The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh, Marilyn Booth (Translator)

Overview

Suhaila lies in a coma in a Paris hospital. The loved ones of the title are the constellation of friends, predominantly women, who flock to Suhaila’s side from all over the world to envelope her in the warmth of friendship that may ultimately save her and enable her rebirth. Suhaila comes alive through the stories about her: her excesses, her love of dancing, of wine, and of poetry, despite years of abuse by her Iraqi husband, the bleakness of exile from home, and the frustrating separation from her only son.
The Loved Ones is an intimately moving, polyphonic narrative of displacement and nomadism, a disjointed, at times disfigured tale that blends diverse time frames so that the past, the present, and the future are unified, interlocked, and intertwined. This award-winning novel is a hymn to friendship and to boundless giving that ultimately restores life—it is a story about memory and history, a story against forgetting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789774249419
Publisher:	American University in Cairo Press, The
Publication date:	12/01/2006
Series:	Modern Arabic Literature Series
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alia Mamdouh (Author)
ALIA MAMDOUH was born in Iraq and received her degree in psychology from the University of Mastansariya in 1971. She served as editor-in-chief of al-Rasid magazine from 1970 to 1982. She now lives in Paris. She is the author of Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad (AUC Press, 2005).

Marilyn Booth (Translated by)
Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi include Bitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies, which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Nawal al-Saadawi. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2004 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Arabic Literature, this is the story of a young man who leaves his family behind in Canada to visit his comatose mother, an Iraqi exile living in Paris. As his own memories of his mother rise to the surface, he hears stories of her life from her friends, who have gathered at her bedside. Mamdouh, an Iraqi exile herself, captures the longing for home and family felt by many of the characters; however, the prose is often turgid-perhaps a fault of the translation-and it isn't until the last third that the novel gains much-needed energy when the son reads his mother's diaries. Extensive translator's notes, including a bibliography, along with a foreword by feminist scholar Hélène Cixous, help put the novel in its cultural context. Recommend for literary collections.
—Alicia Korenman

Library Journal