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cloppythemule 's review for:
Celestial Bodies
by Jokha Alharthi
This is a brilliant book and a deserving winner of the Man Booker prize this year.
I'll confess I've never had any interest in the Middle East and hadn't even so much as spent a thought on Oman until now.
This book manages to evoke and convey the intricacies of a culture I know absolutely nothing about in a very show, not tell fashion. It's like watching a curtain being drawn back over a hidden room. Intriguing, exciting and discombobulating.
This story is set in a small coastal village called Al-Awafi and spans the years from the 1920s to modernity, lightly skipping back and forth between points of view and eras within the lives of a few local families. The change from a slave owning, car-less town, where women are kept indoors to a modern place where the lamp-posts 'look like the ones in Dubai' happens in increments.
The central character Abdullah is the son of the second wealthiest man in town, and as we hear his reflections on his relationship with his father (slave owner, loving man or psychopath?) and his wife (cold, remote, unknowable) his daughter, his son and most of all the missing figure of his mother. A slow reveal is made about what happened in the coastal town over decades of cover-ups and polite legend in place of truth. Its bloody great.
I'll confess I've never had any interest in the Middle East and hadn't even so much as spent a thought on Oman until now.
This book manages to evoke and convey the intricacies of a culture I know absolutely nothing about in a very show, not tell fashion. It's like watching a curtain being drawn back over a hidden room. Intriguing, exciting and discombobulating.
This story is set in a small coastal village called Al-Awafi and spans the years from the 1920s to modernity, lightly skipping back and forth between points of view and eras within the lives of a few local families. The change from a slave owning, car-less town, where women are kept indoors to a modern place where the lamp-posts 'look like the ones in Dubai' happens in increments.
The central character Abdullah is the son of the second wealthiest man in town, and as we hear his reflections on his relationship with his father (slave owner, loving man or psychopath?) and his wife (cold, remote, unknowable) his daughter, his son and most of all the missing figure of his mother. A slow reveal is made about what happened in the coastal town over decades of cover-ups and polite legend in place of truth. Its bloody great.