Alia Mamdouh

Naphtalene is the story of a young girl (at the beginning she is 9 years old, at the end she is about 12) growing up in Baghdad in the 1950s. It is very descriptive and atmospheric. The author does a good job bringing to life the everyday life of women in Iraq during this time period. Unfortunately for me, it was very hard to read. It is written in a stream of consciousness style. The author switches from first person to second person and back to first often, even in the middle of paragraphs. There are flashbacks that you don't realize are flashbacks until it mentions a character who has already gone. The writing style really made it hard for me to follow what was going on in the story. The parts I was able to look past the style and absorb the story were wonderfully evocative of the place and time.… (meer)

This is an amazing book. I would have liked to give it another half star. Her style drove me a little crazy but at some point I just gave myself over to it. It almost totally consists of sensory impressions of growing up in Bagdhad in the 1950s. The narrative voice constantly changes from first to second to third. What story there is is about a young girl, Huda. After her father leaves to start another family, her mother dies of tuberculosis, and the children are raised by their pious grandmother. The city of Bagdhad, the baths, the market, a trip for a religious holiday - each description written in intense, almost fiery prose.… (meer)

A difficult read.

This is a difficult book to review because, although it provides quite a fascinating insight into life, particularly the lives of women, in 1950s Baghdad, unfortunately the content is obscured by overly wordy, often vague language, that makes the book very difficult to understand.
Personally, I found the 'Napthalene' section of the Afterward, to be hugely instructive about what I'd actually read. A lot was clarified by this section, including the relationships between all the characters and the significance of many of the events.

The story is narrated by Huda who is ten-years old at the start of the book. However, the majority of her narration is in the second person, which I found very alienating.
This was an era of relative pace, during the reign of King Faisal II, and Huda is able to play in the streets with the boys and generally enjoy her childhood. Her father is a policemen, a threatening character, who spends much of this time living at the Prison, but whose menacing presence is felt by everyone when he is home. Her mother has tuberculosis and Huda and her younger brother are largely raised by their grandmother in a house with their teenage aunt, of marriageable age.

We follow Huda into the years of her puberty, where she struggles with having to wear the cloak, which keeps falling off and which she finds very hot, making her head itch.

There was an excessive amount of reference to coughing, snot and the stink of sweat, which didn't make for pleasant reading.

Like The Loved Ones, also by Alia Mamdouh, it's hard to know if the obscure language is a factor of the book or of the translation, but as both books had different translators, this seems less likely. Certainly, within our book group, those who had read The Loved Ones in Arabic, had similar problems with the text.… (meer)

Prize winning Arabic novel.

I found this book incredibly difficult to read. I had to force myself to read 20 pages per day to read it in time for a book group. I had wondered if the translation was partly to blame, but some of our members read it in Arabic and had the same response.

The central character, Suhaila, is only known to us through her friends and her son. She is unconscious throughout the book and they are visiting with gifts and much conversation, with her (one way), and with each other. They also discuss her with her son, Nader, who has come over from Canada on hearing of his mother's illness. However, we never actually discover what is causing her ailments. The doctor says: "A surge in her blood pressure set off tremors in the veins that send the blood to the brain. There was a hemorrhage and it stopped....." P131.

Through all these interactions we learn of her early life in Iraq and subsequent exile to Paris. Her arranged marriage to an Iraqi soldier had been unhappy and abusive and she had left Iraq when he had disappeared. Her son appears to have been distant both geographically and mentally and he has left his young wife and their son back in Canada.

The problem is, nothing happens. The whole book is a conversation between various characters, who, in turn describe other characters. What little I learned of life in Iraq was padded out with an excess of language that made every page a struggle.

The author is due to make an appearance at the Dubai Literary Festival in March this year, perhaps I will glean a little more of the book's meaning then. Meanwhile, I am dreading my next read, Naphtalene, also by Alia Mamdouh, and for another book group. It does get slightly better ratings, so fingers crossed.… (meer)