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Celestial Bodies Paperback – October 8, 2019
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In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, 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 await 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.
The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCatapult
- Publication dateOctober 8, 2019
- Dimensions5.48 x 0.69 x 8.23 inches
- ISBN-101948226944
- ISBN-13978-1948226943
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Editorial Reviews
Review
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year in Fiction
"In her novel Celestial Bodies, the Omani author Jokha Alharthi inhabits this liminal space between memory and forgetting: the dark tension between the stories we tell and the stories we know . . . Booth’s translation honors the elliptical rhythms of Arabic and the language’s rich literary heritage. She imbues the book’s numerous poetic extracts with lyricism and devotedly preserves the rhymes and cadences of its proverbs. ('The feet walk fast for the loving heart’s sake, but when you feel no longing, your feet drag and ache.') Yet there is no doubt that this is a contemporary novel, insistent and alive . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets." ―Beejay Silcox, The New York Times Book Review
"Bright and illuminating." ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"The form’s remarkable adaptability is on brilliant display in Celestial Bodies (Catapult), a searching work of fiction by Jokha Alharthi, an Omani writer and academic . . . Within all the chapters, the stories float like this, lightly tethered to what the French call récit―the moment in which the story is being told, the narrative present. The result is a beautifully wavering, always mobile set of temporalities, the way starlight seems to flicker when we gaze at distant and nearer celestial bodies . . . Indeed, the great pleasure of reading Celestial Bodies is witnessing a novel argue, through the achieved perfection of its form, for a kind of inquiry that only the novel can really conduct." ―James Wood, The New Yorker
"Arab women, therefore, face twin obstacles: the West’s own gender biases, and the reductive narrative of the Arab woman. This is why it was such a victory when the International Booker Prize jury chose an Arab novel―one written by a woman―to receive the award for the first time in the prize’s history. The Omani novelist Jokha al-Harthi’s breathtaking, layered, multigenerational novel Celestial Bodies, which was beautifully translated into English, follows the lives of three sisters from a small village at a time of rapid social and economic change in Oman. The tale is replete with history, poetry, and philosophy, but also slavery, broken marriages, passion, and not-so-secret lovers." ―Kim Gattas, The Atlantic
"Rich, dense . . . The variety of perspectives is effective in offering a window into a country that few Western readers will know intimately . . . Celestial Bodies is strongest in its exploration of how the changes in Oman affect women: within one generation, they are exposed to ideas from abroad and start moving away from cloistered, rural life. But Alharthi . . . pushes past stereotypical narratives of Muslim women defying patriarchy, instead illustrating the difficulties of balancing tradition and newfound freedoms. It’s a tale that perhaps could have been written only in a strange new place itself." ―Naina Bajekal, Time
"A rich, dense web of a novel . . . Alharthi constructs a tapestry of interlocking lives, some seen over the course of decades, others at just a single pungent moment. Rarely have I encountered a work of fiction in which form and idea were so inseparably, and appropriately, fused . . . Marilyn Booth, the translator, has done a wonderful job of conveying a lyricism I can only assume is present in Alharthi’s original." —Ruth Franklin, The New York Review of Books
About the Author
Marilyn Booth holds the Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford University. In addition to her academic publications, she has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic, most recently The Penguin’s Song and No Road to Paradise, both by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud.
Product details
- Publisher : Catapult; First Edition (October 8, 2019)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1948226944
- ISBN-13 : 978-1948226943
- Item Weight : 9.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.48 x 0.69 x 8.23 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #504,155 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,910 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
- #8,031 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #25,540 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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Jokha Alharthi won the Booker International Prize in 2019 for this novel, the first Arab author to be awarded the prize. In her acceptance speech she stressed the universal nature of some of her themes. True enough. But I also feel that this excellent novel is deeply rooted in the particular circumstances of Oman, which further enhanced my reading enjoyment.
The novel was smoothly translated from Arabic into English by Mary Booth. I had read another work that Booth had translated: Rajaa Al Sanea’s “The Girls of Riyadh.”
The core of Alharthi’s novel is three generations of one Omani family. In terms of historical development however, those three generations spanned 10 generations or more in many other countries. The key date is 1970. In that year Sultan Qaboos overthrew his father, Sultan Said bin Taimur, who was “feudal, reactionary and isolationist,” per Wikipedia. Schooling, health care, and many other aspects of the country were stuck in the equivalent of the European Middle Ages. Most Omanis were illiterate, including almost all the women. One of Qaboos first acts was to outlaw slavery, one of the very last countries in the world to do so. (I personally continue to believe that there are many forms of slavery that continue to exist in numerous countries of the world.) And Qaboos, who would provide an enlightened rule for half a century, until his death in 2020, largely brought the country into the modern world, with good schooling, education, and a reasonable social safety net.
The ramifications of the not-so-distant past of slavery is a key aspect of Alharthi’s novel. In 1926 the 15-year old slave, Ankabuta, would give birth to Zafira, who is a central character in this novel, slave, child-care minder, and yes, concubine. Zafira’s son, Sanjar, though nominally “free” after 1970, flees the on-going social discrimination, and goes to Kuwait, where he works, well, much as a slave, in the souks. Hum.
Djinns are omnipresent in the lives of this family and the residents of the village of Al-Awafi. Homage and care must always be taken with them. And how could an uprooted basil bush lead to a death? Alharthi is an excellent story teller, backing and filling the story among the characters, throwing out a hint here and there, and ultimately telling you the answer. There is a “desert and the sown,” to use Gertrude Bell’s formulation, to life in Oman. Awafi is a coastal agricultural village, with irrigation practices using the falaj system that dated back millennia. In fact, Azzan’s bride, Salima, bears the “falaj” nickname, earned under some unique circumstances. Azzan can leave his home in the evening to visit the nearby Bedouin encampment for a bit of camaraderie, and use the excursion to obtain a bit more… it is the Moon, you understand, and other bewitching celestial bodies. Or is it djinns?
Much of the novel centers on the three daughters of Azzan and Salima: Mayya, “the seamstress,” bookish Asma, and Khawla, noted for her vanities and mirrors. London (imagine the scandal of naming your daughter after a city! Hum!), who is the daughter of Mayya and Abdullah, also has a prominent role. She will become a doctor, driving her BMW to Muscat to work. Each of the women find their own orbits in the cosmos that is modern-day Oman.
Oman was once a flake of my life. My family and I spent six days there over the Winter school holidays of 1997. Three of those six days were spent camping, in splendid isolation, 50 km south of Muscat, on the beach. I remember reading a guide to Oman before going that cautioned Arabs from the other countries of Al Jazeera (as well as the expats who had adopted the local driving customs) that in Oman they really must obey the speed limit… or there were consequences. Imagine that. A country different. We also circled around to the desert side, and drove high onto Jebel Akhtar (which is never translated by Booth, but means “Green Mountain”). There was an enormous cedar tree that three people could not link their outstretched arms around its trunk. I would have been more careful if I had known about all the land mines and bombs dropped by the British in the 1950’s, as Alharthi describes.
Alharthi has written a truly great novel on Oman and its people and history. 6-stars. I’ll conclude with a plug for another great Arab writer still languishing in obscurity: Yousef Al-Mohaimeed. His “Where Pigeons Don’t Fly,” is an incisive portrait of modern-day Riyadh and his “Munira’s Bottle” is also excellent. Hear that, Mr. Booker!