The Story of Zahra: A Novel

Deep, sensitiv and breathtaking. Eminent fiktion writer bring so close to the reader touching every nerve.

This book really holds my interest!

This book is the story of a young woman, Zahra, negotiating life in Beirut before and during the Lebanese Civil war. She experiences domestic abuse and a dubious affair with a man at her job. After two abortions she leaves Lebanon to live with her uncle in Africa and gets married to another Lebanese expatriate. Zahra and her husband divorce and she moves back home to Beirut to recover from psychotic episodes and the electric current therapy she receives as treatment. When she returns to Beirut, the civil war is in full swing and Zahra experiences both the personal danger and the social freedom given to her by the war. Al-Shayk also addresses the struggle for Lebanese men in their society and in war, showing that patriarchy and oppression in societies affect everyone. Unfortunately, as is the case with Zahra, these men react to these problems by hurting the women around them.The book is not all dismal, though, Zahra finds empowerment in her life and learns ways to negotiate the world around her. This book is beautifully written, interweaving timelines, and multiple narrative voices, and complex symbolism. Reading this book was an incredibly fulfilling experience for me because of how richly Al-Shayk weaves her narrative.Al-Shayk effectively explores the ways in which women and their bodies have to negotiate patriarchal societies and war. Zahra's story shows the reader the ways that people's needs and expectations, as individuals as well as nations, affect the psyches of women and young people. Al-Shayk shows just how burdensome other people's desire for connection and identity can be. The symbolism she uses creates a rhythm throughout the novel which pushes her reader onward.This book is an important look into the hearts of people before and during war time. It makes the reader think hard about what we do and how we hurt others in our struggle for wholeness (whether we try to find it in love, family, revolution, education, or war). If you are looking for a history of the Lebanese civil war or life before the war, this is not it.Zahra is the story of one young girl, who could be many young girls, but one girl nonetheless. Much of why Zahra turns out the way she does is because other people have projected so much onto her. People expect her to be perfect for her family, for her country, for her religion, for the men who want her. She becomes so ingrained in the identities they give her that the Zahra underneath crumbles into despair and madness.This book gives voice to a person previously silenced. Al-Shayk gives Zahra and girls like her the power to reveal and explore who they are in the context of the world around them instead of being engulfed by the world.

Very disturbing especially that it is not a true story, yet full of disgusting and sick themes. It gives wrong and misleading impression about real life in Lebanon and the Middle East. Totally awful!

One of the best books I've read in the past few years. I couldn't put it down. Captivating story, beautifully written.

The concept of "woman as nation" in the Arabic world has been an ever-evolving consistency. It has commonalities that transcend nations, religions, and time periods--and it has peculiarities and specifics depending on the nation, the culture, the religion, the time period, the place, the family, and the individual. Hanan al-Shaykh's protagonist Zahra puts all of this on display. Zahra is Lebanon. She is Lebanon during the civil war. That is how all of the men--perhaps with the exception of her grandfather-- see her. And that is how she sees herself. Her mind takes on this role, as does her body. In the first half of the novel, Zahra fights against this pressure. She goes inward. Al-Shaykh's writing forces us the readers to feel Zahra's anxieties. This is by no means a light reading. Do not read this to learn a few things about Arabic or Lebanese lifestyles, issues, masculinities and femininities, sexualities, or wars. You will learn, but you will do so primarily through the emotions al-Shaykh's writing demands. By no means is the novel a drab, drawn-out sob story. The chain of events sounds better than anything Hollywood creates these days: Zahra begins in her home country of Lebanon as a young girl whose mother drags her to extra-marital sexual encounters; naturally, Zahra engages in her own secretive pre-marital sex. She then visits her uncle in North Africa, and al-Shaykh gives us his narrative viewpoint along the way, as well as the viewpoint of one of Zahra's lovers, and both of these narratives provide us with layers of material on masculinity to dig our minds into. Within all of this, al-Shaykh warps time. She forces us to question the idea of narration itself, the reliability of it. At many points throughout the story, Zahra seems like the most anxious human being imaginable--yet her feelings are somehow easily relatable, even to the Westerner, and even to the sheltered Westerner. You will empathize with her, scream at her, and use her as a tool for your own self-reflection.Zahra returns to Lebanon amidst the chaos of the civil war. There is violence. There is a brother addicted to hash, and to his gun, and to his military brothers, and to his conception of time, and to his perception of power, all of which stems from his masculinity. And there is Zahra. The war invigorates her. You feel the life the war gives to her, her sympathy, her pain, her passion, her sense of time, her body. She risks her life, in many ways, to save her people, as she sees it, all in an attempt to explode her mind and body from the oppressive patriarchal systems that created her very image--both her societal, Lebanese image, and the image she projects onto herself. For Zahra, the war places her anxieties in perspective, and al-Shaykh allows us to see how in many ways, Zahra's anxieties symbolically produce the Lebanese civil war. All of this growth in Zahra culminates in her relationship with a rooftop sniper--one of the most intriguing relationships I have encountered in any novel. All of the relationships in this novel will grip you; if you ever thought the political and the personal were inherently separate, al-Shaykh will change your mind. But it is not the relationships or the story's plot which make this a worthy read. Al-Shaykh's writing, her construction of Zahra's mind, her warping of time, her ability to make you feel, will keep you reading. You will think of time and narration differently than you did before. You will think of your body and its relationship to politics, family, and fighting oppression in a new way, whether you are a woman or a man. I highly recommend this book, especially if you enjoy complexity and intricate writing, and have some time to think.

I think my issues of following along in this book stem from the fact that it was translated from another language and it reads as such and seemed to jump around in time without clear delineations. Also, it seemed to have lacked character development. After reading interviews with the author, I can better appreciate now that Zahra's actions demonstrated her free-thinking and bravery for a woman in this setting dealing with probable mental-health issues that we all experience on top of everything else

Not too fast-paced but certainly not too slow-paced and drawn out, this book is vivid and captivating. It explores taboo issues in Lebanon through a rotating first-person narrative, with beautiful imagery appealing to the imagination. A gripping read. I read this in a number of hours...I simply couldn't put it down!

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