The Other Place (Modern Arabic Writing) Review

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The Other Place (Modern Arabic Writing) ReviewA difficult novel to translate, and certainly not easy to read or decipher in English, despite Farouk Abdel Wahab's admirable rendering. There's something about Abdel Meguid's style (slow, structurally repetitive, even monotonous at times) that defies translation. In addition, the novel steadfastly refuses to accommodate the reader in any way--the narrator has his own priorities. His tunnel-vision perspective feels incredibly confining at times.
But, of course, that's the point. The novel dwells on the alienation felt by an educated Egyptian trapped in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia, doing meaningless work for a corrupt company servicing an American airbase. A cosmopolitan Alexandrian, the narrator, Ismail, finds Saudi Arabia's bizarre mix of tribalism, consumerism, and puritanical religiosity every bit as unfamiliar and repugnant as any Westerner would. Moreover, his narrative records the ways in which his fellow guest workers are gradually warped and twisted by their exposure to Saudi society and norms. But Ismail is trapped in Saudi Arabia by economic necessity, and by the end of the novel, the reader feels trapped too.
Certainly an important novel for Western readers trying to understand the contradictions of the modern Arab world. In many ways, Ismail is more comfortable with American culture than Saudi--he grows up watching American movies, his fluency in English secures him his job in the kingdom, and he feels a kinship with an American woman he meets there. But he also witnesses the American military presence steadily increasing, he is drawn into an American engineer's scheme to defraud the Saudi company, he can't help but see how American economic and military interests go hand-in-hand with Saudi corruption and despotism. In the final tally, no country is spared its share of blame: not the U.S. (the puppet-master that dominates behind the scenes), not Saudi Arabia (the anachronistic, fundamentalist kingdom propped up by oil wealth), not even Egypt (which has become parasitic, dependent on remittances from its guest workers in the Gulf).The Other Place (Modern Arabic Writing) OverviewThe Other Place portrays the shallowness of the petrodollar culture and the price one pays for quick money. The protagonist of this prize-winning novel, an educated middle-class Egyptian from Alexandria, describes his experiences and those of migrant workers and professionals in one of the Gulf states, and their interaction with the oil-rich country's local elite and with agents of Western businesses. The book pictures rather than states the desolation brought about when market values take over and the ravages that such an order causes to all who partake in it. Ibrahim Abdel Meguid succeeds in representing imaginatively the important phenomenon of migration and the barren landscape of the petrodollar culture, and at the same time penetrates the rationalizing mechanisms of the migrants and their psychological make-up.

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