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Summary: Multigenerational saga of Egyptian women ~1945-1990
Review: This novel of soap opera style love, honor and family secrets is intelligently told against a backdrop of Egyptian politics with a feminist theme focusing on the oppression of women in a male-dominated society of centuries long tradition. The rights of women and men in Egypt are drastically different. There is a passage in the book where one woman decrees that women should be informed by their husbands if they are being divorced, informed if they are taking a second or third wife, be given the right to divorce their husbands if they are being physically abused...basic rights that I expect as an American woman. A young woman in the novel dishonors her family by being raped, another because her hymen was broken innocently and she would not produce blood as proof of her virginity on her wedding night.Amira is the matriarch of the prosperous Rasheed family. The story begins in 1945 and it is Amira's ever-present voice throughout that links the many women and children as their lives unfold through the years until the end of the book in the early 90's. Her husband has died and her son Ibrahim is now the head of the family. His first wife dies while giving birth to his daughter Camelia. Driven by grief and shame for not having a son, he curses God and disappears to Europe. He comes back with an English wife, Alice who also bears him a daughter, Yasmina. Although they want more children, the couple has bad luck with subsequent pregnancies and like many men in Egypt, Ibrahim becomes obsessed with producing male heirs. He takes the drastic measure of claiming the son of a beggar girl as his own. Most of the story focuses on Amira, Ibrahim, Alice, Camelia and Yasmina although there is a large cast of supporting characters. I was appalled by the lack of rights and limited choices for women. It was entertaining and educational without being overly preachy or political. It was a fairly long book at 600 pages, but I really enjoyed reading it. Recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: An epic portrayal of women coping in a patriarchal society
Review: This review is for the Little, Brown and Company first edition, a paperback, published in Great Britain in 1993, 598 pages. Ms. Wood has published 18 novels with another due out shortly. VIRGINS OF PARADISE was Ms. Wood's third BIG novel. Read all about this author at www.barbarawood.com.
VIRGINS OF PARADISE is a long novel that recounts the sociological changes in Egypt from 1945 to around 1992 by tracking the Rasheed clan, a wealthy and initially aristocratic family whose locus is a mansion on Virgins of Paradise street in Cairo. Ms. Wood divides her story into seven parts, each one a significant slice of time in recent Egyptian history, and relates how the extensive Rasheed family fared through the social and political upheaval.
The baseline is set in 1945 when, at the end of WWII, the British occupation disintegrates and the royal aristocrats reign, but there are portents of change. Part two, begins on Black Saturday, January 23, 1952, when a mob destroys mostly British interests in Cairo and continues through July of that year and the exile of King Farouk, which precipitates upsets and tragedy for the Rasheeds. In part three, in 1962, we see how the Rasheeds have coped with the sociological changes under Abdel Nassar. For part four, the plot continues with the intricacies, secrets and crises of the Rasheed clan in 1966/1967 up to the eve of the six-day war. Nassar dies in 1970. Part five picks up the epic in 1973 after President Sadat has made some changes. Here, the story shifts in part to Southern California where Jasmine (Yasmina), born in part one and disowned in part four, is studying medicine. In part six, the story tracks both the Rasheeds in Egypt and the outcast Jasmine in 1980 and into 1981, when President Mubarak assumes control after the assassination of Sadat. The plot gets sticky as the swirl of lives begin to converge and clash in part seven, in 1988. The epilogue, sometime in the early nineties, picks up where the epilogue left the reader wondering.
The western connection in VIRGINS OF PARADISE begins with Alice, a blond Brit who becomes the second wife of Ibrahim, the dominant Rasheed male. Alice and Ibrahim beget Yasmina, who we meet in the prologue as a protagonist. Written in the omniscient, everybody's point of view, there are many protagonists in VIRGINS OF PARADISE. My favorite is Amira, the widowed matriarch raised in the old days when, once married, a woman never left her home. But Ms. Wood takes us behind the veils and lets the reader grasp the values and the frustrations of the Egyptian woman in a changing society.
This is character driven women's fiction at its best. The eclectic cast of female characters, a virtual harem, allows for multiple scenarios, permutations on the plight of woman in a repressive society where she is circumcised at puberty, betrothed without her consent, excoriated if she does not produce a male, and can be discarded by her husband saying "I divorce" three times. The several generations of Rasheed women allow the author to play out a spectrum of solutions to the female predicament. VIRGINS OF PARADISE is an epic portrayal of women coping in a patriarchal society.
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Summary: Women in Islam
Review: This was one of those absolutely delicious books that I eat up like an exquisite food. Jasmine is an Egyptian woman, banished by her father from his wealthy household when he discovers that Jasmine was raped, and therefore has dishonored the family. This is one of the many injustices encountered by the women characters in this story in a society dominated by men who justify their actions by their religion. Some of the women accept this, but a few struggle to speak out for equality and modernization, often at the risk of their lives. I finished reading this book two months after the terrorist attack on New York, when there is a lot of talk about fundamentalist Islam. The plot includes the ideas of killing for the sake of God, of fundamentalists striving to return Egypt to its old ways, restricting women's freedoms, and beating them if even an ankle shows. In spite of this ugliness, there is much romance, passion, sexual longings, and family secrets that weave throughout several generations of the wealthy Rasheed family, as their lives coincide with changing political tides in Egypt, beginning with the monarchy of King Farouk, and passing through succeeding presidencies. There is gentle suspense and intrigue, and characters to love as well as to hate. All this made for a delicious story, yet because of its setting and focus on Islam, I was constantly pulled to think about the reality of it in relationship to current events. It's very enlightening, and though fiction, an important book for understanding the present time.
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