These lively fictional tales offer an unusual perspective on Iranian life and society. Told by a high-spirited, intelligent, willful (if sometimes insecure) teenage girl, they recount incidents in her daily life in Iran in the 1970s before the Revolution. Without any ideological "message," they present human interest and social comment. Their central characteristic is humor, from slapstick to subtlety, which can be easily appreciated across cultural boundaries.   As we meet Suri's immediate family, distant relatives, and friends, we are discreetly introduced to upper-middle-class society in an Iran undergoing headlong westernization. The contradictions between this process and traditional Iranian mores are particularly well depicted. Much writing in recent years has been concerned with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. This volume reminds us that there is always an ongoing human dimension largely unaffected by political and religious changes.

Suri & Co.: Tales of a Persian Teenage Girl (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Literature & Fiction

Amirshahi, Mahshid

History & Criticism

Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

On the surface of this novel, various members of a Moroccan family recount their versions of the family's experiences under the French Protectorate and since Independence. On a deeper level, the book deals with human memory and how it forms one's experience of the world. Some critics have found the Arabic original to be similar to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Outstanding Moroccan novelist and critic Mohamed Berrada first published Lu'bat al-Nisyan in 1987, and it has since been translated into French and Spanish. Called the first postmodern novel in Arabic, the story is written in such a captivating style that it has become a bestseller in the Arab world. Apart from its postmodern modes of narration and metafictional structure, the novel has elements of an autobiographical nature. Hadi, his mother, brother and other characters subtly portray the lives experienced by people from various classes and different backgrounds. The narrator and the narrator's narrator take these nuances and struggle with how a story, any story, should be told. Change in Moroccan culture and in the psyche of the main protagonist is painted artfully by the encircling wealth of detail.

The Game of Forgetting (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Berrada, Mohamed

Contemporary

This novel of the emigrant experience is a moving witness to the Lebanese people and to a time, the civil war. Emily Nasrallah's narrative follows an elderly Lebanese couple who leave their village during the war to visit children and grandchildren in the New World. The war escalates dangerously during their visit, and the couple's children are reluctant to let their parents return home. Although much of the story takes place on Prince Edward Island and in New York, the behavior and rituals of the family are those of the village in southern Lebanon. Such traditions may not be necessary to life in the New World, but are nonetheless terribly painful for emigrants to discard.

Flight against Time (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Nasrallah, Emily

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Please, No Police: A Novella (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Ören, Aras

In this moving fictional treatment of a Muslim woman's life, a personal and family crisis impells the heroine to reexamine traditional cultural attitudes toward women. Cast out and divorced by her husband, she finds herself in a strange new world. Both obstacles and support systems change as she actively participates in the struggle for Moroccan independence from France.
This feminist novel is a literary statement in a modern realist style. Many novels by women of the Middle East that have been translated reflect Western views, values, and education. By contrast, Year of the Elephant is uniquely Moroccan and emerges from North African Islamic culture itself. Its subtle juxtaposition of past and present, of immediate thought and triggered memory, reflects the heroine's interior conflict between tradition and modern demands. The title refers to a famous battle described in the Koran.

Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Abouzeid, Leila

Literary