Description
Celestial Bodies, which was originally published in 2010, is the work of an Omani writer Jokha Alharthi. This the first novel from Gulf to be shortlisted and win the Man Booker Prize for 2019. It is originally written in Arabic and the first-ever book by a female author from Gulf to be translated into English. Celestial Bodies made its own place in 'major international writers' shelf' in the United States.
The novel takes its reader on a journey in the village of al-Awafi in Omann, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty' and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and awaits a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.
These three women and their families, their losses, and loves unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-Owning society into its complex. present. Through the Sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.
In an introductory note the translator, Marilyn Booth, sets out the book's key theme, built around the pressure on three generations of an Omani family as a result of social change.
But it's harder to make out these themes in the novel itself, perhaps because of the complex structure.
The narratives alternate between a third-person viewpoint and the first-person voice of Abdallah, a married businessman haunted by his father's cruelty. The stories of many others are woven in, making the shape of the book more a tangled skein than a linear progression.
Frequent reference to the family tree that opens the book is needed, but cannot straighten out bewildering inter-relationships. Slavery was only outlawed in Oman in 1970 and its dark complexities affect the families at the heart of the novel. While there are some frustrations for the reader to overcome, the glimpses into a culture relatively little known in the west are fascinating.
This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is "an innovative reimagining of the family saga... Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secret".--The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Jokha Alharthi was born in Oman in July 1978. She is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, a children's book, and three novels in Arabic. Fluent in English, she completed a Ph.D. in Classical Arabic Poetry in Edinburgh and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. She has been shortlisted for Shaikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and her short stories have been published in English, German, Italian, Korean and Serbian. She lives in Oman.
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| Jokha Alharthi |
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Rating: 3.9/5
Author: Jokha AlHarthi
Publisher: Catapult (First Edition)
Publishing Date: October 8, 2019 (First Edition)
Edition Language: English
Genre: Sister Fiction, Coming of Age Fiction, Cultural Heritage Fiction
ISBN-10: 1948226944
ISBN-13: 978-1948226943
Pages: 256
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