Assia Djebar

[Stewart]

I think it's wortwhile creating threads for writers potentially in with a shout of the Nobel...so, without further ado, some cribbing from Wikipedia:

Assia Djebar is the pen-name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen (born June 30, 1936), an Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker. Most of her works deal with the obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa's most famous and influential writers, and was elected to the Acad?mie fran?aise on June 16, 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition.

Here's her website, too.

We've got a thread on one of her works: http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...cavalcade.html.

[Daniel del Real]

This is a short review I wrote when I was reading Far from Medina last week. I finished it yesterday but my opinion unfortunately didn't change a bit. I mean, her prose is definitely not worth it of a Nobel Prize, specially after greatest stylists like Müller and MVLL won it recently.

Early October seems to be the only moment of the year when her name is present. Don't know many people who have actually read her and no one who seems to have a very solid opinion on her based in the readings of most of her works.
In this month I'm trying to read some Arab authors and decided to start with her. The book I'm currently reading is called Far from Medina and it's a type of collage where Djebar collects the names of many women who were around in the first years after the Hijra and build up the story for each one of them, a story that most of the times was neglected by the official history. It sure sounds as a very interesting task, to vindicate the name of women through early Islam history.

2/3 in the book, I'm advancing feeling I'm enjoying this book more as a reference title, learning a lot about the first years after the Hijra, and not thinking she is a great story teller or writer. Of course she did a great job researching everything she could about the lives of all of these women and filling the spaces with fiction to be able to complete history, but her prose doesn't fully engage the reader and it feels chopped and uneven at times. This feels more like a chronicle and when she tries to intervene to make some annotations or thoughts about the women, she fells short and comments something that it's easily evident and that doesn't bring anything else to the book. Another disadvantage is that it's sometimes hard to follow all the Arab names and keep getting who is related with who (specially when men had so many wives). This is of course my fault, not blaming it to the author, but it's something that doesn't help to add up to the equation.

I've been going really slow with this book as I've been reading it for more than a week now. Can't blame the book entirely as this is not my best time of the year for reading and haven't been totally healthy these days. Hope to finish it this week and have a better overall picture of the book and the author.