Arab Writing

Now this is a chapter on which I am sure to be found wanting. My reading list of Arab authors is quite short, and I think I should do something about it. 

Up to this moment, it is comprised of The 1001 Nights, The Life and Deeds of Sultan Az-Zahir Baibars, The Storyteller by Rabih Alameddine, and Boualem Sansal's Le Village de L'allemand (ou Le journal des frères Schiller, published in English as An Unfinished Business). I bought recently This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar ben Jelloun, and started reading from Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy in a bookshop. And that's about it.

Two of the titles don't have known authors, but the 1001 Nights I read were in a children-friendlier edition translated and edited by Romanian writer Eusebiu Camilar. The books were two thick, hardcover volumes published at some point in the 1960s, and they provided hours and hours of entertainement. The anonymous account of Baibars' life was in a semi-scholarly Romanian edition published in the 1980s, peppered with notes, as the translators chose to leave in Arabic some words with difficult Romanian equivalents. This is why I still remember one of the connecting phrases in the narration: "The muhaddith tells us...". 

This leads to Alameddine's Storyteller (or The Hakawati), which tells of life in Lebanon shortly before the civil war, with the narration going back and forth to early 2000s, with some episodes from the early 20th century. And all is interspersed with a magnificent story that could come (or be part) of the 1001 Nights. The main narrator is a young Lebanese who took refuge and grew up in America, returning to Lebanon to be near his dying father. We find out that the father comes from a family of storytellers, the kind that travelled around towns in the Arab and Ottoman world, earning their bread by setting up shop in coffee houses and keeping people hooked on their stories and glued to their seats for hours (and even days) on end. The two narratives, in the real and fantastic worlds, run in parallel and touch in subtle ways. And, like in the 1001 Nights, story begets story in both narratives. I really enjoyed it.

The reader is faced by a completely different outlook with Boualem Sansal. This former Algerian top civil servant began writing in his fities as a reaction to the civil war. Le Village de L'allemand takes in the tragedy of that event, but an extra dimension is added by another, earlier, tragedy - the Shoah. The Schiller brothers, Rachel and Malrich, were sent to live in France by their mysterious German father, a hero of the Algerian war of independence. While Rachel is a successful professional with a French wife, Malrich lives in the banlieu and is very close to being deep in with a very bad crowd. However, the civil war brings to light something of the father's past that changes completely the lives of the sons. An excellent review by Maya Jaggi can be read on the Guardian Online (spoiler alert: it gives-away some of the plot).

I started reading The Blinding Absence of Light on the train. It is a well written story about a man emprisoned in a hell-hole, together with others, for taking part in an attempted coup against Morocco's King Hassan II in 1971. The prison setting is very bleak, steeped in darkness, but the narrator is keen to tell a story, talking, in a Shahrazad kind of way, as a means of survival.

I plan to return to Naguib Mahfouz sooner rather than later. Another to-read is Boualem Sansal's Rue Darwin.

I should add here that Boualem Sansal and Tahar ben Jelloun wrote in French, and Rabih Alameddine in English.