Season of Migration to the North

By -

 Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih

Here's my Spin title!  This novel was chosen as "the most important Arab novel of the 20th century."  I....am not entirely sure why, as it didn't blow me away, but it did have a lot of subtle things to say about colonialism.

Our narrator, who is nameless, is a Sudanese man who has spent years studying in Europe.  Now he is back in a newly-independent Sudan, ready to work hard in Khartoum for the advancement of his people.  He visits his home village on the Nile,* where he meets all the people he has known all his life -- an a newcomer, Mustafa Sa'eed, who lives as an ordinary resident of the village with a wife and two sons.

Sa'eed, however, is not an ordinary villager at all, and tells our narrator (who has heard of him) his story.  He lived in London for many years, and was a prominent economist.  He was semi-adopted by an English couple, married an Englishwoman, and had endless clandestine affairs with more English women.  And he eventually murdered a woman, was put on very public trial, and went home to Sudan.  After confiding all this, Sa'eed disappears in a flood and leaves our narrator entrusted with the care of his wife and sons.  

Our narrator lives in Khartoum with his wife and child, but visits home and carefully pays for the boys' educations.  Hosna, Sa'eed's wife, is the subject of gossip because she does not want to remarry, although she has suitors.  And how will it all end?

The novel spends a lot of time meditating on opposites that are not always as opposite as they seem.  Europe and Africa, men and women, tradition and modernity...but if Europe is 'the land of hanky-panky,' what of the old man who calls it that, who has spent his life pursuing innumerable women?  (And speaking of women, none of them seem to get much of a deal, no matter where they're from.)

It was fine, but I don't think it was really my kind of novel.

*I kept looking at Google Maps, trying to figure out where this home village was.  Every time I thought I had it pinned, there would be a little more information which proved me wrong, and I'd have to go look again.   I think I did eventually get it right!


Comments

  1. reeseMay 31, 2021 at 9:48 AM

    It sounds like I liked it a bit better than you, but yes, the most important Arab novel of the 20th Century does seem like a stretch.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more