Leila Al-Atrash. A Woman of Five Seasons.

Simawe, Saadi A.

Nura Nuwayhid Halwani, Christopher Tingley, trs. New York. Interlink. 2002. 170 pages. $12.95. ISBN 1-56656-416-6

VERY SELF-CONSCIOUS of its own feminism, A Woman of Five Seasons, by Palestinian novelist Leila Al-Atrash, takes place in a fictional Arab Gulf country named Barqais. Any reader familiar with the Arab world can easily guess that this oil-rich country could be any of the Gulf states, ruled by a sheikh with his family and tribe, and both protected and exploited by Western powers. The main character, Nadia al-Faqih is an unhappily married woman with cherished ideals of independence and intellectual life, for whom wealth and economic security cannot establish a decent life. Even when her possessively "loving" husband, Ihsan Natour--who rose from a poor Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus to become one of the politically influential millionaires in the intrigues of the East-West game--provides her a permanent high-class life in Paris and London, Nadia fails to find self-fulfillment. Throughout most of the novel, Nadia, disgusted and suffocated with her husband's political and business maneuvers and conspiracies, silently rejects both his way of life and the life of his favorite society of businessmen and people of power. Although many times she voices her objections to being involved in his Machiavellian deals by telling him that this is the last time, she ends up surrendering to his pressure and manipulation. In this stifling ambience, Nadia's only emotional and spiritual outlets are books, which infuriate Ihsan, and a secret, unfulfilled love for Jalal Natour, Ihsan's older brother, who has become a prominent leader in one of the Palestinian liberation movements. Ihsan knows of her old love for Jalal, because he was the one who discouraged Jalal from nurturing his love for Nadia by telling him that Nadia was really not in love with him. Now married for several years, Nadia knows that her husband loves her, but she is aware that he loves her as a female, not as a free and independent person. Hence, she has grown into two conflictive selves: the traditional submissive Arab female who lives for her husband and children, and the repressed but increasingly rebellious person inside her that urges the other self to reject husband and wealth for the sake of a life of wholeness and spiritual integrity.

To further complicate Nadia's life, her idealized man, Jalal Natour, comes to Barqais, after many years of absence, during which he has become an adorned Palestinian hero. However, he manages only to shatter her romantic image of a Palestinian leader, who is supposed to embody the exact opposite of the corrupt official Arab rulers. Not only does he disappoint her by using the Palestinian cause to establish his own private business, Jalal, taking advantage of her fascination with him, tries to sexually assault her, thus demolishing the remnant of her hope in both the Palestinian revolution and the prospect of finding a good Arab man. The novel ends when Nadia confronts her husband with the evidence of his love affair with Angela Redenstein, a wily European businesswoman. Evidently, Nadia emerges out of the debris of her illusions a more mature individual, but divorced from the social context that makes her self-fulfillment possible. An Arab businesswoman in Europe, ironically enough, Nadia will have to search, perhaps in vain, for the man who loves her as a person, not as a female--a man with real power "to touch my inner being, to see it in a sexless way and communicate with it."

Structurally, the novel effectively Weaves several narrative strands into a tight and suspenseful plot. Main characters, through verging on the stereotypical, are vividly delineated and interact in a very credible way. However, there is considerable confusion caused, it seems to me, by the inconsistency of the point of view. Most of the time one is led to believe that the center of intelligence is located in Nadia, and therefore the point of view is the limited third-person. At many other crucial moments, however, one feels that the author's intrusive presence, assuming the role of the omniscient narrator, collides with Nadia's. Another source of ambiguity for the reader comes from the glaring omission of the historical context in which the events of the novel take place. With no apparent narrative necessity, one is left to wonder whether the omission of the historical context in which the events take place is another deliberate fictional disguise meant to function, in tandem with Barqais as a fictional name of an Arab Gulf state, to protect the author and the novel from the wrath of the oil sheikhs?

Saadi A. Simawe

Grinnell College