Granada: A Novel (Middle East Literature in Translation)

Rating:
Summary: not a historical novel!
Review: I just finished this book for a class on modern arab lit that I absolutely loved. This book is meant as an alegorical statement of the experience of loss and defeat by "outsiders" so dominant in Arab consciousness, so it shouldn't really be read as a historical novel. But there is something disappointing about the lack of nuance in character development and depth in the story it tells (in fact, it reads a bit like an adolescent novel). It's too bad, because Ashour is a lyrical writer and the subject is a serious one. If you are looking for some serious fiction by women writers from the Arab world, I strongly recommend Huda Barakat and Sahar Khalifeh (Wild Thorns is a classic about why people in Palestine resort to violence even when they abhor it in principle).

Rating:
Summary: Somewhat disappointing
Review: This book was a pleasure to read at first thanks to Ashur's wonderful descriptions of everyday things and her ability to bring the scene alive. But as the story develops, I couldn't help but feel that the author was stereotyping her characters to make an all too predictable ideological point, and that was disappointing. The female heroine seems to have no flaws, a feminist twist, but at the expense of any sense of complexity in the story. There is also an akward sense of insularity to the novel. "Christians" do not enter the story at all except as villains and inquisitors, a one dimensional world that seems to have much in common with the demonized view of Arabs so prevalent in the US, only turned on its head. Too bad, because Ashur is clearly an accomplished writer. Her agenda simply dominates the story, producing an overly simplistic account of the human tragedy she seeks to describe.