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Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, by Bahaa' Taher. Tr. by Barbara Romaine. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. xix + 124 pages. $35 cloth; $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Aida A. Bamia
Bahaa' Taher is an Egyptian novelist who, slowly but steadily, has been taking his rightful place on the national and international scenes. He remained in the shadow of other familiar, though not always superior, writers, but not for a lack of writing dexterity nor of prowess in fiction writing. It is probably his residence overseas, far from the traditional centers of the Arabic literary movement, that is partly responsible for his late discovery by critics, readers and translators.
It is, therefore, a real pleasure to read the translation of one of Taher's novels, Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery (published in Arabic in 1991). This book was preceded by two other novels, Qalat Duha (Duha Said, Cairo, 1985) and Al-Hub Fi al-Manfa (Love in the Land of Exile, Cairo, 1995).
Taher is undoubtedly a first-class storyteller. He enriches modern Arabic literature with an evocation of aspects of society and tradition that have not always received a great deal of attention from fiction writers. Originally from the Sa`id (Upper Egypt), Taher depicts this...