Red Wine (Modern Arabic Literature

by Amina Zaydan

Suzie Mohamad Galal, born in the Egyptian city of Suez during the War of Attrition in the late 1960s, is a woman of inner conflicts, at once a fighter and a lover, who traverses the boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Her whole life is intricately tied to the wars and political events taking place in Egypt. But as she grapples with where to begin her story of personal and national crises, questions of narration arise: which metaphor best serves the layers of meaning she wants to communicate, and whose voice is telling the story anyway?
Red Wine is both timely in its attention to the issues of state brutality, religious extremism, and gender, and timeless in the way it deals with the themes of coming of age, guilt, and sadness.

Genres: Egypt

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

mina Zaydan (born 1966) is an Egyptian novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1966 in Suez and now lives in Cairo where she works as a civil servant.

Zaydan is known for her strong stand on gender inequality in her writings. In 1994, her short story collection entitled It Happened Secretly won first prize in a literary competition held by Gamal al-Ghitani's Akhbar al-Adab weekly newspaper. It also won the prize for Best Short Story Collection at the Cairo International Book Fair the following year. She has since published a further volume of short stories called Fawda and several novels. Her second novel Red Wine won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal in 2007. An English translation of Red Wine by Sally Gomaa was published by the AUC Press in 2010.

Reviews

[Marcia Lynx]

This is the review I did for /Al Masry Al Youm./
http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/...

I feel odd about giving it a number of "stars," because I'd give a certain number of stars for the book and a far lesser number for the translation, which was mucky.

[Roos Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wat een tragiek, wat een ellende. Ik heb geen woorden. Het was echt prachtig. Door het poetische en lyrische taalgebruik was het niet altijd duidelijk wat nou realiteit was en wat niet. Maar dat paste ook wel bij de langzaam steeds schizofrener wordende hoofdpersoon. Het maakte niet zoveel uit wat nou realiteit was, want het was in ieder geval haar realiteit, en dat die duister was was wel duidelijk.

[د.حنان فاروق · Rating 5 out of 5]

عمل أكثر من رائع ولغة حكي مختلفة..أخذتني مني لأيام..صعود وهبوط وتجول في التاريخ والفكر والحرية والعدل والحب..مفهوم الحب يختلف من شخص لآخر..هناك أناس يرون الحب سعادة مؤقتة وهم كثر..وهناك أناس يرون الحب حياة ..إبداعاً..إلهاماً..تاريخاً..جذوراً...هؤلاء الذين يرونه كذلك يتعذبون..لكنهم هم الذين يرون لاغيرهم..ربما لايرون الحقائق كاملة لكنهم يجعلون من الخيال نوراً يضيء لهم الطريق في ظلمة الأيام المصمتة..
العمل رائع ..مشكلته الوحيدة أن لغته تحتاج صنفاً بعينه من القراء المتمكنين من اللغة المحبين لروح الحرف والذين يعتبرون الكلمات كائنات حية تنبض بأكثر مما تقول..
استمتعت حق

[DubaiReader · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm only 20% through the book but finding the translation almost impossible to understand. I'm sort of getting the gist of what is happening but only by trawling through a mass of words that appear to be meaningless. It's as if it has been taken directly from the Arabic without making any adjustments to make it legible for an English speaker.
it's a shame because this is a prize-winning book in Arabic and I know it has something relevant to say, but I really think I'm going to be abandoning this after the book group tomorrow.

[سمراء · Rating 4 out of 5]

رواية بجد تحفه

[عزت زيزو · Rating 4 out of 5]

i want to read this novel please