatment of women, for example. And he doesn’t even mention the banning of his own books. I suspect the bans were more symbolic than real for the kind of elite circles he moved in: any of his chums who wanted to read them could just pick up a copy when they were out of the country. But even that symbolism is interesting, and it would have been interesting to read what he had to say about it.

Still, it was about as readable and interesting as one could hope for from the professional memoir of a technocrat. It’s written in a lively manner with plenty of (suitably tame) anecdotes, and although it comes across as slightly self-serving, I can believe he was a genuinely effective administrator: hard-working and pragmatic, keen to be well-informed, careful to keep in contact with the end users of whichever project he was running, whether railways or electrification or the health service.

Not everything I hoped for, then, but quite interesting.

» ‘Suspension Bridge, Wadi Laban, Riyadh’ is © KhanSaqib and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

Categories
Culture

The Chronicles of Dathra, a Dowdy Girl from Kuwait by Danderma

Part of the point of the Read the World challenge was to read things that would never have found normally. The Chronicles of Dathra certainly fits that description; it is self-published Kuwaiti chick-lit. According to the blurb:

Dathra is the story of a kind hearted pretty girl from Kuwait whose qualities are hidden beneath her excessive layers of fat and shabby fashion sense. Dathra, like everyone else, is trying to live her life to the fullest and find love. Only her insatiable appetite and irresistible cravings are getting in her way and subjecting her to the scrutiny of a society where looks are everything.

3361396659_838f05349a_o

It feels like it’s aiming to be Bridget Jones’s Diary; but Bridget Jones is a basically healthy woman who wants to be a bit thinner but doesn’t have the commitment to diet properly, whereas Dathra is dangerously overweight and has an unhealthy psychological relationship with food. She lies to leave work early because she has a food craving; she eats enormous amounts when she’s upset; she has aggressive public tantrums when she can’t get the food she wants; she breaks up an engagement because of a disagreement over food; she puts herself into hospital by overeating.

So there’s some tonal weirdness going on, as the book comes across as darker and stranger than I think it means to. The book seems to have the same lack of self-awareness that it makes fun of in Dathra; neither of them are quite coming across in the way they intend. Or perhaps I’ve misjudged the author’s intentions completely.

It made an interesting change, anyway. Presumably there is an enormous variety of fiction being published all around the world all the time: thrillers, romances, sci-fi, chick-lit, and for that matter all kinds of literary fiction. But the tiny sliver of it that ever makes it into English translation — and few countries even have one book translated per decade — tends to all be much the same: serious, important, highbrow, and almost always political. Which is frustrating. This at least is a book written in the last few years about everyday life for wealthy but otherwise ordinary Kuwaitis.

» The photo, ‘McDonald’s Drive Thru – Surra, Kuwait’, is © Samira/Mink and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

Categories
Culture

The Diesel by Thani Al-Suwaidi

I actually finished this about a week ago, but I’ve been busy doing other things: hacking, snorting, waking up in the night with my lungs apparently trying to invert themselves.

But this morning I feel much more human, so: this is my book from the United Arab Emirates for the Read The World challenge. It’s a short novella written from the point of view of a transgender singer, and I was excited to find it, because the few books I’d found from the UAE looked frankly pretty terrible; and gender issues in a rapidly-changing Islamic monarchy… that’s got to be an interesting subject, right?

3088330441_576e329f50_o

It didn’t quite live up to my hopes in that respect. I think that what has been happening in the Gulf states recently is really interesting: most spectacularly represented by the building of the Burj Khalifa, the World Cup being awarded to Qatar, the money being pumped into Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain. But the Arabic version of this book (al-Dizil) was published in 1994, and given the speed the Gulf states have been changing, that’s a long 19 years.

And the style is so literary that I’m not sure I would have been completely confident that it was about someone who was transgender if it didn’t say as much in the introduction — though I expect it would be more obvious if you were familiar with the cultural context. The references are clear enough, but there is so much other stuff which is apparently magical or symbolic or poetic — non-literal, anyway — that I wouldn’t have known to take it them at face value.

Which is fine — I (often) like prose which tends to the poetic — but it doesn’t leave me feeling any better informed about social/sexual/gender/political issues in the Gulf. Still, my expectations aside, it should be judged on its own terms as a poetic narrative. And it is interesting, often effective, sometimes striking, sometimes annoyingly opaque.

During the Read The World challenge I have rarely felt that books were too foreign for me (though perhaps that just means I’m missing a lot). But in this case, with the combination of an allusive style and a sensitive subject matter, I feel more strongly than usual that I’m probably missing something.

» Burj Khalifa , Dubai is © Ahmad Al Zarouni and used under a CC by-nc licence. The photo doesn’t have much to do with the book, really, but hey-ho.