Reviews

Season of Migration to the North and The Wedding of Zein by Tayeb Salih

jain's review

3.0

Considering how highly lauded this novel is, I was expecting a lot more from it than it delivered. The writing is beautiful, even in translation; the protagonist is interestingly flawed; and the scenes involving the village elders are purely awesome: funny and clever and perceptive. Unfortunately, charismatic sociopaths tend to bore me, especially when I find their charisma unpersuasive (as I found the sociopath in this book), so that I have to watch the other characters drawn helplessly into orbit around the sociopath while I myself am unmoved.