When Abdallah comes to ask for Mayya's hand in marriage, she is at her sewing machine, dreaming of another man. Her sister Asma marries a painter, Khalid, hoping for a marriage of love, unlike her sister, but it turns out that Khalid only desires her for her social status. Their sister Khawla has even grander dreams: she is promised to a cousin in Canada, whom no one really expects to come back for her. These three women, the son of Salima and the Shaykh's son Azzan, are a cross-section of life and love among the small villages of Oman, each desiring a love match but being thwarted by the rigid rules of family and marriage. The celestial bodies of the title are satellites that orbit each other, drawn together, and by being drawn together locked in perpetual motion, but never seeming to touch. And not only them: like the sisters, their parents, grandparents, children--and even slaves--look for love in their own way.
Man, I don't know. I think maybe I am simply growing more impatient as a reader as I grow older. (You'd think it'd be the opposite, but you have to age a little, I think, to realize how many books there are to read in the world, and so it's easier to get impatient when one isn't cohering.) But this book just had too much going on for me to follow. Each individual story is sharp and well-drawn, the three sisters especially, but for each sister there are a half-dozen other characters whose stories are chopped up and strewn throughout the book: Marwan, whose obsession with purity leads him to chop off his hand; Masouda, the woman locked in her courtyard because the village thinks she's crazy; Azzan, who is drawn into the charms of the Bedouin woman Qamar; Sanjar, the son of the slave Zarifa who escapes the village with his new bride; London, Mayya's daughter who marries, and then divorces, a caddish poet; several dead children; Abdallah's mother, who was, I think, poisoned, etc., etc. No sooner does one of these stories get going than it stops and another narrative thread is taken up.
The best of them, I thought, was that of Abdallah, Mayya's lovelorn husband who realizes too late that she has no love for him. Abdallah's section is the only one in first person, and comprises his reflection on his life as he waits to touch down aboard a plane to Europe. (Although it might have been symbolic and he might actually be dead--that's how obscure parts of this book were to me.) Abdallah's is the only story, I felt, that's really given space to develop, and I was really fascinated by his relationship with Zarifa, his father's slave, who serves as a substitute wife to the father and mother to Abdallah, and who acts, to the chagrin of the other women, as if she is well above her station. Her relationship to Abdallah and Abdallah's father is complicated by the outlawing of slavery in Oman, but it seems that it is her sheer boldness that keeps her in the family. Abdallah's story has all the pieces of a good novel: the unspoken relationship between his regard for Zarifa and his fantasy of Mayya; his tortured relationship with his father; the shock when he finds himself repeating his father's cruelty toward his own son.
That being said, I enjoyed Celestial Bodies quite a bit at the level of language. Translated from Arabic, it has a simple and homespun quality to it that does justice to the thoughtful depiction of life in a changing Oman: the lightpoles shaped like the Burj Khalifa, Mayya's black butterfly sewing machine, the arduous process of the date harvest. I made a pact with myself a while back to reflect on these books as they are, rather than on the book I wish they were in my head. But man, I wish Celestial Bodies had been a little narrower, a little tighter.
With the addition of Oman, my "countries read" list is up to 60!
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