Excuse me, dear Haifa Bitar, no it's not. And when fighting off male dominance, and the insensitive atrocities that they subject us women to, we do not turn into them. The beliefs in this book are dubbed 'feminism' by many. But, if that's feminism, then I'm against it. If males betray and get away with it, and their spouses are horrified and depressed by the betrayal, I should be against the act of betrayal. Yet, here, it turns out that the spouses are just jealous, and they're not condemning the betrayal, they are seeking one level of equality: women should be granted the right to betray and get away with it. I should note that the editor -if there was any- sucks big time! There are countless punctuation, syntax, and grammatical errors. It was so annoying. They recommended me this author at the library. My friend lent me this copy when I told her. I'm glad I did, but I wouldn't read any other book of hers. I felt she treated the novel structure, and the themes in the novel in a simplistic manner, which was sometimes contradictory. The beginning and ending were much more smooth than the sequence of actions in between.
I strongly suspect that 欧宝娱乐 users have panned Hayfa Bitar's book, The Abbasid Cellar, not for lack of literary merit but because they were uncomfortable the subject matter. Perhaps they think that to praise this book would be endorsing the notion that feminism equals sadistic revenge against men. If so, that would reflects only their own failure, not the author's. I think it's very disappointing that this book is virtually unknown with an average rating of 2 out of 5 stars (meanwhile, the Arabic pseudo-translation of Mein Kampf is a best-seller showcased by the majority of bookstores I've seen in Morocco, Jordan and Egypt).
The novella explores postcolonial sexual politics; feminisms; emotional manipulation and revenge via unfaithfulness; the interplay between class & gender in modern Syria; masculinity and emasculation; traditional Arab values as pertaining to virginity; and the psychological toll on women of living in a deeply patriarchal society. I found it daring, unsettling, and emotionally intense, one of the best things I've read in Arabic. Like Wuthering Heights, it plumbs the depths of the human psyche and the cruelest, most sadistic parts of human nature as can manifest in sexual relationships. Like Nawal El-Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, it is brutally succinct and fast-paced. Like The Bell Jar, it doesn't allow a male reader to simply question the mental stability of the female protagonist--it plunges him into her world so deeply that her every decision starts to feel like the same one that I would have made. Another similarity to The Bell Jar is that it strikes me as an unpretentious, ostensibly unassuming work, one that lands higher than it seems to have aimed. In terms of the language itself, The Abbasid Cellar lacks the kind of pyrotechnics favored by a lot of the male authors I've read lately--nor does it need them.
Like Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, it exists at the intersection of class, gender, and a globalized world. The main character, Khulud, spurns her Arab boyfriend while "giving her virginity" (the phrasing used in the original text) to a young German man who's only in Damascus briefly as part of his military service. This bears similarities to Hamida's entrance into a life of prostitution in Midaq Alley. But I suspected that Mahfouz was resentful towards Hamida, even as he portrayed her to be the victim of poverty. Bitar's view towards Khulud is less clear, and she is a more complex and nuanced character. Towards the end of the novel, Khulud thinks to herself: "I cheated on him with Holliday, wanted to have two faces like everybody else [...] I became two-faced, maybe 100-faced [...]".
I haven't read Hanan Al-Sheikh's Story of Zahra yet, but from what I know about it, there are similarities here: the link between illicit sex with a stranger and women's self-empowerment; and the idea that eros and thanatos have some intrinsically link, as claimed Freud (a key idea of Season of Migration to the North, too).
I liked the way characters in this book discussed and were influenced by the works of Italian anti-fascist author Alberto Moravia, as well as the works of Egyptian physician, activist and novelist Nawal El-Saadawi. I also noticed several points in the story at which I could imagine how lesser writers would have stumbled and taken the plot in directions that seemed rote or soap-opera-like. Instead, Bitar did a masterful job of leading events to a tragic crescendo that subverted my expectations in key ways. I particularly love when writers enhance a story's climax by bringing into stark collision characters who had heretofore not interacted (in this case, the main characters social circle collide with her family members including her sketchy father who had been, for reasons that are important to the plot, entirely out of the picture).
There's room for debate over the extent to which the main character is flawed vs. her society is flawed, and consequently how much blame she bears for the consequences of her actions. But what is indisputable is that this novel achieves something that lots of good literature doesn't quite pull off: to cause me to truly empathize with a fictional character, and somehow see myself in her even when she's at her worst.
What is there for me specifically to take away from this story? I think I will continue to struggle with this question for some time, which makes me all the more glad to have read it. 5/5, intense and very thought-provoking, added to favorites shelf.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.