My Bookshelf is almost exclusively British and American authors this year – I’ve been hungry for some different perspectives. So, after a bit of research into Middle Eastern writers, I picked up Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, from Oman.
Oman is one of my favourite places on Earth and this book was 2019’s winner of the Man Booker International Prize. Good start…
But this will be a short commentary, because I didn’t finish it – an act I’ve been feeling increasingly OK about since reading Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell.
It’s not you, it’s me
Two things made Celestial Bodies difficult for me.
Firstly, my Arabic is terrible – nowhere near good enough to read a full book – so I got Marilyn Booth’s English translation. Translated works always feel a bit… wonky – you’re basically reading somebody else’s interpretation of the story. Booth also made the stylistic choice to remove speech marks in the English translation, which made the print version confusing for my meagre brain to properly follow.
Secondly, Alharthi’s style is very conversational. I spend a lot of time with Arabs, and I can totally see this kind of story being said verbatim (in Arabic) in the family home. It reads just like it would be spoken aloud. It’s this stylistic choice that I suspect contributed to Celestial Bodies winning the Booker prize. But, the combination of colloquial language and the general lack of structure means, again, my tiny, narrow-minded brain couldn’t stay focused.
The audiobook
I could never recommend a book I didn’t finish, but I would say this: Celestial bodies is one of those books that I think gets enhanced by the audiobook. I know audiobooks can often taint your own interpretation of a story, but you’re reading a translation anyway, here, so that’s unavoidable.
In this case, Laurence Bouvard’s audiobook delivery helped me get through the difficult, colloquial language more than once. The prosody and voice changes helped me understand when somebody is talking vs thinking vs neither – something I desperately needed in a book without speech marks.
The audiobook didn’t help me get through to the end, but it sustained my focus long enough to have something to say about it. If you’re going to give Celestial Bodies a go, maybe bear that in mind.
But overall, this one wasn’t for me, and I’m OK with that. I actually took a good learning from the experience. As somebody who enjoys reading, Celestial Bodies helped me realise how tuned in my brain is to a certain structure and format, and that’s something I’ll need to unlearn if I’m going to enjoy new experiences.
