Just Like a River (Interlink World Fiction)
The first novel by one of Syria's foremost writers and intellectuals arrives in English 19 years later with its luster little diminished. Khatib employs a filmlike structure to maximize narrative economy ("jump-cutting" between episodes without noting connections) and the significance of incidents. Each chapter focuses on a single character during a single episode of the courtship of the college-educated daughter of a progressive middle-class Damascus family by a university teacher and scholar with radical opinions. She likes him, he likes her, her family likes him, his friends think she's perfect for him--and it doesn't work out. The reasons it doesn't are characteristic of a developing Third World country in which new expectations outstrip entrenched realities, and old habits fail new possibilities. For instance, the girl's father has raised her to be a modern woman, but when she challenges her suitor's diffidence by turning to an English professor, the father throws her out of the house in a burst of angry patriarchy. A sad, extraordinarily instructive work of social-psychological realism.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved