Peter Clark (5) (1939–)

This book is the product of a writing workshop that took place on an island off the Emirati coast. It contains seven stories, presented in both Arabic and English.

I look forward to reading the stories in Arabic. I read them in English first, because it is so much easier. If I had to pick one word that describes almost all of them, it would be "haunting." Many play with memory and personal identity as it tries to disentangle itself from national identity. Many of them also deal with cultural show more taboos, particularly sexual ones.

I found myself enjoying the two most overtly magical stories the best. One was about the city of Sana'a and a love affair that seemed as if it could only take place under its spell. Maybe sometime I will be able to visit Sana'a and see its magic for myself. The atmosphere in the story reminded me a little bit of how I felt sometimes visiting old Cairo or the old walled Souk in Tunis.

The other magical story was like an Arabian Gabriel Garcia Marquez story complete with wild fecundity and inexplicable happenings and recursivity. I will be looking for more stuff by that author.

The stories left me feeling that weird feeling I have about my own relationship to the Middle East, a mixture of great love for it and great frustration at how social mores frustrate individuals' need for identity and freedom. So many stories from the Middle East have this theme. I hope the winds of change blowing through the region right now will bring happiness and fulfillment for the millions who live there. show less

I was drawn to this book because it's described as "a bilingual reader". I've taken a few years of Arabic, so I thought that working through some of the stories here might be a good way to get in some practice. It's a lot faster to get through a text in an unfamiliar language if there's a translation provided.

Unfortunately, I only had to open this book to realize that it wasn't what I wanted. The key point for me is that the translations are not on facing pages. Instead of holding the book show more normally and glancing back and forth between the two versions, it was necessary to keep my place on two different pages and flip constantly back and forth between them. This was extremely annoying and I don't think I even made it through the introduction before giving up. If you're looking for a convenient dual-language book for the purposes of language practice, this isn't the one for you.

So I was left just reading the English translations of the stories, and even before I had managed to get started I heard from other reviewers that they were terrible. This had the benefit of reducing my expectations to almost nothing, so that I couldn't be disappointed. I only liked one of the eight stories, but that already meant that the book had exceeded my expectations!

That one story, by Mohammed Salah al-Azab, stood out because it was clearly written, with a straightforward narrative. Most of the stories jumped around from place to place or character to character with few threads of continuity for the reader to grasp onto. The writing tended to be vague, possibly in an attempt to sound poetic. Sometimes I just wasn't sure what was going on. There were a few stories that make me curious enough to do further research, but I would have preferred it if the stories themselves had done more to illuminate the times and places described.

My response to this collection probably isn't surprising, given the circumstances in which it was created. It's essentially the product of a writers' workshop that brought together eight promising young authors for a period of ten days. They worked intensively on their stories during that time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stories were ready for publication immediately afterward. It also doesn't help that several of the stories were actually intended as chapters of books, but were provided without any context.

I appreciate the thought behind this collection, but the product itself is a disappointment. show less

I had won Emerging Arab Voices in the March draw of Early Reviewers and I was quite excited and oh so impatient to read the stories. As an Armenian growing up in war torn Lebanon in the '80s, this bilingual collection of short stories from the Middle East and the Gulf caught my attention immensely. When the book was finally mailed to me in July, I wanted to devour the stories - in English since my Arabic is quite rusty - but like my fellow reviewers have alluded to already, I just couldn't show more maintain the anticipation and delight. The stories fell flat and encumbered too heavily across the page, some had promise like Letter to Yann Andrea which superimposes the reality of the Lebanese civil war with the narrator's dreamy hallucinations of Margarite Duras' The Lover. Though this is a fine effort, I cannot but feel that a more thorough and stringent editing process would have served everyone better. There is great promise, but the delivery falls flat. show less

The production value is top notch and the arabic script that comprises the second half is, I suppose, a nice touch, but the stories and chapter extracts are, for the most part, unmemorable.