Women of Karantina

Women of Karantina by Neal Eltoukhy Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.
You are going to either love or hate this book.
Can I just leave that as the review?
I suppose not.
My experience with Egyptian literature is solely confined to the myths, legends, the odd short story or the odd novel by Mahfouz; therefore, I have no knowledge about how Eltoukhy’s style fits into modern Egyptian literature.
You’ve been warned.
In some ways, the cover (at least to the English translation that American University in Cairo Press provided via Netgalley) is slightly misleading. The novel is not quite as cartoonish as the illustration of the women on the cover implies.
Eltoukhy tells the story of two families in the Karantina section of Alexandria. The story larges focuses on the women from the families, but to call it a feminist traditional novel in the standard sense of the word would be in correct.
It starts with the death of a dog that eventually leads to a murder at a train station. It is a story of two lovers who separate and come back together. There is the man who sorta becomes a hermit, there is a love quadrangle, and lots of train tracks.
The style is almost heretic and a constantly dipping in and dipping out of a storyteller’s voice. This makes it feel as if you are sitting in a crowded bar or square listening to a storyteller spin the story out. It almost like a gossip session or one of those long soap opera like stories that your grandmother tells you – though this one isn’t quite like that in subject matter.
The story itself is like the Godfather meets the Golden Girls meets Monty Python meets something uniquely Egyptian that you see in the fiction of Mahfouz. It’s Angela Carter without the werewolves. It’s something unique.
It does seem to speak to the role of women in society because the women are defined and hindered by the roles assigned to them or the lens that men or society view them.
The drawback is that at times, especially towards the end of the novel, it almost seems as if it is too much, or strangely and slightly contradicting, too little.
Yet there is such magic in the story.

Until Women of Karantina, I haven't had much luck in Arabic literature. Granted, having read only two books originally published in Arabic (In Praise of Hatred and Girls of Riyahd), that's hardly a statistical sampling. So now, with book three that I have read from Arabic, I can proclaim Women of Karantina to be the best book translated from Arabic I have read (to the best of my knowledge - maybe I read another book translated from Arabic when I was a kid but the fact that I don't remember it, even if I did read one, likely says it wasn't very good).

Reading, I kept being reminded of something. It took a good third of the way through the book for me to figure it out. Women of Karantina was reminding me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both have a family, although in Women of Karantina, some members are bonded by blood, others bonded by proximity. They have exploits, wild, crazy, revolving exploits, in Alexandria, whirling up and pulling more and more people in, like being swept down a drain or swept up in a sandstorm. The whole thing is a folly, the silliness and the megalomania and the scheming and the treachery and every plan failing and succeeding marvelously at the same time. Is it as polished and magical as One Hundred Years of Solitude? No, but it comes close.

"Once he told his Mama that he felt like a zero before the decimal, like something worthless."

(Oh Hamada, sometimes I feel like that too.) But, with the above quote, we can see how Women of Karantina isn't as accomplished as One Hundred Years of Solitude; do we really need that added phrase "like something worthless"? That's understood. Trust your readers to figure it out. There are also repetitions of certain phrases, characters changing personalities and tastes on a whim, a narrator that is sometimes a bit too intrusive for eir own good, and background about Alexandria dumped into the story when I would rather get back to the story of the main characters, not learn about how Alexandria once tried to ban tobacco and hookahs. We have dreams (but that's clearly an issue I have no one else, since every book I read people talk about their dreams) as shortcuts for character development, and the cheap trick of someone's friend turning out to be dum dum dum a figment of his imagination. Plus the use of faggot for virtually every insult. Oh my goodness, you have all of Arabic at your disposal, switch up the insults (or at least, drop the homophobic one for something else). So almost magical, but not quite.

As to the translation, my knowledge of Arabic hovers an epsilon away from zero, but often the verb tense didn't fit. There's a lot of the omniscient narrator using (and I had to look this up) present continuous in the story, i.e. "We are still in the early days of Spring" and "Inji and Ali are now satisfied that their path is secure." Each time it happened, I was pushed out of the story. Perhaps this is how the present tense works in Arabic (come on Duolingo people, let's get working on an Arabic course for me) and the translator wanted to keep the feeling of a tale originally spun in Arabic? I don't know. It stuck out.

Still, for all my whinging in the last few paragraphs, I enjoyed Women of Karantina. Awful people doing awful things to each other, but still, it earns my smile.

Women of Karantina by Nael Eltoukhy went on sale January 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.