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An Arab Melancholia (2008)

by Abdellah Taïa(Favorite Author)

3.51 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

158435111X (ISBN13: 9781584351115)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Semiotext(e)

review 1: Disappointed is how I feel about this book. I imagined having found a writer I would love with an interesting, beautiful style. Perhaps it is the fault of the translator, but the writing is passive and simple, the passionate diary style burdened by repetitive phrases and teenage lack of focus. It reads like Anne Rice as a young, homosexual man with an overlarge sense of self importance despite a dull self hatred.
review 2: "I was running. Fast, fast. Fast, fast." An Arab Melancholia is a sweetly written exposition of being gay in the Arab world. It goes a bit further actually, and to pigeon-hole it as a gay novel would be a bit unfair, but this is what it is presented as and it does frame the novel in a particular way, which I talk about later on. Autobiographi... morecal and written as a stream-of-consciousness with little in the way of a firm chronological narrative, the time and location of the novel is sometimes a little hard to follow - but this is part of the pace of the novel - running, jumping and darting around. Putting an understanding of the politics of sexuality and gender into a kind of queer literature is really neat, and Taïa does a great job in articulating themes - class division, poverty, the postcolonial, migration, patriarchy, the family and religion - which acutely fragment the social and cultural fabric of the Arab world at large. I'm quite interested in this kind of (post-national?) literature which uses a particular region (in this case the Middle East and North Africa) as framing its geographical boundaries. It seems as though Taïa would see his experiences of sexual subjugation and repression as common to the lower classes throughout the entire Arab world, hinting at a protest against the inequalities of power structures, and the upper classes which thrive in a corrupt and unequal political economy. This to me is where the writing succeeds, and by framing it in an autobiographical way the queer themes of the novel (to a queer reader) form a thread which connects these larger critiques. The descriptions of alienation and loneliness in seeking relationships I'm sure are familiar to most and more than anything suggest to me that this novel is an excellent way of understanding that although relationships between people are acutely framed by their background, people who are romantically inclined tend to have a tough time in a world which is pretty ruthless. I also liked the way Taïa frames mobility - running is the pace at which the narrative unfolds - between Marrakech, Paris and Cairo. Though the way that Taïa queers Arab politics as a critique of power is a resounding success, some of the autobiographical aren't entirely developed as well as they could. I would have preferred a slightly longer novel with a bit more autobiographical content, more generous and descriptive in its tone than some of the relatively disjointed and unconnected sequences in the book. But as a novel it works, and it works nicely. Not just because its a novel by an openly gay author from the Arab world - it works because it uses queer politics as an excellent method of criticising hegemonic power and oppressive structures, and offers a way out of it. And that's important. less

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