Women of Sand and Myrrh

I liked this book, and though it is fiction it gives an arab womens perspective on life in the middle east. The author uses her own stlye of writing and reminds me of Azar Nifisi's book Reading Lolita In Tehran. I think to appreciate this book you need to know a little something about mid eastern culture, instead of just saying it gives stereotypes we use today towards arabs like one reviewer wrote.

This is an extraordinary novel by any standard. Al-Shaykh's willingness to go deep into the hearts of her (yes, sometimes shallow) characters reveals the hidden depths of life behind the veil, and so much more. This is powerfully anti-lyrical writing, and important reading for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what's happening (and not happening) culturally between men and women, East and West, Islam and the rest of the world. Anyone who dares enter here will venture far beyond the politically correct, when it comes to female sexuality and lies, secrets, silences, customs, and intuition.

The book started out slow, but as the book progressed, I had to go back to the beginning and reread it. The stories of each of the women give an outside perspective of the other women. As you're reading about one of the women, you get a mental picture of some of the other characters as they are mentioned from her perspective. Then, you get to see another perspective of these women as they are introduced in different chapters. I really liked this book and thought it was very creatively put together.

Yes, this novel deals with four women (Suha,Nur, Suzanne, and Tamr) living in an un-named Middle Eastern country...but the problems that many of the women face have echoes of the same problems that an average housewife experiences in Middle America...Suzanne's husband is unloving and cold, she feels fat and undesirable....Suha must live in a place that is far from her home for her husband's job, and her intelliegence is being stifled in this oppressive society, she yearns for freedom...Tamr is going to make it work, she will work within the system to achieve her dreams...and Nur drowns in her hedonistic pleasures, she alleviates her loneliness with lovers, cigarettes, and riches, yet they still don't complete her. All these problems can be found in intelligent women who are not being fulfilled by their society or men or domestic life....buried within this novel is a connection for all women.... while i read it i was enthralled with all the descriptions of food, and horrified at the heavy veils the women must wear in public and in the presence of men and the other social conventions a woman must endure...the men weren't all together despicable either, they were just humans trying to make it....This novel had universal themes (women trying to find happiness, love and most importantly self-fulfillment)peppered with vivid images of a certain type of Middle Eastern society.... a good read!

A friend passed this book along to me with the usual 'You have GOT to read this...' commentary. The cover of the copy I was lent has this quote from the Literary Review: "Marvelously Vivid. I was reminded of The Handmaid's Tale." Being a big fan of The Handmaid's Tale , I was intrigued. The sheer reality this book describes is disturbing. Extremely disturbing...at least to a women who was born and raised in the United States after 1969 (like me). The book get's inside the character's heads while vividly describing what's going on around them, and the sheer maddening aspect of never really knowing what was happening outside of the walls of your home - of knowing that you had little to no real power over your existence.It's told from the point of view of four different women, with each women getting a separate section of the book. this is an excellent way to arrange this novel because, not only do ! you get to see each of the characters from both the inside and the outside (e.g.: they describe each other), but you also get an in-depth look at life as it is for very different women. For example: Tamr goes on a hunger strike in order to force the male head of her family to allow her to go to school and learn to read, and who witnesses the brutal punishment enacted on a young woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Of all of the women, her story is the most inspiring because of her sheer determination to become self sufficient. After being divorced twice (men are able to divorce their wives at any time, and all it requires is the proper documentation which is delivered to the woman after everything is said and done. She doesn't even know what's happening until someone walks in, hands her the form, and says, pack up and go to your parents house...), she's decided she wants nothing more of marriage and manages to pull! strings and bust heads (e.g.: she actually walks into ! government offices...she's supposed to send in a man to do it for her), until she has the finances and documentation allowing her to open her own beauty shop. It's amazing what the woman had to go through to open a hair salon! Apparently, the author's first novel was banned in several Middle Eastern countries due to it's explicit descriptions of female sexuality. I would not be surprised if this novel were also banned for the same reasons. I imagine this novel should leave a person thinking how lucky she is to be living someplace other than the Middle East, but I actually found I could relate to many things the characters described, though on a less extreme level. That's part of the reason this book is so disturbing and is so similar to the Handmaid's Tale - it's not to hard to imagine your own world becoming very similar to the one Hanan describes.