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BOOKS I N BR I E F The World Through The Eyes of Angels by Mahmoud Saeed, translated by Samuel Salter, Zahra Jishi and Rafah Abuinnab, is winner of the 2010 King Fahd Middle East Center manuscript translation prize at the University of Arkansas. The novel begins in 1940, in Mosul, Iraq, a lively trading centre where Muslims, Jews, Christians, Kurds, Yazidis and Armenians live harmoniously. Through the crowded streets runs a little boy, barefoot, burdened with chores and regularly beaten by his sadistic older brother “Ahmad the Mad Dog”. He meets three girls – a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, each of whom enters his life and enriches it before being tragically torn from him.This is a story of heartbreak and cruelty, narrated from the mouths of innocent, and a love song to an Iraq that has long since disappeared. In the author’s own words, it is “a living witness to a people fated to walk in darkness”. Syracuse University Press, USA, 2011, pbk, 200pp, ISBN 978-0-8156-0991-9. FC. Arabian Tales: Baghdad-on-Thames by Khalid Kishtany. This delightfully funny set of 19 new short stories by the Iraqi writer are a mix of satire and sex. Kishtany revels in the mischief of his light tales with Chaucerian aplomb.The stories are set in the backstreets of Baghdad and London, constantly poking fun at the cultural sensibilities of both cultures through the author’s ingenious plotlines. Kishtany’s capricious sense of humour and his wry sense of social justice make this collection an enjoyable study of cultural intersection and human idiosyncrasy. Quartet Books, UK, 176pp, hbk. ISBN 9780704372504. £15.00. BG. Sarmada by Fadi Azzam, translated by Adam Talib, plunges its reader into the mysterious tenets of the Druze faith.Although it begins in Paris, with hip narrator Rafi, the focus is a world away, in the eponymous Sarmada, a Druze village in the rocky plains south of Damascus.The history of the village and its people is traced through three women: Azza, Farida and Buthayna, all of whom have a unique relationship with this strangely magical place.The novel brims with soothsayers, transmigrating souls, superstitions and graphic sexual scenes, not to mention violent murder and historical coincidences.Written as the Arab Spring erupted in Syria, the book is not overtly political, but does contain scathing accounts of the Ba’ath Party as Azzam spins a spider’s 212 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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BOOKS I N BR I E F web of modern Syrian society through his plots. Swallow Editions, London, 2011, hbk, 120pp, ISBN: 978-1-906697-37-2. FC. The Night Counter by Alia Yunis. Fatima, a Lebanese grandmother, is spending her nine-hundred-and-ninety-second night in Los Angeles. Scheherazade, mythical narrator of the Arabian Nights, perches on the windowsill. Each night, Fatima tells Scheherazade one story from among the one thousand and one that constitute her life. She has only nine stories left, and knows that, like Scheherazade, her life will end as soon as her stories do. Fatima’s last nine nights cross four genera- tions, two continents and a hundred years as she recounts her life with her immediate family and meets up with her vast, scatttered, extended family of several generations, some wanting assimilation, others not, while others discover their family, and yet others seem 100% American. Alia Yunis’ story imaginatively draws on the modern and the ancient, and much in betweeen.The novel is charming, funny and sad; a celebration of the everyday magic that shapes our lives.Three Rivers Press, NewYork, 2009, pbk, 372pp, ISBN: 978-0-307-45363-1. FC. Bar Balto by Faïza Guène. Guène’s talent for vividly capturing a multiplicity of human voices emerges through this se- ries of monologues, in which the suspects of a murder crime tell their stories, alongside the dead victim himself. The crime has taken place in “Making-Ends-Meet”, a deprived suburb of Paris. The victim is Joel, the unpopular and grumpy owner of the local pub.The suspects include, among others, Muslim twins Alia and Nadia, teenage troublemaker Tani and his younger brother Yeznig, who has learning difficulties.At times funny and at times distressingly sad, the small details and frustrations of everyday life, related in Guène’s familiar conversational style, convey the harsh reality of the community’s daily lives and the terrible consequences it brings. Sarah Ardizzone’s translation BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 213

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BOOKS I N BR I E F

The World Through The Eyes of Angels by Mahmoud Saeed, translated by Samuel Salter, Zahra Jishi and Rafah Abuinnab, is winner of the 2010 King Fahd Middle East Center manuscript translation prize at the University of Arkansas. The novel begins in 1940, in Mosul, Iraq, a lively trading centre where Muslims, Jews, Christians, Kurds, Yazidis and Armenians live harmoniously. Through the crowded streets runs a little boy, barefoot, burdened with chores and regularly beaten by his sadistic older brother “Ahmad the Mad Dog”. He meets three girls – a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, each of whom enters his life and enriches it before being tragically torn from him.This is a story of heartbreak and cruelty, narrated from the mouths of innocent, and a love song to an Iraq that has long since disappeared. In the author’s own words, it is “a living witness to a people fated to walk in darkness”. Syracuse University Press, USA, 2011, pbk, 200pp, ISBN 978-0-8156-0991-9. FC.

Arabian Tales: Baghdad-on-Thames by Khalid Kishtany. This delightfully funny set of 19 new short stories by the Iraqi writer are a mix of satire and sex. Kishtany revels in the mischief of his light tales with Chaucerian aplomb.The stories are set in the backstreets of Baghdad and London, constantly poking fun at the cultural sensibilities of both cultures through the author’s ingenious plotlines. Kishtany’s capricious sense of humour and his wry sense of social justice make this collection an enjoyable study of cultural intersection and human idiosyncrasy. Quartet Books, UK, 176pp, hbk. ISBN 9780704372504. £15.00. BG.

Sarmada by Fadi Azzam, translated by Adam Talib, plunges its reader into the mysterious tenets of the

Druze faith.Although it begins in Paris, with hip narrator Rafi, the focus is a world away, in the eponymous Sarmada, a Druze village in the rocky plains south of Damascus.The history of the village and its people is traced through three women: Azza, Farida and Buthayna, all of whom have a unique relationship with this strangely magical place.The novel brims with soothsayers, transmigrating souls, superstitions and graphic sexual scenes, not to mention violent murder and historical coincidences.Written as the Arab Spring erupted in Syria, the book is not overtly political, but does contain scathing accounts of the Ba’ath Party as Azzam spins a spider’s

212 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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