Customer Reviews

Granada (Middle East Literature in Translation)

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This book was brought to my attention as a student of translation. I think that it is indeed a remarkable novel for a variety of reasons. Although a specialist on the history of this era might not be satisfied with the quantity of historical detail presented, I did not feel like the story itself was sacrificed for the purpose of allegory. The key aspects of the story were the act of presenting a story, in itself -- the language was sumptuous and the arabic translation was breathtaking. Descriptions were fabulously drawn. My impression of the novel was that it gently creates an allegory, while more importantly reiterating that people who live in an insular culture are always slow to change. I thought this book might be well received by Americans, who generally are not aware that the rest of the world does not move as quickly as they do, and who are not prepared to deal with too much character depth or historical detail.

I just finished this book for a class on modern arab lit that I absolutely loved. This book is meant as an alegorical statement of the experience of loss and defeat by "outsiders" so dominant in Arab consciousness, so it shouldn't really be read as a historical novel. But there is something disappointing about the lack of nuance in character development and depth in the story it tells (in fact, it reads a bit like an adolescent novel). It's too bad, because Ashour is a lyrical writer and the subject is a serious one. If you are looking for some serious fiction by women writers from the Arab world, I strongly recommend Huda Barakat and Sahar Khalifeh (Wild Thorns is a classic about why people in Palestine resort to violence even when they abhor it in principle).

This is a melancholic master piece about Fanaticism and Oppression(which unfortunately is a feature that involves all kinds of human's history) !

The novel's events take place in Al-Andalus after 1492 - after the fall of Muslim power in Granada , it expresses bitterly and smoothly the last vanishing chapter of the Arabic - Muslim cultural and the social identity of societies used to live in the Iberian Peninsula for more than 700 years . It is a unique piece ; full of detailed descriptions of places , traditions , and from anther side emotions , meditations & metaphors .

The novel was written in a very rich language and deserves to be read.

For anyone who would like to really get involved with this historical novel I recommend to also read the historical analytical book (A History of Islamic Spain) by William Montgomery Watt .

N.B
The novel in Arabic is a trilogy , I think this is only the 1st part .

This book was a pleasure to read at first thanks to Ashur's wonderful descriptions of everyday things and her ability to bring the scene alive. But as the story develops, I couldn't help but feel that the author was stereotyping her characters to make an all too predictable ideological point, and that was disappointing. The female heroine seems to have no flaws, a feminist twist, but at the expense of any sense of complexity in the story. There is also an akward sense of insularity to the novel. "Christians" do not enter the story at all except as villains and inquisitors, a one dimensional world that seems to have much in common with the demonized view of Arabs so prevalent in the US, only turned on its head. Too bad, because Ashur is clearly an accomplished writer. Her agenda simply dominates the story, producing an overly simplistic account of the human tragedy she seeks to describe.