Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Poorly Written and Shallow, September 3, 2008
The story is overly unadorned and intellectually unchallenging. The description, if at all, of the characters is poor and insufficient. One finishes reading the book wondering, how do these persons look like, dress, and move or behave? The emphasis is on Hasan's ability to smell menstruating women, and indeed, there is a portrayal of different instances where Hasan experiences such episodes. However, the author does not at all depict the actual sense of this smell or its aesthesis on the main character of the novel. Thus, the reader cannot share, appreciate and evaluate Hasan's experience, as well as the resulting feelings, reactions and stance that this occurrence entails. It is more than obvious that English is not the author's first language. The sense emanating from the whole writing is that the author translates into English, words and phrases from his native language. Consequently, the end - product is hard to read and follow smoothly and effortlessly. The final point concerns the excessive use of the word "damn", in the writing. This hyperbole adds nothing to the story or to the understanding of the characters' psychosynthesis, which the reader tries so hard to capture and comprehend, but due to the limitations of exposition, that is an impossible task to accomplish. The book is a disappointment and definitely not recommended, although one cannot ignore the fact that it is the author's first published novel.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sexual repression in Islam, February 15, 2002
Ammar abdulhamid attempts to demonstrate how the culture of Islam in Syria is sexually and morally repressive. Through the use of a few simple character narrations, he tells the story of two people raised under the umbrella of Islam and who can find no way to escape from a place of emotional suppression, sexual frustration and fear of physical danger for speaking out. Accompanying these two characters are two saviors - a married couple who have been westernly educated by returned to Syrian to decry the intellectual death they find there.
While I would not suggest this book for a fun read, the author is talented and gets his point across clearly and with style.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book about sexual limits, spiritual epiphanies, and social confinement..., October 1, 2006
We do not remember our histories or our lives by those dull periods of conscious stasis; rather, we look upon those pivotal moments where our world-views are shaken, our emotions in shambles, and our futures unpredictable, as being the ones most important to defining ourselves. If it is indeed those moments of change that capture the essence of the human condition and define the individual, then Ammar Abdulhamid's taboo challenging Menstruation is about them; it is a novel about epiphanies. Menstruation is a ground-breaking novel, if not in its conclusion about the universality of the "Religion of Love," then in its noteworthy perspective from that of a former Muslim raised in Syria.
Not shy with his subject matter, Abdulhamid does not hesitate to introduce the controversial subject matter of his book at the outset. The central character in the novel, Hasan, has refined his ability to identify menstruating women after years of scavenging through trash dumps for used tampons and developing a complicated classification system by odor and color. A peculiar admixture of revulsion and comedy, Hasan's sixth sense has a cleansing effect on the reader's mind, allowing for the complete absorption of other more pertinent issues presented in the text. Hasan's fetish for menstruation, which originates in his faulty belief that the fetus is nurtured upon blood in the womb, is later explained in one of the many interstitial narratives as being a symbolic purge in the human body; and, just as this purge occurs physiologically, it occurs also as "intellectual" and "spiritual menstruation." We are reminded, though, that despite the unsavory image of the menstrual cycle, that it "also denotes an ability to to bring forth a new life in this world"--whether it be intellectual, spiritual, or physical. These cycles, then, are the opportunities at which the personal epiphany manifests itself.
A recurring theme throughout the novel is that of the characters' sexual exploits. We become intimate with Wisam, an unsatisfied married woman who wants love-not-sex from her begrudging husband, and her adventures into lesbianism and infidelity. The brutal and dehumanizing nature of the sex Wisam has with her husband contrasted with the orgasmic and convivial encounters she has with Batul and Fatin, two other women, demands that the definition of "love" and its relationship with social norms be challenged. Indeed, these encounters and the many others throughout the book do serve a higher intellectual purpose besides being provocative as explained in the unpublished final chapter of the book. At the same time, they also affect Wisam personally. "Nice people can't be devils regardless of certain acts of theirs," she repeats to herself as she makes love to Fatin. "How can a sin feel so right?" How is it that sex with her husband was okay but wholly unsatisfying and somewhat torturous, while this supposedly insidious encounter fulfilled her needs physically and emotionally?
While Wisam never formally rejects her faith in Islam despite such heretical questions, other characters like Hasan, Batul, and Fatin do take this step, though not publicly at first. Batul, another married woman, openly states that she does not believe and intends to leave everything behind when the opportunity presents itself--Fatin, on the other hand, is a brave sixteen year-old veil-wearing teenager who revels in privately mocking the other women that attend religious study sessions with her. She is in a similar social situation as Hasan who, as the son of an acclaimed imam, is forced to be quiet in his new beliefs until he can establish his own financial independence from his father. Despite this apparent duplicity, there is nothing malicious about Hasan and Fatin's move towards intellectual freedom. Hasan, for example, authentically strives to reconcile his doubts by consulting his religious sister-in-law. Nevertheless, during this coming-of-age he comes to the conclusion that "the more in need of faith [he] grow[s], the less capable of faith [he] become[s]." Together, Hasan and Fatin illustrate another pressure of modern Syrian society: that, despite the supposedly secular nature of the ruling authoritarian regime, pressures against religious freedom continue to exist within society, manifesting themselves in the pragmatic considerations one must take regarding familial, fraternal, and financial relations.
A review of Menstruation would be incomplete without noting the unique and innovative narrative style that Abdulhamid adopts. Chapters are organized by the perspective of one or more of the characters, and are further subdivided and classified according to function: innermost thoughts, for example, are separated from the narration of events. This organization allows us to witness the secretive natural thoughts that oft occur but are rarely shared, given the superstitious nature in which we understand them. According to the Qur'an, for example, such thoughts should prompt the recitation of certain incantations against "the evil whisperer... who whispers in the breasts of mankind." Nevertheless, because of Abdulhamid's approach, we are completely aware of Hasan's lust for his sister-in-law and his heretical thoughts regarding religion.
More importantly, though, this organization allows for the easy introduction of a number of characters, many of whom never meet each other during the story. It is through this technique that we are allowed to be acquainted with the brilliant academic work of married couple Nadim Qanawati and Kindah Kayali, who function in the novel as the intellectual 'mentors' of other characters, and whose moral clarity serves as the basis of the novel's narrative framework. Indeed, it is through Nadim and Kindah that we understand the threatening position Hasan and others are in--under the former's guidance, Hasan and others participate in a secretive club for like-minded individuals. Nadim, who could very well be an older and more mature version of Hasan, writes of this secrecy with disgust and horror:
"You could be the greatest killer of all time, the hungriest of all known assassins, the most infamous shedder of blood, human blood, in all of our glorious history, still, you will never be able to stir up, to tap into, as much feeling of hatred in people's souls as can a simple, but earnest, jotter of words. We, the thinkers of the world, are forever an accursed and undesired breed."
Ultimately, Nadim and Kindah's message is one of self-empowerment and individualism: as Nadim explains whilst between the bed-sheets with Kindah, "I am my own messiah, you are your own messiah, everybody is his own messiah." The importance of Nadim and Kindah to the meaning of the novel cannot be overestimated, and yet I cannot elaborate thoroughly on it without risking a "spoiler" about too much of the novel's content or its conclusion. I am also unable to touch on a number of other themes expressed in the novel, such as the importance of the heretic to human progress, the threat to the heretic from all parties (from the CIA to the Islamists to the Syrian government, as Nadim explains), and the status of women, among others. Thus, I will leave those tasks to the reader who makes his way through the pages of this book.
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