Celestial bodies

First Title Value for Searching:

Celestial bodies

Personal Author:

Ḥārithī, Jūkhah

Physical Description:

xi, 243 pages ; 21 cm.

General Note:

Translation of: Sayyidāt al-qamar.

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Domestic fiction.

Summary:

"In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool ... against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present"--Publisher marketing.

Subject Term:

Sisters -- Fiction.

Families -- Fiction.

Additional Credits:

Booth, Marilyn

Publication Info:

New York : Catapult, 2019.

Subject:

Sisters -- Fiction.

Families -- Fiction.

Oman -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction.

Oman -- Social conditions -- 20th century -- Fiction.

Historical fiction.

Domestic fiction.

Family

Families -- Social aspects

Families -- Social conditions

Family life

Family relationships

Family structure

Relationships, Family

Structure, Family

Sultanate of Oman

ʻUmān (Sultanate)

Salṭanat ʻUmān

Muscat

Mascate

عمان

سلطنة عُمان

オマーン

オーマン

SAILS ISBN:

9781948226943

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
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Searching... Dartmouth - Southworth	GDRD FIC ALH	GOOD READS	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent	FIC ALHARTHI JOKHA CELESTIAL	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	FIC ALHARTHI	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Mansfield Public Library	FIC ALHARTHI	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library	FIC ALHARTHI	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Norfolk Public Library	F ALHARTHI, J. CEL	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Norton Public Library	FIC ALH	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Rehoboth - Blanding Free PL	FIC ALHARTHI, J.	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Taunton Public Library	ALHARTHI, JOKHA	1ST FLOOR STACKS	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Wareham Free Library	F ALH	FICTION	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is "an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets" ( The New York Times Book Review ).

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.

These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.

The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Alharthi's ambitious, intense novel--her first to be translated into English and winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize--examines the radical changes in Oman over the past century from the perspectives of the members of several interconnected families. With exhilarating results, Alharthi throws the reader into the midst of a tangled family drama in which unrequited love, murder, suicide, and adultery seem the rule rather than the exception. She moves between the stream-of-consciousness musings and memories of businessman Abdallah as he flies to Frankfurt and vignettes from the lives of those in his family, the slaves who raised him under the rule of his abusive father, and the members of the large family he married into. These include, among many others, a wife who apparently loves her sewing machine more than him, her two conflicted sisters, a father-in-law conducting a torrid love affair with a Bedouin woman, and an unhappy physician daughter. The scenes establish the remarkable contrasts among the generations, whose members are united primarily by a fierce search for romantic love. The older generation has grown up with strict rules and traditions, the younger generation eats at McDonald's and wears Armani jeans, and the members of the middle generation, particularly the women, are caught between expectations and aspirations. The novel rewards readers willing to assemble the pieces of Alharthi's puzzle into a whole, and is all the more satisfying for the complexity of its tale. (Oct.)

Booklist Review

Altharthi makes literary history as the first female Omani author to be translated into English and as author of the first novel written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. She shares that extraordinary success with translator and Oxford professor Booth, who reveals, I like very much that Jokha does not write for readers who do not know Oman: she does not try to explain things. Indeed, Althari's unique structure demands vigilant participation as it is more jigsaw puzzle than linear narrative, and the skeletal family tree provided proves useful. Set against Oman's rapid shifts during the twentieth century from slave-owning nation to oil-rich international presence are three generations of an upper-class Omani family: Salima, who survived a difficult childhood, and her husband, Azzan, who can't resist the pull of the moon (goddess); their three (surviving) children dutiful Mayya, book-obsessed Asma, and waiting Khawla and Mayya and her husband Abdallah's children: independent London, irresponsible Salim, and Muhammad, who has special needs. Most memorable perhaps is enslaved Zarifa, excluded from the family tree yet integrally bonded. Omnisciently narrated chapters are interrupted, with an obvious font-shift, by businessman Abdallah's first-person, mostly in-flight monologues. Pieced together, a robust village emerges, of alliances and betrayals, survival and murder, surrender and escape. Patient readers will be seductively, magnificently rewarded.--Terry Hong Copyright 2010 Booklist

Guardian Review

The first Omani woman translated in English and winner of the Man Booker International prize reflects on her 'lucky book' Celestial Bodies and Oman's uneasy relationship with its history Jokha Alharthi's second novel, Celestial Bodies , may have its roots in rural Oman - its irrigation canals and high desert nights, its cool back rooms and busy courtyards - but it was born in Edinburgh. Alharthi was studying for a PhD at the university, she had an eight-month-old baby, and she and her husband had had difficulty finding a place to live and so were renting a small flat from week to week. Her stress was compounded by the fact that, although her PhD was in classical Arabic poetry, she was expected "to write fluent English, and to write fluent essays, and I was like, I never did that! I never did that. So I just came back to the flat one night and got the baby to sleep, and just sat there with my laptop thinking about - not exactly Oman, but a different life, and a different language. And because I love my language so much, I felt the need to write in my own language. So I just started writing." She had already published one book, Dream , "a love story, kind of", and for a long time had been thinking of another, with snatches of ideas and characters and places. "It wasn't all clear in my mind, but I kept thinking about them, and also about the traditional ways, which are rapidly vanishing in Oman." But she "hadn't started yet, until that moment, when it was a really difficult moment for me. So it was like going back to my mother's womb again, to feel warm, and secure. The novel - I don't want to say it saved me, it's a big word - but kind of." Just over a decade later, in May this year, Celestial Bodies won the International Man Booker prize. Alharthi beat finalists including last year's winner, Polish bestseller Olga Tokarczuk, and joined previous winners including Korean author Han Kang ; it was the first book from any Arab country to win. We meet the morning after, in a bright many windowed room on the top floor of the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects in central London. Alharthi sits next to her translator, Marilyn Booth, who remembers that the translation, too, began in Edinburgh: Alharthi had not yet finished her PhD when her supervisor retired, and Booth took over (she is now professor in the study of the contemporary Arab world at Oxford). "She brought me her novel. And I just really loved it, and wanted to translate it." Booth was so keen that she completed the translation before they had a publisher lined up, "which is not always a good idea", she says. Celestial Bodies is the first novel by an Omani woman ever translated into English, and the prize, £50,000, is split equally between them. The book tells the story of three generations of a family from a village called al-Awafi. There are three daughters, their father and mother, their children and their husbands' parents. The birth of a child called London (the capital of a foreign city, a Christian city no less, whisper appalled neighbours and relatives) is the hub from which all sorts of spokes radiate, then spin with speed and impressive control: within six pages we have been presented with an animating tragedy, and a memorable account of a woman giving birth, "standing as tall as a grand mare". Alharthi's characters are pleasingly contradictory and fallible, irreducibly individual. A doting new father brings cases of baby food for an unweaned infant, an act that is "unnecessary and slightly disgraceful"; a former slave locked away as "mad" by an embarrassed daughter calls out, whenever she hears a noise in the courtyard, "I'm here, I'm here, I'm Masoud and I'm in here". To say that Celestial Bodies is a multi-generational saga simplifies what Alharthi has done, which is also to tell the story of how Oman has changed over the last century, from a traditional rural patriarchal society where Islam was complemented by Zar spirit worship, and which was among the last countries in the world to abolish slavery (in 1970), to an urban, oil-rich Gulf state. And she has done so in a form that shifts from voice to voice, viewpoint to viewpoint, decade to decade, sometimes within a single paragraph or sentence. It is no surprise that, as well as 10th-century Arabic poets such as Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn Husayn al-Mutanabbi, and the more recent Mahmoud Darwish, Alharthi counts among her favourite writers Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata and Anton Chekhov, and that the first piece of fiction she published, at 18, was a short story. She has since written three collections of stories, which have been translated into five languages, as well as children's books. What attracts us to literature is not that it's familiar to us, it's that we can relate to the universal value in it Celestial Bodies was first published in 2010, and it has been a "lucky book" says Alharthi, who is 40 and is in person as direct and unshowily confident as her prose. "I think books are like people, some have lucky lives, and this book got a lot of attention." The critics loved it, a master's thesis has been written about it, and last year a critical study. She does almost all of our interview in fluent and authoritative English, but now she turns to Booth: "I want to say this in Arabic if you don't mind, to put this in precise words - I don't want to get it wrong." "Some people feel that touching upon a sensitive topic like slavery is stirring up the past in a way that isn't appropriate now," says Booth after a moment, "because Oman is another country, and slavery is something of the past. But she's saying that that's what literature does - it's to think about the past, to think about history." Alharthi grew up immersed in history and especially in Arabic literature. An uncle was a poet and travel writer; her grandfather was a poet who "when I was a child, in every situation would recite verses from Al-Mutanabbi to justify his position" - just as one of her characters, Azzan, does, to his beautiful Bedouin lover, who finds it increasingly alienating and irritating. Booth, who studies modern Arabic language and culture, and whose Arabic is in fact Egyptian Arabic (she has never been to Oman, and had to ask Alharthi to send her photos of typically Omani things she had not come across before), found these poems, with their double meanings and referents that stretch a thousand years into the past, by far the most challenging sections to translate. "She hated me for it!" laughs Alharthi. When Alharthi's mother was growing up in the village of Al-Qabil there was no schooling beyond basic reading and writing for anyone, male or female, unless you went to the capital, Muscat, so she taught herself poetry, reciting it as she went about her daily chores. By the time Alharthi and her siblings were born things had changed, though there still wasn't a kindergarten, so her father, who was the local governor, forged their birth certificates so they could start school early. "He thought we were too smart to sit at home." Alharthi, who now lives in Muscat and teaches classical Arabic literature at Sultan Qaboos University, is one of eight sisters and four brothers. And where do you come? "OK, let me see," she counts them off on her fingers, under her breath. "I think I'm number four." The others have gone on to work in a wide range of jobs, from oil company employee to a brother in the foreign ministry and a sister who runs a communications company. Alharthi herself is married to a civil engineer and they have three children. One of the many striking things in Celestial Bodies is the way Alharthi refuses easy assumptions about power, and people's roles in the world. There is a moment, for instance, where she focuses on the childhood of one of the main characters, a matriarch, Salima, who started off as a poor female relative. Then she was not allowed to eat or be clothed as an equal with rich relatives, but at the same time she was not allowed to mix with the servants, to bathe like them, or dance as the slave girls do. Adult Salima cannot abide Zarifa, a former slave from her son-in-law's family, who runs the household, has the love and devotion of her supposed master and his son, and has the power in all but name. "For me it's always complicated," says Alharthi, "the relationships are complicated, and people claim their authority wherever they are. A lot of women are really strong, even though they are slaves actually, but they still can be strong." Each chapter is named after the person from whose point of view it is told, but it is interesting that the only one who speaks in the first person is a man, Abdallah - again supposedly the inheritor of riches, a businessman, the head of his household, the man in a man's world who ought to have all the power. "But Abdallah doesn't!" says Alharthi, partly because of old hurts, partly because of the intensity with which he loves someone who does not love him back, partly because his world is changing so fast, partly because of the strength of the women who surround him. "You'd assume that the first-person character is the one who's got some authority," adds Booth, "and he's really the most vulnerable." How does Alharthi feel about the much wider readership this prize might give her? She is silent for a while. "I don't know, it is strange ... yanni " - she turns again to Booth; English phrases pop like bubbles out of urgent Arabic. "It's wonderful to have a bigger readership," says Booth at last, "and to have readers everywhere, but it's also a slightly strange feeling, because these are characters that came out of her mind. They developed within her own thinking and they're going out into the world and other people are reading about them and thinking about them, and it's slightly hard to let go." Or, as Salima says about her daughters: "We raise them so that strangers can take them away." There is the further point of culture, says Alharthi, which is that "when it was published in Arabic, the Arabic audience in general and the Omani audience in particular can easily relate to the novel" - and non-Arabs cannot really be expected to feel the same sense of recognition. "But I still think that what attracts us to literature is not that it's familiar to us, it's that we can relate to the universal value in it. Even if it has a very strong mahaliya " - "localness", supplies Booth - "still I hope that international readers can relate to the universal values in it."

Kirkus Review

Omani author Alharthi's novel, the first by a woman from that country to be translated into English, won the 2019 International Man Booker Prize with its sweeping story of generational and societal change.The book opens with a betrothal in a well-to-do Omani family. Mayya, a serious girl who excels at sewing, obediently marries the son of Merchant Sulayman although she's secretly in love with a young student just returned from England. Later she surprises everyone by naming her firstborn daughter London. The story alternates between third-person chapters and ones narrated by Mayya's husband, Abdallah, a businessman whose childhood was marred by his father's cruelty and mother's mysterious death. Through the complex, interwoven histories of the two principal families and their households and their town of al-Awafi, we witness Oman's shift from a slave-owning, rural, deeply patriarchal society to one in which a girl with the unlikely name of London can become a doctor, marry for love, and obtain a divorce. The great strength of the novel lies in the ways this change is shown not as a steady progression from old to new but as a far more complicated series of small-scale transitions. Abdallah was largely raised by his father's slave Zarifa, whose mother gave birth to her on the day slavery was supposedly abolished at the 1926 Slavery Convention in Geneva. Zarifa is sold as a teenager by Shaykh Said to Merchant Sulayman and later married off to a slave kidnapped from Africa who screams "from the depths of his sleep, We are free people, free!" Both her husband and son leave Oman, and although Zarifa eventually follows, her heart remains in al-Awafi. The narrative jumps among a large and clamorous cast of characters as well as back and forth in time, a technique that reinforces the sense of past and present overlapping. In an image that captures the tension between old and new, a family uses its satellite dish as a trough for livestock. Salima, Mayya's mother, herself a kidnapped teenage bride, thinks sadly as she prepares the next of her daughters for her traditional arranged marriage, "We raise them so that strangers can take them away." But the daughter in question, Mayya's sister Asma, welcomes wedlock, because "marriage was her identity document, her passport to a world wider than home." A richly layered, ambitious work that teems with human struggles and contradictions, providing fascinating insight into Omani history and society. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

The first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Alharthi's eloquent tale garnered the first Man Booker International Prize for a book originally written in Arabic. Marilyn Booth shares the prize for her translation, and Laurence Bouvard's expressive narration accentuates the lyricism of the text, infused throughout with poetry and proverbs. Amid rapid societal change--slavery in Oman was abolished in 1970--a privileged Omani family seeks brides for three daughters: Mayya, despairing of true love, accepts her groom resignedly; Asma marries dutifully, hoping for fulfillment through motherhood; Khawlah scorns a multitude of proposals to wed her unpromising choice. Following the brides' fortunes but also revisiting several past generations, Alharthi acknowledges some burdensome history and gives voices, narrated convincingly by Bouvard, to many among the forgotten, enslaved, and downtrodden. The nonlinear narrative structure, flickering backward and forward in time, both challenges and rewards readers, as alternating points of view--an omniscient narrator and Mayya's husband Abdallah, literally scarred by his past--contemplate moments of joy and illumination, mysterious deaths, lost dreams, acts of brutality, adherence to customs now under scrutiny. VERDICT Given its literary significance, innovative writing, and cultural insights, this is a highly recommended purchase.--Linda Sappenfield, Round Rock P.L., TX

Excerpts

Mayya, forever immersed in her Singer sewing machine, seemed lost to the outside world. Then Mayya lost herself to love: a silent passion, but it sent tremors surging through her slight form, night after night, cresting in waves of tears and sighs. These were moments when she truly believed she would not survive the awful force of her longing to see him. Her body prostrate, ready for the dawn prayers, she made a whispered oath. By the greatness of God -- I want nothing, O Lord, just to see him. I solemnly promise you, Lord, I don't even want him to look my way . . . I just want to see him. That's all I want. Her mother hadn't given the matter of love any particular thought, since it never would have occurred to her that pale Mayya, so silent and still, would think about anything in this mundane world beyond her threads and the selvages of her fabrics, or that she would hear anything other than the clatter of her sewing machine. Mayya seemed to hardly shift position throughout the day, or even halfway into the night, her form perched quietly on the narrow, straight-backed wood chair in front of the black sewing machine with the image of a butterfly on its side. She barely even lifted her head, unless she needed to look as she groped for her scissors or fished another spool of thread out of the plastic sewing basket which always sat in her small wood utility chest. But Mayya heard everything in the world there was to hear. She noticed the brilliant hues life could have, however motionless her body might be. Her mother was grateful that Mayya's appetite was so meagre (even if, now and then, she felt vestiges of guilt). She hoped fervently, though she would never have put her hope into words, that one of these days someone would come along who respected Mayya's talents as a seamstress as much as he might appreciate her abstemious ways. The someone she envisioned would give Mayya a fine wedding procession after which he would take her home with all due ceremony and regard. That someone arrived. As usual Mayya was seated on that narrow chair, bent over the sewing machine at the far end of the long sitting room that opened onto the compound's private courtyard. Her mother walked over to her, beaming. She pressed her hand gently into her daughter's shoulder. Mayya, my dear! The son of Merchant Sulayman has asked for your hand. Spasms shot through Mayya's body. Her mother's hand suddenly felt unbearably heavy on her shoulder and her throat went dry. She couldn't stop imagining her sewing thread winding itself around her neck like a hangman's noose. Her mother smiled. I thought you were too old by now to put on such a girlish show! You needn't act so bashful, Mayya. And that was that. The subject was closed and no one raised it again. Mayya's mother busied herself assembling the wedding clothes, concocting just the right blends of incense, having all the large seat-cushions reupholstered, and getting word out to the entire family. Mayya's sisters kept their views to themselves and her father left the matter in her mother's hands. After all, these were her girls and marriage was women's business. Excerpted from Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.