Peter Clark (5) (1939–)

I was drawn to this book because it's described as "a bilingual reader". I've taken a few years of Arabic, so I thought that working through some of the stories here might be a good way to get in some practice. It's a lot faster to get through a text in an unfamiliar language if there's a translation provided.

Unfortunately, I only had to open this book to realize that it wasn't what I wanted. The key point for me is that the translations are not on facing pages. Instead of holding the book normally and glancing back and forth between the two versions, it was necessary to keep my place on two different pages and flip constantly back and forth between them. This was extremely annoying and I don't think I even made it through the introduction before giving up. If you're looking for a convenient dual-language book for the purposes of language practice, this isn't the one for you.

So I was left just reading the English translations of the stories, and even before I had managed to get started I heard from other reviewers that they were terrible. This had the benefit of reducing my expectations to almost nothing, so that I couldn't be disappointed. I only liked one of the eight stories, but that already meant that the book had exceeded my expectations!

That one story, by Mohammed Salah al-Azab, stood out because it was clearly written, with a straightforward narrative. Most of the stories jumped around from place to place or character to character with few threads of continuity for the reader to grasp onto. The writing tended to be vague, possibly in an attempt to sound poetic. Sometimes I just wasn't sure what was going on. There were a few stories that make me curious enough to do further research, but I would have preferred it if the stories themselves had done more to illuminate the times and places described.

My response to this collection probably isn't surprising, given the circumstances in which it was created. It's essentially the product of a writers' workshop that brought together eight promising young authors for a period of ten days. They worked intensively on their stories during that time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stories were ready for publication immediately afterward. It also doesn't help that several of the stories were actually intended as chapters of books, but were provided without any context.

I appreciate the thought behind this collection, but the product itself is a disappointment.… (plus d'informations)

I can truly say that I did not enjoy reading these stories. Sadly, I was more than ready to enjoy them. I felt that they were, for the most part, unengaging as they had been written as part of a writing seminar and not for the public. Several of the stories were a single chapter of larger works to which I had no access. I had to read those in no context whatsoever.

Nevertheless, my feeling about the individual stories was that they had been "overwritten" to such a degree that not one of them engaged me enough to think that I might like to read more by its individual author. It took me more than a year to finish these eight stories. I did so only because I felt I must in order to give my thoughts about this book as a whole, but certainly not because I wanted to.

If this book had any redeeming features at all, it was that it was a bilingual edition. Sadly, I do not know how to read Arabic, but I do plan to pass this book along to a neighbor who is a native Arabic speaker.… (plus d'informations)

I had won Emerging Arab Voices in the March draw of Early Reviewers and I was quite excited and oh so impatient to read the stories. As an Armenian growing up in war torn Lebanon in the '80s, this bilingual collection of short stories from the Middle East and the Gulf caught my attention immensely. When the book was finally mailed to me in July, I wanted to devour the stories - in English since my Arabic is quite rusty - but like my fellow reviewers have alluded to already, I just couldn't maintain the anticipation and delight. The stories fell flat and encumbered too heavily across the page, some had promise like Letter to Yann Andrea which superimposes the reality of the Lebanese civil war with the narrator's dreamy hallucinations of Margarite Duras' The Lover. Though this is a fine effort, I cannot but feel that a more thorough and stringent editing process would have served everyone better. There is great promise, but the delivery falls flat.… (plus d'informations)