There's sadness, and little magic, in this tale of Arabian nights

February 06, 2008|Book Review, Saul Austerlitz

Wolves of the Crescent Moon
By Yousef Al-Mohaimeed
Penguin, 179 pp., paperback, $14

Of all the styles in the profusion of marketplace wares available to the contemporary novelist, perhaps none is so capable of transcending national boundaries as magical realism. Born in Latin America, magical realism has spread beyond its birthplace and across the world, from Poland to India. Birds do it, bees do it, so why not Saudis? After all, what better place than one of the most repressive countries on earth for a literary style that seeks to express truths incapable of being otherwise formulated? In "Wolves of the Crescent Moon," Saudi novelist Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's first novel to be published outside the Middle East, he fiddles with the knobs and presses all the buttons on his new toy, but seems unable to steer the splendid vehicle once driven by Borges and Garc&#xED;a M&#xE1;rquez.

To begin with, Al-Mohaimeed's magical realism is of a tempered, partial sort, seeking to invest contemporary Saudi society with a patina of age and inscrutability, like something out of the "Thousand and One Nights." "Wolves" intertwines the fates of three Saudi outcasts, each denied a full life by virtue of deformity. As in a fairy tale, each of the three men is missing an essential body part, defined by its absence. For Turad, who has escaped his ministry job, where he was subject to the slings and arrows of his coworkers, it is his ear; for his friend Tawfiq, it is his manhood, taken from him after being kidnapped and sold into slavery; and for the child whose fate is told in the file Turad reads while whiling away his time waiting for a bus to depart the hellish city where he has been living, it is an eye.

This trio is brought together by fate, and by the all-seeing eye of the novelist, who finds in them a potent symbol of Saudi Arabia's moral failings. A society enamored with its comfort finds little energy to assist the downtrodden. Turad seeks to escape the barren promises of youth, when he ran free as a Bedouin highwayman, and fate's wicked sense of humor - something he is reminded of every time he looks in the mirror. The snatching of his ear after a highway robbery gone terribly wrong has become, for Turad, a representation of all the blows he has been forced to endure. "How on earth could someone who possessed such a wonderfully perfect ear be sad?" Turad asks wonderingly of a melancholy Turkish sandwich vendor he glimpses.