I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.62 (757 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0747561311 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-03-02 |
| Language | : | Arabic |
DESCRIPTION:
At once clever and evocative, I SWEEP THE SUN OFF ROOFTOPS is a collection of great insight, wit and poignancy, placing Hanan al-Shaykh among the foremost cosmopolitan writers of our time.. A woman feigns insanity to escape from an empty marriage, only to have her plans backfire; a young Danish missionary finds herself slowly and inexorably drawn into the world of the Yemeni village where she has been stationed; and a woman's lighthearted attempt to contact the world of the dead turns serious when she encounters the spirit of her late husband. At the intersection of tradition and modernity, East and West, childhood and adulthood, Hanan al-Shaykh's characters find their way through the shifting and ambiguous power relationships that shape the landscape of the modern Arab world
Asked her age, Fatin replies, "The age of madness." This combination of sangfroid and desperation, truly mad situations and sane protagonists, sets the tone for al-Shaykh's (Beirut Blues) fiction. These short narratives represent the faith of a dedicated rationalist whose favorite subject is the stubbornness of unreason in matters of the heart and hearth. . Several stories, notably "The Marriage Fair," spin plots from the ostracism an unmarried woman may endure in the Arab world. The poignant "I Don't Want to Grow Up" concerns a young girl and her brother living in an oil-company
Patchy, ranging from average to excellent AA This is a fascinating collection of short stories. Nearly all are very readable without once checking how many pages you have left.The first few stories depend primarily on the plot, and to an extent the element of surprise or shock. Don't read reviews that take you step by step into. Robust, diverse look at lives of women in Arab countries Although the backgrounds of the women in these stories are diverse, from an educated Europeanized Arab woman, modern and not-so-modern women living in Arab countries, and a European refugee into Arab lands, they share similar concerns: alientation, fear of being consumed by marriage . I'm just a third of the way into the book I'm just a third of the way into the book. I find the plot and the point of view of the characters so well done. Would that I spoke Arabic so that I could read in the original. Inshallah