Paris, When It's Naked.

Accad, Evelyne

The Lebanese poet, novelist, essayist, and painter Etel Adnan (see WLT 66:1, p. 70) wrote her first novel, Sitt Marie Rose, in French (Paris 1978; Eng. 1982) during the siege of the Palestinian camp of Tel al-Zaatar in the summer of 1976. Adnan feels very strongly about Beirut, where she was born in 1925 to a Syrian Moslem father, a former Ottoman officer, and a Greek Christian mother. She was educated in French schools and later studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Harvard and Berkeley in the United States. She has published seven volumes of poetry and one essay. Of Cities & Women and Paris, When It's Naked are her two latest books. One epistolary, the other a kind of diary, both are meditations on today's world problems and the condition of women in Adnan's simple, direct, thought-provoking style.

Of Cities & Women is in the form of letters written to a Lebanese intellectual, Fawwaz, who lives in exile in Paris. The project started at a feminist book fair in June 1990, ending two years later in Beirut, where the fighting had stopped. The letters are written from Barcelona, Aix-en-Provence, Skopelos, Murcia, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, and Beirut, each city being described by Adnan's special talent for colors, smells, unusual descriptions, expressions mixed with meditation, interpolations, questions, attempts at answers, and deep sensitivity to the plight of women in the various cities, countries, streets, and art representations she describes.

Paris, When It's Naked is a kind of diary about life in Paris, where the author spends much of her time, meditating, going to cafes, meeting old and new friends, and philosophizing about existence in general and the City of Light in particular. Through these pages, fascinating to read, one feels Adnan's love for the French capital she renders so vivid through its rain, its people who read in the metro, its cafes and restaurants, its artists, painters, philosophers, and writers, but also its refugees, prostitutes, beggars, and homeless.

Writing in the context of conflicts and world problems that haunt her--the Gulf War, the Lebanese tragedy, ecological disasters, the population explosion, the mass media, revolutions and counterrevolutions--and of other major catastrophes looming on the horizon at the turn of this century, Etel Adnan calls on us and makes us think about vital issues in a new, original manner that is extremely moving in its poignancy and vision.

Evelyne Accad University of Illinois, Urbana