The Story of Zahra : A Novel

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Summary: A WOMAN'S SEARCH FOR PEACE IN AN AT WAR WORLD
Review: A Lebanese writer now living in London, al-Shaykh has been praised as the Arab world's leading woman novelist. Her Women of Sand and Myrrh was a breakthrough in its revelatory descriptions of Arab women's lives.

The Story of Zahra has been banned in seven Arab countries because it candidly addresses of a personal and political nature.

Zahra, a child of the Shia community in south Lebanon is deceived and abused by her parents. To escape, she seeks a haven with her uncle who is living as a political exile in West Africa. Regrettably, he, too, seeks to use her as "the key to making contact with my past as well as my future."

Returning to Beirut to escape a loveless marriage, Zahra finds a strife torn city ablaze with civil war. There she misguidedly enters into a liaison with a sniper in the hopes of saving others. What would her life be like if the violence and gunfire would ever end?

The Story of Zahra is a chillingly told story of a woman's search for peace in a world ravaged by war.

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Summary: a page turner!
Review: This book althought set in a world very different than my own, can be seen as universal. The trials of Zahra before the war and after the war show how a troubled woman with psychological disorders manages to survive in a somewhat difficult world. As an Arab woman with a psychological disorder, she is an outsider.

As Salwa Bakr notes in The Wiles of Men women are often seen as silly and crazy when they have psychological disorders.

Although the depiction of the war may not be as detailed or accurate as many wish, that is not what Al-Shaykh is trying to convey with this novel.

She is showing how the war is a catharsis for poor Zahra. While everyone's attention is towards the gory and war fears, Zahra is not pointed out as crazy and strange, she is able to live her own destiny.

This book is a page turner...highly recommended

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Summary: A Fearless Warfare of Sexuality
Review: This novel's manifest narrative may deceive. At first effect, the Lebanese Civil War may pose as its operative theme, or that of the subjection of women in a patriarchal and war-ridden social order, which issues a new clause to its 'discipline' of honour with every break of day. The latent narrative, however, which surfaces by a dash of close reading and a twist of astuteness, reveals itself in the reader's piecing of Zahra's fragmented life; a family that denies her the identity she only knows and comprehends; a loveless marriage; a psychological dissipation or breakdown if we were to build our understanding of her burden on the dead ends she happens upon. The surface may seem uncomplicated, but what lies beneath is scary. She is a rejected, ridiculed, and restrained woman who cannot break herself away from the helix of violence she's been immobilized in. She chooses to become one with that violence, and that is when and how she finds her peace. Zahra 'transcends,' in a philosophical sense, pulling herself out of the mud, in Sartre's terms. She becomes her own woman in the hands of irrevocable madness. She metaphorically and literally lays herself in the hands of a sniper who rapes her, "caresses" her, impregnates her, and finally kills her to reenact his own life: the life of death he revives day after day.

Zahra finds in war her only salvation and in her body the only road that could lead her there. Her story is a novel of extremes and the possibilities, or rather impossibilities, in between. It is that of a sexuality expended against life's blindness, society's theft of individuality, and family's detrimental claim of ownership; a story of a body that could find its only means of expression and realization in subverting itself. This novel stands as one of the richest ever written in the history of the Arabic contemporary novel. First published in 1980 and having been banned in many Arab states at its inception, Zahra's story has affirmed its merit and catalytic role in modern world literature. The English translation is faithful to its Arabic original in that it amply transposes the tangled and multifaceted temper of its storyline as well as its author's details of signification. Hanan al-Shaykh confronts the most dreaded, abhorred, and frightful in life. And she does it as a master of her own craft.