arabic novels

A true “intersection” of Arab women’s texts that challenges and rewrites the traditional boundaries of nation, gender, and community.

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Past mingles with present and myth and folklore blend with reality, as the narrative voice records Muhra’s quest as she seeks to discover the truth about her mother through the old family photographs that adorn the walls of her grandfather’s house and other documents hidden away in cupboards and drawers.

At once both narrator and narrated, Muhra’s tale of self discovery is set against the dwindling fortunes of her own people as they struggle to preserve their identity and culture amid the larger Egyptian community that encroaches upon them. At the same time her father’s wanderings and ultimate demise reflect the waning star of the Arab tribes who once controlled large swathes of Egyptian territory and enjoyed the patronage of Kings and Princes.

Unwilling to give up despite premonitions of doom, Muhra’s search leads her inexorably to the bitter truth about her mother’s poignant life and the tragic and untimely end of her and the young foreigner she loved.

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Isan, the novel’s protagonist, is either Seth himself or a latter-day avatar. A desert-wandering seer and proponent of desert life, he settles for an extended stay in a fertile oasis. If Jack Frost, the personification of the arrival of winter, were to visit a tropical rain forest, the results might be similarly disastrous. Not surprisingly, since this is a novel by Ibrahim al-Koni, infanticide, uxoricide, serial adultery, betrayal, metamorphosis, murder by a proxy animal, ordinary murder, and a life-threatening chase through the desert all figure in the plot, although the novel is also an existential reflection on the purpose of human life.

Ibrahim al-Koni typically layers allusions in his works as if he were an artist adding a suggestion of depth to a painting by applying extra washes. Tuareg folklore, Egyptian mythology, Russian literature, and medieval European thought elbow each other for room on the page. One might expect a novel called The Seven Veils of Seth to be a heavy-handed allegory. Instead, the reader is left wondering. The truth is elusive, a mirage pulsing at the horizon.

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From the Iraqi author of Cell Block Five.

This timely, elegant novel’s hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers torture. Convinced that he is protecting society from anarchy, he is at peace with the world until ordered to interrogate a childhood friend, a journalist with possible links to violent subversives. Then he falls in love with his friend’s wife. The plot of this novel, which was written in Iraq in 1976 and published in Arabic in Germany in 1989, is further complicated by street protests in Baghdad following the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War of June 1967. Despite the grim subject matter of this novel, it is at heart a love story, lyrically narrated.

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