Wolves of the Crescent Moon

Description

“The first great Saudi novel.” —The New York Sun
 
Banned in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, this provocative, fast-paced debut novel confirms what The Washington Post reported about its award-winning author: “Yousef Al-Mohaimeed is taking on some of the most divisive subjects in the Arab world . . . in a lush style that evokes Gabriel García Márquez.” 

In a Riyadh bus station, a man comes across a file containing official reports about an abandoned baby. As he pieces together the shattered life documented within, a larger picture emerges of three outsiders—a Bedouin, an orphan, and a eunuch-linked by fate and trying to make lives for themselves in a predatory city.

Unfolding with the intensity of a fever dream over the course of one night, Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a novel of astonishing power and great moral consequence about a deeply traditional society confronting the modern world. “[A] clear and gripping picture of a Saudi society terribly divided between old and new, rich and poor.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“A dramatic rendering of culture clash . . . Sophisticated . . . Will remind you of Camus’s Stranger.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Wolves of the Crescent Moon has put Saudi Arabia at the forefront of Arab literature. . . . Saudi commentators have warned of an emerging ‘industry’ of writing about Saudi Arabia that is in danger of falling into cliches of representation for the sake of a quick buck. . . . Not so Mohaimeed, whose Wolves of the Crescent Moon eschews populist material such as young people’s sex lives to delve into the complex Saudi social fabric with striking narrative artistry.” —Reuters
 
“Haunting . . . Employing a nonlinear narrative that shimmers with a certain dreamlike quality, Wolves interweaves the lives of [three] characters in complex and unexpected ways. It’s easy to imagine this tale being narrated by an ancient storyteller to a group of rapt listeners gathered around a blazing desert fire. Al-Mohaimeed’s prose is taut and yet lyrical, evoking the harsh beauty of the desert landscape in spare sentences rich with vivid imagery. While his name will be unfamiliar to most American readers, his talent deserves serious attention.” —BookPage
 
“Swirls with a richness of language and imagery . . . Deserving of a large audience.” —Library Journal
 
“A very rich work . . . Intense . . . Vivid . . . Powerful . . . Gripping . . . Artfully constructed . . . A riveting story . . . Wolves of the Crescent Moon describes a part of Saudi society that is barely noticed. . . . Al-Mohaimeed’s creative approach in weaving together these stories, and the pithiness of some of the scenes, show a talented author at work, yet another indication of a lively, innovative Arabic-fiction scene from which a lot more will surely be heard in the future.” —The Complete Review
 
“This fresh-voiced debut novel . . . beautifully captures the frustrations and resentments of [its] tormented characters.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“A fascinating story of three souls disfigured by life and looking for peace and safety in a merciless world . . . A fine read.” —Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Arabian Jazz and Crescent

“An irresistible novel.” —Nuruddin Farah, author of Links and Knots
 
“Brave and brilliant . . . A novel that sneaks up on you with its power to make you see, hear, and live the complexities of another world.” —Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation 
 
“At last, an authentic voice from Saudi Arabia. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed has written a remarkable, rhythmic, genuine novel, throbbing with sensuality and moral courage, as if it didn’t take place in a society that denies the tick of the heart.” —Hanan al-Shaykh, author of Women of Sand and MyrrhYousef Al-Mohaimeed was born in Riyadh in 1964. He has published several novels and short story collections in Arabic and has had stories published in Lebanon, Egypt, France, Germany, Spain, and Russia. He studied English and photography at Norwich University in England and was recently presented with an award by Diwan al Arab magazine and the Egyptian Journalists Union in recognition of his creative contribution to Arab culture. He lives in Riyadh.
 
Anthony Calderbank is the translator of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Rhadopis of Nubia, Sonallah Ibrahim’s Zaat, and Miral al-Tahawy’s The Tent and Blue Aubergine. He lives in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

INTRODUCTION
Night falls in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A man waits in a bus station, trying and failing to imagine his next destination. As the narrator Turad sits and contemplates his life, his memories begin to unfold, transporting the reader into a series of interlocking tales. There is the story of Tawfiq, a Sudanese slave who was captured and made into a eunuch as a young boy. As he journeys from one continent to another, and then to Saudi Arabia, Tawfiq falls tragically from favored slave status in grand homes and palaces into servitude in a government ministry. There is Nasir Abdulilah, a one-eyed child of unknown parents, a young man whose life appears to Turad both in imagination and reality, and grips Turad during the long night in the bus station. Threaded throughout is the dramatic biography of Turad himself, once a Bedouin hunter, “the son of a tribe,” (p. 7) now unemployed and destitute, and mysteriously missing one ear.

In this company, the reader is invited to “while away the Riyadh night with stories and sad memories” (p.159), not just those of our three main characters, but also of the girl who was impregnated by a silver moon, and the lovers who court in a taxi as it roams the streets of Riyadh.

Wolves of the Crescent Moon is the work of Saudi Arabian writer Yousef Al-Mohaimeed. Though banned in his own country, the novel and its characters have now found voice in the United States. With this novel, Al-Mohaimeed strives to give voice to the invisible people who populate the underclass of Riyadh, people whose hopes and dreams are in conflict with the realities of servitude, immovable societal distinctions, and the daily humiliations that they must endure as they struggle to live with dignity. Turad claims “All I want is a place where people will respect me” (p. 42), but this goal is the most elusive of all. Along with literally losing parts of their bodies, Tawfiq, Nasir, and Turad also face the loss of their families, livelihoods, and futures as they face dehumanization in the alienated, class-strangled rush of modern Riyadh. Yet for each there is hope, and the story brings us to a new dawn with wonder, surprise, and admiration for the determination of its people.

In shifting points of view, with stories layered within stories and an original written style that recalls ancient oral traditions, Al-Mohaimeed evokes a city of contrasts: of melancholy and wealth, tribalism and modernity, of aching beauty placed next to horrific suffering. Taking place in a single night and anchored only in the transitory space of a bus station, the novel roams between desert sands, city streets, and grand palaces, from fast-food stalls to an African village. Part fairy tale, part dream, part bitter nightmare, this portrait of a city and its disenfranchised is a haunting, lyrical, not-to-be missed novel by a major new voice in world literature.

 

ABOUT YOUSEF AL-MOHAIMEED

Yousef Al-Mohaimeed was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1964 and has published several novels and short-story collections in Arabic. Wolves of the Crescent Moon is his first book to be published outside of the Middle East.

 

A CONVERSATION WITH YOUSEF AL-MOHAIMEED
Q. Many Americans are unfamiliar with literature from Saudi Arabia. What can you tell us about writing and literature in your country?

A. I think that literature in Saudi Arabia has matured over the last ten years, in many genres—in poetry, the short story, and the novel. At the same time, however, the novel continues to face two major problems, for it is expected to perform many roles beyond the creative. By this I mean that the Saudi novelist is expected to be at once a sociologist, a psychologist, and an anthropologist. The second problem is that many Saudi novelists are writing with the aim only of exciting the reader, without striving to produce a piece of writing that is also a work of art.

Q. Did you have formal training as a writer? Are there writers, particularly from the Middle East but elsewhere too, that strongly influence you?

A. No, I haven’t had formal training as a writer, because we don’t have these kinds of programs like you do in the Western world. But I have had the opportunity to learn from such great teachers as Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Balzac, and Dostoevsky. They taught me the rules of writing when I was a child. After that I continued with contemporary writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, etc. I think this is brilliant training.

Q. The novel is heavily symbolic and does not on the surface involve any scandalous or overtly political content. Why then was it banned in your home country?

A. It was banned in my home country because we have a strong and severe censorship regime. The Ministry of Culture in Saudi Arabia requires that every manuscript be read before it is published. The censor is likely to stamp every page, and if he suspects any words or phrases of being taboo, he cuts them immediately. He may cut words, phrases, lines, paragraphs, or even whole chapters because he suspects that they are taboo. It differs from one censor to another. Personally I am against the deletion of sentences or phrases from my manuscripts. For this reason I was forced to publish in Beirut.

Q. What were the consequences of the ban for you and your work? Has your approach to writing been changed?

A.No, as I said I published in Beirut, because I can’t change my ideas, but I am optimistic about the future. Together with other members of the new generation of writers in Saudi Arabia, I am trying to expand the freedom of writing. I am hoping to persuade the Ministry of Culture to annul censorship of manuscripts, and to leave the publisher to decide what he wants to publish. If this happens in our country, a huge publishing industry will develop, maybe the biggest in the Middle East.

Q. How did you come up with the idea of writing about a man waiting in a bus station? Do you think of Turad as a typical protagonist?

A. The idea came from a man who lost his ear, and who hid it to prevent people from seeing his shame. According to the customs of the desert, if you commit a shameful act, then a part of your face, such as your nose or your ear, gets cut off. This punishment forces you to leave your tribe and your home in the desert. Then I wrote the man’s life as a flashback.

Q. What can you tell us about the tribal life that Turad left behind? Is it common now for people from the desert to move into the city, for work or other reasons?

A. Yes, people do move from the desert, but far less than, say, in the 1950s and 1960s. Many people move to cities to study or work, but a lot of them find it difficult to adapt to city life. They tend to look for others like themselves, and they gather and settle in certain parts of the city. This leads to a new kind of tribal racial discrimination.

Q. All of your characters are mired in tragedy, yet the novel manages to express hope as well. Why do you choose such dramatic backstories for your characters? And what do you intend by placing them in such reduced circumstances?

A. These characters are from a lower social class. The main problem is that unfortunately many westerners, even some Arabs, think there is no poverty or unemployment in Saudi Arabia, the country with the biggest reserves of petroleum in the world. The truth is we have a high percentage of unemployed and many problems in higher education. I am less concerned about the lives of the upper classes in my society than I am with people who live in difficult circumstances.

Q. How did you go about choosing the structure for this novel? The writing shifts in and out of different points of view, sometimes within the same page and story, much like one would find in the oral tradition. Were you purposefully trying to invoke that type of storytelling?

A. This is a good question. I structured the novel so that different parts of the backstory would become clear to the reader only gradually. And I wanted to give each of the three main characters a different voice. For example, Turad the Bedouin has a way of speaking that is different from that of Tawfiq the Sudanese slave. In addition, Nasir’s diary is written in a different voice. The different ways that each of them uses language create distinct types of storytelling.

Q. The city in the novel is like a character, imbued with a kind of romance. Can you describe your own Riyadh for the reader? What do you like most and least about it?

A. I think a city like Riyadh needs a whole novel about it. It is a crazy city, and very different from Cairo or Beirut. For example, you cannot easily walk around in Riyadh. If you want to get from place to place, you should use your own car, as there is not good public transportation. I feel this creates a sense of isolation in the city. If you are a man, you cannot sit down with a woman in public place, like a coffee shop, so you see only men in coffee shops. It is very much a man’s city. In spite of this, I love it, and missed it when I was abroad. I was born in Riyadh and spent my youth in its streets.

Q. There is an implicit multiculturalism in the novel, as minor characters from India, Bangladesh, Turkey, and elsewhere appear throughout. How is it affecting Riyadh, and Saudi Arabia in general, to have so much immigration? How do these different cultures affect your own?

A. The main problem is that most of the foreigners in Riyadh come alone, without their families. So the effect is limited. I think if there were more women and children here from abroad, the effect would be greater. Many of the workers come to Riyadh to earn money as quickly as possible, and then go back to their countries.

Q. This is your first novel available in the United States. What does that mean for you as a writer, and would you like to see the rest of your work translated?

A. I am very happy for that, but the most important thing is that my novel is published by Penguin. I cannot imagine my name alongside those of the great writers, such as Beckett, Joyce, Dickens, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Zola, Coetzee, Paul Auster, and Nuruddin Farah. Of course, I hope to see the rest of my work translated and published by my wonderful publisher.

Q. What are you working on now? Will we see these characters, or others like them, again in your fiction?

A. I started to write a new novel last year. The characters are different, but they’re also living in a strictly religious society, and they’re dealing with the effects of terrorism. Most Arab writers try to write about terrorism as Westerners understand it; they view the people living among them through Western eyes. It is very difficult to see and talk about the tree without enough knowledge of the seed. I try to understand the religious strictness in Saudi Arabia from the inside. I hope to finish the novel in the middle of next year, and hope to see my second novel, The Bottle, which is already translated, published in English.

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Wolves of the Crescent Moon is set during a single night. Think back to all of the action that takes place in the present tense, and all that takes place as memory or imagination. How does this affect the pace of the novel? Why do you think the author chose to structure the novel in this way?
 

Each of the three main characters is missing a body part. What does this mean for each, both literally and symbolically? What do they lose as a consequence and is there anything that they have gained? What else are they missing in their lives?
 

Make a brief sketch of Turad’s life: from his home life in the desert, to the events that caused him to abandon his “noble and ferocious face,” through various jobs in Riyadh, to his present, indigent state. What propels him from place to place? How do his origins affect his life in the city? What do you think will happen to him next?
 

Count the number of substories that run throughout the novel and look through the list of chapter titles, from “A Body Like Ripe Fruit” to “The Journey of Thorny Dreams.” How does each title add to the overall story or to the particular plot it introduces? Which chapters stand alone, as separate stories? Which tales seem like dreams, memories, or flashbacks? How does this contribute to the mood of the novel?
 

Amm Tawfiq’s story is particularly dramatic and tragic. How does he explain his capture and its consequences to Turad and to himself? Which experiences seem to mark him the most? Describe how he feels about his life in Saudi Arabia, as he expresses it to Turad. What is his attitude toward freedom?
 

Return to the chapter that tells the story of the one-eyed man Nasir Abdulilah’s parents. Is his story real or imagined? Does it matter? What are we meant to learn from it, and from Nasir’s presence in the real-time of the novel? Compare the additional information we get from the diary that Turad discovers, as well as our own brief glimpses of Nasir, and attempt to describe Nasir as he really is.
 

Parentage is complicated for the three main characters. Tawfiq never knew his father, Nasir never knew either of his parents, and Turad’s mother and father, weak mentally and physically, fail to govern either him or his brother. What are the repercussions of these unstable family constructions for the characters and how is this revealed in their various names? In what ways do they compensate for their missing parents? What is permanently lost, individually and culturally, by this loss of familial grounding?
 

The palace and its mistress recur in many stories. How do the two link the various characters and how do those that pass through the palace feel about their time there? Tawfiq claims “Inside the palaces, every creature has a defined role in life” (p. 153). Think over the events that transpire there and the consequences for each of the main characters. What do you think the palace represents in the city, culture, or country?
 

Wolves recur throughout this novel, from the title to the final chapters, in flashback, murals, and in Turad’s musings. What do wolves symbolize, for Turad especially, but also for the other characters and for Saudi Arabia? Are they heroic or vicious, sympathetic or monstrous? How does an understanding of the wolf help us to understand the author’s purpose?
 

Think through the scenes of city life in the novel. What do we know about Riyadh and its citizens by the end? Try to describe the city, or compare it to one you know well. Who are the inhabitants of Al-Mohaimeed’s version of Riyadh and who is missing from his portrait? How do both major and minor characters feel towards the city they live in?
 

Why does Turad make the choice that he does at the end of the novel? Why do you think he is unable to take action at the beginning? Describe the trajectory of his night, and try to explain what has changed for him by daybreak.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.5000 × 5.1000 × 7.8000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143113218
ISBN-10	0143113216
Author	Yousef Al-mohaimeed
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC030000, LCO012000
Subjects	books fiction, saudi arabia, short story anthology, banned books, book lovers gifts, book lover, mystery thriller suspense, fiction books, mysteries and thrillers, gifts for readers, mystery and thriller, realistic fiction books, book gifts, long story short, book lover gifts, short story collections, LCO012000, Literature, suspense thriller books, suspense books, thriller books, suspense fiction, betrayal, literary fiction, thrillers, short stories, book lovers, novels, middle east, suspense, FIC030000, fiction, thriller