The First Great Saudi Novel

Books | Review of: Wolves of the Crescent Moon

By BENJAMIN LYTAL
December 26, 2007

Driven mad by city life, the hero of Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" (1835) decides that he is Ferdinand VIII, the King of Spain. Whisked off to the sanatorium, he meets other exotic potentates — the Dey of Algiers, for instance — and men with shaved heads who seem to be Chinese. His flight, from sanity and from the humiliating vagaries of bureaucratic St. Petersburg, is to an arid land of magic, one that predates the modern city.

But Turad, the hero of Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's "Wolves of the Crescent Moon" (Penguin, 180 pages, $14), a Saudi bus-station vagrant obviously modeled on figures in Dostoevsky and Gogol, has actual recourse to the desert and its genies. Going half-crazy and desperate in Riyadh, he has his own Bedouin youth to remember. Before he was Raskolnikov, Turad was Ali Baba, marauding on the hajj trails.

The close juxtaposition of ancient and modern in Saudi Arabia is Mr. Al-Mohaimeed's advantage, but it is also his chief obstacle. Across the Red Sea, in Egypt, the modern novel has flourished, but it is not quite an established art form in Saudi Arabia. The state censors all manuscripts, and not with a simple yes-or-no judgment. Rather, a single sentence or paragraph might be struck, according to the individual censor's notion of taboo, and so most authors elect to publish instead in Beirut. Saudi Arabia has experienced the kind of bourgeois population density that makes for great novels only recently. Mr. Al-Mohaimeed is working at the start of a new tradition.

Those Saudi novels that do get published — even those that must be published abroad — do not always serve the cause of literature. There is a thriving interest in the women of Saudi Arabia — because they suffer a rare degree of isolation under Sharia law, but also because there is something exotic about that isolation. Saudi critics have accused novels such as "The Girls of Riyadh" and memoirs such as "Single in Saudi" of pandering to a salacious Western audience.

Mr. Al-Mohaimeed, a sincere writer who claims Balzac and Dickens along with Dostoevsky as influences, wants to distinguish himself from those exoticizing Saudi writers who "are writing with the aim only of exciting the reader." Serious writers worldwide would like to politic on behalf of "quality lit," but only a few have a legitimate campaign. The "Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction," published last year, contained only one Saudi writer, Abd al-Rahman Munif, who hardly ever lived there. Other Saudi authors, such as Ghazi Algosaibi, have tended to write about other places, Jordan or Cairo or Paris. Mr. Al-Mohaimeed, then, is an honest literary pioneer.

His Riyadh, brought to life in the episodic "Wolves of the Crescent Moon," partly resembles our sprawling American cities, designed for cars. Many of his characters are lonely drivers; many of them suffer from urban isolation. An ancient capital, Riyadh still had only 150,000 inhabitants in 1960; now it has an estimated 5 million. Of those new arrivals, most are either former Bedouins or internationals — now mostly members of an eclectic underclass that goes unrepresented in any stereotype of an oil-funded Saudi welfare state.

A Somali eunuch turned driver, a foundling who lost his eye to stray cats, and the ex-bandit Turad — these are Mr. Al-Mohaimeed's representative characters. Each has lost a part of his body, and Turad, who lost an ear after he was caught stealing, was thus deprived of his tribe and family. Disavowed by church and state — two of them suffer specifically at the hands of would-be pilgrims — all they have to show for themselves are their scars:

My friend, Turad thought, all the mementos you have are bits of your body. You don't carry a family tree with you. You don't have a lovely house with a majlis for the men at the front, with low couches and cushions lined up against the walls, where you could proudly hang your family tree in a gold frame, like people do in this country, for they are very proud of their ancestry. You have no father, only a tooth that fell out, and no mother, only a lock of soft hair.

The flip side of tribal kinship and strict social mores, Mr. Al-Mohaimeed suggests, is a culture of outcasts, a system in which black sheep can be easily gotten rid of. A Washington Post article that, prior to this book's translation, featured Mr. Al-Mohaimeed as one of several incisive young Arab writers, compared his style to that of Gabriel García Márquez. While Mr. Al-Mohaimeed does not have Mr. García Márquez's depth or his high degree of flair, he shares the Colombian's tact, disclosing about his peoples only what is genuinely mysterious and powerful, eschewing the merely exotic. Several of his characters may believe in genies, and Turad's past exploits, which seem to take place in a world without guns, may be hard to believe — until you recall that until the 1960s, most of the Saudi population was nomadic. And even the book's arabesque name, "Wolves of the Crescent Moon," turns out to be the invention of the translator, Anthony Calderbank. In Arabic, the title is more enigmatic: "The Traps of Scent."

If anything is implausible in Mr. Al-Mohaimeed's novel, it is that his bandit-hero, Turad, has fallen so low. This is the point of the book, but also its weakness: The vicissitudes of modern Saudi life have been so stretched as to leave Turad little interior consistency. His mournfulness gives us the atmosphere of Riyadh, but it would be a more tangible city if Turad felt some keen reverberation of his lost physical courage.

Yet we should be grateful for any such understanding of Riyadh at all. "Wolves of the Crescent Moon" teems with fresh conundrums — about tribal ethnicities, sexual naïveté, superstitions, international labor markets. In his debut novel, Mr. Al-Mohaimeed has proven that Saudi Arabia is, for the novel, fertile ground.

blytal@nysun.com

The First Great Saudi Novel

Books | Review of: Wolves of the Crescent Moon

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