A WOMAN OF FIVE SEASONS

This 1990 novel by a prominent Palestinian writer is one of the better recent portrayals of woman’s fate in the retrograde, repressive Middle East. Against the background of Barqais, a haven for impoverished Arabs who have left their homes for work in its newly rich oil fields, ambitious young Ihsan Natour struggles to manage both his uncertain career and his stubborn wife Nadia, who’s much more concerned with establishing her own personal independence. The story zips right along (thanks to a smoothly readable translation), and al-Atrash’s detailed character portraiture makes her two protagonists only too real. Ihsan is both a monster of appetite and attitude and a rather touchingly clueless male; meanwhile, Nadia has just enough of a mean streak to render her something less and more than a monument to embattled feminism. Sharp, amusing, and memorable.