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May Telmissany. Dunyazad Roger Allen, tr. London. Saqi. 2000 95 pages. L14.95/$22.50 (L5.95/$12.95) ISBN 0-86356-552-2 (340-6 paper)
DUNYAZAD IS A BOOK of sweet beginnings and unfulfilled promise. It contains one haunting image, a well-done vignette or two, and is, one hopes, an indication of better writing to come from its first-time novelist author. To translate such an uneven work is a misuse of translation resources that tries the patience of those who seek fine Arabic literature in English translation.
Dunyazad is the first-person narrative of a woman dealing with the stillbirth of her second child. The rose basket in which the tiny corpse is carried to burial is the work's one fresh image, offered in the opening pages. The narrator recounts her postpartum depression in the slim text, in which it is not so much the banality of her middle-class Cairo...