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Celestial Bodies

Jokha Alharthi,

Marilyn Booth (Translator)

3.43 · Rating details · 9,801 ratings · 1,824 reviews

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly ...more

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Paperback, 256 pages

Published October 15th 2019 by Catapult (first published 2010)

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Sep 25, 2019 Angela M rated it liked it

Shelves: edelweiss-reviews

This is the winner of the 2019 International Man Booker Prize and that was one of the things that drew me to read this book. The other was that while I’ve heard of Oman, I didn’t know much about it, except that it was in the Middle East. I had to look at a map to see exactly where. I ended up having mixed feelings about it. A family saga in a way spreading over decades, there is a focus on three sisters and the on how they accept or don’t the marriages their family decides for them. The narrativ ...more

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Apr 08, 2019 Hugh rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-lit, read-2019, translations

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019

I am a little unsure what to make of this one.

I knew very little of Oman and its history, so that side of it was quite interesting, and some of the stories were quite moving, but overall it seemed to lack direction, and although the component stories are all part of a wider family story stretching over several generations, the organisation seems a bit random, which made it rather confusing. The family tree at the start didn't help much - too many ...more

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Mar 17, 2019 Paul Fulcher rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019, mbi-long-list-2019

Now winner of the 2019 Man Booker International

An interesting choice by the judges, a book whose strengths lie in its deep cultural insights and clever construction.

The moon is the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below. The moon moves between high and low, between the sublime and the filth of creation. Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matters of this lower world.

Celestial Bodies has been translated by Marilyn Booth from Sayyidat al-qamar (literal translati ...more

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Oct 21, 2019 Jibran rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Jibran by: Antonomasia

Shelves: arabic, booker-intl

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019

Life appeared to her sharply divided in two parts, like night and day: what we live, and what lives inside of us.

It would not be an exaggeration to call this novel a microcosm of modern Oman. It takes a wider view of the monumental changes that have taken place at turbo speed in the Omani society during the last fifty years or so, told through the story of three or four families drawn from different social classes, who navigate the troubled waters ...more

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Feb 22, 2020 Michael rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020

Spanning decades, Celestial Bodies explores the hopes and frustrations of three generations of a wealthy Omani family. The book’s chapters alternate between the perspective of a husband who’s married into the family and that of an omniscient narrator who takes a kaleidoscopic look at the inner lives of the members of the household. There’s not a single narrative thread tying everything together, but Alharthi consistently contrasts characters’ differing conceptions of love, womanhood, and masculi ...more

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Apr 16, 2019 Antonomasia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Antonomasia by: 2019 International Booker Longlist

Shelves: booker-international, women-in-translation, 2019, scribd, decade-2010s, mena

The beginning of Celestial Bodies is set in the 1970s but, as a cloistered young girl sews, her romantic longing expressed in tones resembling those of courtly love, it feels almost like medieval historical fiction. Oman has, over the last 40-50 years, experienced dizzyingly rapid cultural and technological change, and the novel explores this through the stories of three families linked by marriage and servitude.

Initially, I found it difficult to understand where characters were in history, so The beginning of Celestial Bodies is set in the 1970s but, as a cloistered young girl sews, her romantic longing expressed in tones resembling those of courtly love, it feels almost like medieval historical fiction. Oman has, over the last 40-50 years, experienced dizzyingly rapid cultural and technological change, and the novel explores this through the stories of three families linked by marriage and servitude.

Initially, I found it difficult to understand where characters were in history, so to orientate a little, I listened to all the BBC Radio programmes about Oman which I could find. (There aren't very many, and it took under an hour and a half.) The extreme rapidity of change was such that it doesn't seem insensitive to compare it to earlier periods of history in other parts of the world; even having seen horses and carts still in routine use in rural eastern Europe in the 1990s, this was something else. There was a big contrast between the radio programmes - all from the 00s and talking about modernisation in glowing terms, similar to the way Saudi Prince Salman's Vision 2030 project was reported a few years ago - and the Wikipedia entry on Oman, which has a lot of content on human rights abuses. It also became evident why there seems to be Sultan Qaboos everything, e.g. the author teaches at Sultan Qaboos University, she has won the Sultan Qaboos Award for another novel. He is essentially an absolute ruler, albeit with an advisory body of representatives, and his influence on the country, by directing modernisation at the pace he decides, has been massive.

It's in those earliest chapters of the novel, about the betrothal of Mayya, one of the three sisters at the centre of the novel, in which the influence of classical love Arabic poetry (poetry of which the author is a professor) becomes apparent. I suspect that these poetics may be obvious throughout the novel to people who know them well - but I do not, and for the untrained reader, they resurface again most obviously in the later episodes about the beautiful, independent, Qamar and her love affair with Mayya's uncle. Qamar's underlying pragamatism and unusual lifestyle for her place and time (a Bedouin Bathsheba Everdene?) are a fascinating contrast with the passion and obsessive focus of this poetry - she loves it but with boundaries - whilst the teenage Mayya, for a while, throws herself headlong into its tumultuous emotions: they two women provide a fascinating inkling as to how this corpus of poetry fitted into real people's lives and psychology.

It's evident from the introduction by translator Marilyn Booth, quoting translated academic texts, that there is esteem for this novel in the world of contemporary Arabic literature, and that it has a number of subtleties that won't necessarily apparent to Western English-language readers like me. In English it seems to have a light experimentalism, a sort of stream-of-consciousness in full sentences. The short chapters alternate between third-person narration - telling the stories of members of two extended gentry families brought together by marriage, and their former slaves - and first-person narrative by Abdallah, Mayya's husband. (Slavery was only banned in Oman in 1970, and many enslaved families stayed on as servants; a liberal Omani blogger said in 2009 that some former slave-owning families still displayed these servants at functions, as they used to with slaves in the days of slavery.) Memories and associations swirl around the narrative as they do in real thought; when you think about someone you've known for years, it isn't just in chronological or discrete fashion, and so it is shown here. The full, conventionally structured sentences can disguise this: they don't look like Western modernist stream-of-consciousness. Another interesting feature that occurred in the early chapters - in which Abdallah appeared to question the course of events related in a previous chapter by the third-person omniscient voice - did not appear to repeat later: this would have been an intriguing literary device and one that also might say something about the patriarchal society in which the novel is set.

The first person narrative returns, again and again, to Abdallah's boyhood memory of being suspended down a well by his autocratic father as a punishment. The mentions of the incident cumulatively convey the effect of trauma for someone who is prone to ruminate on it rather than bury it, and the profound psychological puzzle of making sense of a parent's harshness alongside one's esteem for them in other respects. It may get boring for the reader to keep hearing about this same incident - but this shows how repetitive it is to live with traumatic memories. If there was a similar first-person window into the lives of some of the other characters, the novel would be full of disturbing material, but incidents like the rape of an enslaved teenage girl decades earlier - the mother of Zarifa, who brought up Abdallah - are recounted only once and in the third person. The occasional occurrence of these brutal scenes in Celestial Bodies is similar to that found in many historical family sagas published in English in the later 20th century. The author, herself from a prosperous background in what is still a stratified society, appears to recognise the limitations of the way she might narrate people from enslaved families. On the basis of better-known accounts of chattel slavery in the Americas, every horror here sounds plausible. It seems as if Alhari is, in the third person, telling of stories and people she has heard, but does not presume to speak at length for them in the first person.

Life has changed vastly for everyone in Oman due to the opening up of the country to Western commerce and technology under Sultan Qaboos from 1970 onwards, but cultural change has had the biggest impact on women. Mayya's daughter London (b.1981) is a few years younger than the author herself - and in Mayya's bookish sister, one can see the cloistered life of arranged marriage and children, and the society of local women, that was the probable fate of a woman of Alharthi's talents only a short generation earlier. The chronologically earlier chapters show that it was women as much as men who were keen to uphold the patriarchal status quo, and who imposed discipline on younger girls and wayward women, just as fiercely as Lorca's Bernarda Alba. But the changes introduced from above by the Sultan, and exposure to ideas from abroad, mean that someone like London is no longer quite so subject to that system: she is a junior doctor who drives a BMW, and she wrangles out of her parents some say over her own engagement and marriage. (But that also isn't as simple as the typical Western fictional story of a Muslim girl defying her parents over marriage.)

I would never have read Celestial Bodies if it hadn't been longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and now, at the time I'm writing this review, it has just won. Many of the other readers I'm acquainted with who've been following the prize and reading the listed books - on Goodreads and in the bloggers' shadow jury - feel that Celestial Bodies is a compromise winner, as hardly anyone dislikes it, but it was hardly anyone's favourite either. Who knows if it fell that way among the official Booker judges too - but although I'm a little sad that more obviously spectacular books missed out, I think this is a decent winner. At a time when prizes seem to send a political message - Flights, last year's MBI winner, about freedom of movement in Europe in the face of Brexit, and Milkman about #metoo, even if it was written earlier - this award could be seen to indicate solidarity with Muslim women expressing themselves on their own terms, at a time of increasing Islamophobia.

It is also a book that perhaps, gently challenges ideas of what is best in literary fiction. In the English language context its experimentalism appears light and of a type some denigrate as middlebrow. And the family saga is a genre that, feminist scholars have pointed out, when written by male authors, has often been classed among great literature, or at least literary fiction, but is more likely to be grouped as ephemeral popular fiction when the author is female. I found this a book that works best read quite slowly - when I started to re-read it quickly for the shadowing project, aiming to finish in a few hours, I noticed that things didn't jump out as often, and that it wasn't as effortlessly evocative read at speed as several of the other shortlisted books. But when you slow down to appreciate it, Celestial Bodies contains some beautiful writing, and this novel is always fascinating for its insight into a country which gets very little coverage in much of the Anglosphere. ...more

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Apr 25, 2019 Gumble's Yard rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019, 2019-mbi-shortlist, mbi-prize-winners

Now deserved winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

She began to realise that there was no way she could be Khalid’s other half, once upon a time sundered but which (he assured her) he had now found. This was because Khalid, on his own, took on the likeness of a celestial sphere complete unto itself, orbiting only along its already defined path.

It is published by the Ross-shire based small publishers Sandstone press who “are an independent publisher with an international outlook, prod ...more

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Apr 13, 2020 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Jenny (Reading Envy) by: Shawn Mooney (Shawn The Book Maniac)

Shelves: around-the-world, read-the-world-21, read2020, hoopla, ebooks, booker-winners-and-listed, women-in-translation, middle-east-2020, translated, location-oman

This is the first novel by a woman in Oman to be translated into English, and it won the International Booker Prize. I learned a lot about Oman's history and traditions in the background but most of the story is about multiple generations in the village of al-Awafi.

This book kept sending me on rabbit holes to learn about Omani food so yes I did sacrifice one of my remaining cups of flour to try making khubz ragag, which doesn't work in a non-stick pan, so I ended up with flat bread. It's fine. I ...more

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May 23, 2019 Tamara Agha-Jaffar rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019-mena-challenge, historical-fiction, 2019-reading-challenge, women-of-color, books-i-ve-reviewed, fiction, books-in-translation, middle-east-and-africa, owned-books, 2019-women

The winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies paints a vivid portrait of Omani society as it grapples with the cultural and social changes precipitated by its transition into a modern society. The tension between late twentieth-century values and behaviors with those of the present is played out in the lives, marriages, and relationships of three generations of an affluent Omani family. Threaded throughout the novel are details about daily life and the The winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies paints a vivid portrait of Omani society as it grapples with the cultural and social changes precipitated by its transition into a modern society. The tension between late twentieth-century values and behaviors with those of the present is played out in the lives, marriages, and relationships of three generations of an affluent Omani family. Threaded throughout the novel are details about daily life and the interplay of folklore, traditional healing methods, and religion.

The narrative unfolds in a series of vignettes told by a third person omniscient narrator focusing each time on one of a dozen or so characters. These vignettes alternate with the first-person narrative of Abdullah, a young man damaged by his father’s abuse and his mother’s death under mysterious circumstances. The multiplicity of characters and perspectives would have been confusing had Alharthi not provided a family tree to show the relationships. This family tree is essential, especially in the early pages of the novel, until one becomes familiar with each character’s placement.

The primary focus is on three sisters. Mayya, the eldest, suppresses her desire for the man she loves by acquiescing to parental demands to marry Abdullah, a man she does not love. Asma, the second in line, is the reader in the family. She agrees to marry the man chosen for her because she perceives the marriage to be a means to an end—the end being the ability to pursue her education. Khawla, the youngest, is in love with her cousin, Nasir. She resists all offers of marriage, stubbornly insisting to wait for his return from Canada.

Alharthi’s scope is wide. In the character of Zarifa, we learn of her mother’s captivity into slavery, the treatment of slaves, and the aftermath of their eventual emancipation in the 1960s. In addition to the generational conflicts, we read about political upheavals and rebellions as Omanis struggle for independence. We watch the gradual erosion of a rigid patriarchal structure where male infidelities, spousal abuse, and child abuse are rampant, where women are treated as possessions, and where young girls are kidnapped and forced into marriage. In the space of a few short generations, the society transitions. The slaves have been freed; political factions have reached an uneasy truce; women now have careers, make their own voting decisions in elections, choose their own spouses, and divorce them for their infidelities.

The narrative progresses through non-linear shifts in time. We dip in and out of the long ago past, the more recent past, and the present. We watch Zarifa as she leaves food for the djinn to ward off harm for Abdullah at his birth. Within a few pages, we listen in on a conversation between Abdullah and his now adult daughter. As we piece together the shifts in time and the different perspectives, the back story of each character falls into place and a clear picture emerges.

Highly recommended for its immersive nature and breadth of scope in depicting gendered lives and different socio-economic classes as Oman transitions into a modern society. ...more

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Jun 19, 2020 W rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, from-around-the-world, booker-prize

This is the first novel originally written in Arabic that I've read.Wouldn't have heard of it if it wasn't a Booker Prize winner.

The setting is Oman and I'm always keen to read books set in different countries and cultures.

However,the book was rather underwhelming.Not much of a plot and disparate stories.It is mostly about women's domestic lives in Oman plus a male character Abdallah.There isn't enough drama,excitement or impact.As for humour,it's entirely missing.

The most notable part was about ...more

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Mar 25, 2019 Abbie | ab_reads rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-around-the-world, translations-read-in-2019

3.5 stars
Thank you so much @sandstonepress for sending me Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi in my attempt to read ALL the translated works from the Man Booker International long-list - and a huge congrats on this one being shortlisted! I enjoyed it, and I think had I read it when I was not working 13 days in a row with zero time to read I would have loved it a lot more.
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I read the first 100 pages over 4 whole days and for me, 25 pages a day is just not enough to get into the flow of a book and ...more

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Jun 25, 2019 Barry Pierce rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2019, 21st-century

It usually isn't a great omen when you see that a 243-page novel begins with a family tree. Every single branch of that tree fights for your attention in this muddled but admirable novel. It takes a hugely skilled writer to try to weave the tapestry that this novel wants to be but Alharthi is not that writer. She perhaps isn't helped by Marilyn Booth's translation which often reads like a direct translation of the original Arabic and thus falls completely flat even when the story turns fantastic ...more

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Jul 28, 2019 Roman Clodia rated it it was ok · review of another edition

After a promising opening chapter, I struggled with this book. Ok, the mosaic-like structure of fragmented voices is never my favourite novelistic form but I think the breaking point for me is the amount of telling that Alharthi does: 'London wasn't blind. She did see all the signs, but she wouldn't let her mind accept them'. It just left me feeling that all the stories here are simplified as they are interpreted via the narrative voice and there's little work for the reader to do in understandi ...more

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Apr 08, 2019 Robert rated it really liked it · review of another edition

One reason why I follow the Man Booker International is because it is a passport to different countries. In the case of Celestial Bodies, the author, and setting of the book is Oman, a country I know nothing about. I like it even more when an author goes into depth about the country’s traditions. Luckily this happens in Celestial Bodies.

The novel is a cleverly structured family saga. Within the three generations there’s lost loves, forced marriage, cheating, wayward children, disappointments, ac ...more

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Dec 16, 2019 Kathleen rated it liked it

Man Booker International Prize 2019. This is a challenging book for the reader. It is helpful to familiarize yourself with the family tree in the print editions. The main character narrates in first person, while the rest are in third person. And then there is the confusing ‘shuffled deck’ chronology.

Abdullah ibn Sulayman is the son of a prosperous Omani merchant married to a woman he loves and haunted by his father’s cruelty. His grandfather was an arms trader and his father diversified into t ...more

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Jun 04, 2019 Eric Anderson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I get so excited whenever I start a novel that begins with a family tree. Something about the style of a family saga really appeals to me in the way it traces how individuals function both independently and as part of a family. “Celestial Bodies” mainly focuses on the stories of three sisters in modern day Oman, but it also presents a number of perspectives of different family members and people connected to that family. Like Sara Taylor's novel “The Shore” it also moves backwards and forwards i ...more

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Jul 18, 2019 Trudie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-prize-winners, timeout-bookclub

I postponed this review for over a week in order to mull things over with my IRL bookclub, after which it seemed wise to add an extra half star. This reinforces to me that it is often a rewarding experience to be pushed towards books that I might have skipped and that a good old chin-wag about them is endlessly helpful.

I will admit my reactions while reading Celestial Bodies were mixed. The main issue, let us call it "narrative shenanigans" is compounded by a family tree diagram that despite ...more

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Jun 17, 2019 Katie Long rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I always get excited to read an author from a part of the world that I am not so familiar with. I love reading a point of view that I’ve never seen before, so I really thought I would love this. The concept is great, but there are just too many characters and timelines here. I can see that Alharthi is intending it all to read as rich and complex, but for me it came off more muddled and confused.

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Oct 02, 2019 Tundra rated it liked it · review of another edition

3 1/2 stars. Set in Oman, through a period of tumultuous change, during the 19th and 20th century this book explores the impact of religion, slavery, gun trafficking, war, invasion and modernisation on the extended family of Abdallah.
The changes faced by each generation brings new challenges as Oman and it’s people are forced to adapt - some better than others. This family saga has two perspectives in alternating chapters and has lots of time shifts. This did make it tricky to follow and I woul ...more

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Aug 07, 2019 Jonathan Pool rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: international, book-club-waterstones

Synopsis
The translation and publication of a book centered on Oman, written by a woman, is noteworthy in its own right.
Jokha Alharthi opens the door to a patriarchal, concealed world. It’s not a full expose, but it’s fascinating. Celestial Bodies is a worthy winner of the Man Booker International Prize (2019).
The essence of the story is the change ongoing in the country of Oman and specifically the contrast between secular Muscat, a coastal enclave with its own history based around exposure to t ...more

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Jan 13, 2019 Melanie rated it liked it · review of another edition

Edit: this is now a Man Booker International Prize winner. So chuffed for everyone involved. Especially the small publisher taking such risks with regards to translating books!

As always when reading a book for Read Around the World Bookclub, the journey is often interesting even if the destination can be a bit hit and miss. This month, we travelled to Oman with this recent release (by a small Scottish Press no less).

I knew nothing about Oman and the fact that I googled thinks like "slavery" was ...more

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May 04, 2019 H.A. Leuschel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A beautifully written family saga that opened my mind to Oman's history and its people that I knew very little about .... until now. ...more

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Jun 02, 2019 Sidharth Vardhan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2-asia, woman-authors, booker

When it comes to diversity, International Man Booker presents nice trends - 3 of 4 winners have been from the third world and 3 have been women. That said, it ain't the most deserving one in my arrogant opinion - Annie Ernaux's 'The Years' is the best of 5 books listed in the long list this year that I have read.

The summary saying it is the story of 3 sisters might suggest it is a family story - which it is, but it manages to capture a lot of Onami life including the slave trade, politics, chang ...more

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Aug 29, 2019 Krista rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019

The moon is the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below. The moon moves between high and low, between the sublime and the filth of creation. Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matters of this lower world. And so it is the guide to all things. Contemplate the state of the moon until you know it well. Its soundness is the strength of all things, its ruin the corruption of all things. If the moon moves closer to another celestial body then it gives more force

The moon is the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below. The moon moves between high and low, between the sublime and the filth of creation. Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matters of this lower world. And so it is the guide to all things. Contemplate the state of the moon until you know it well. Its soundness is the strength of all things, its ruin the corruption of all things. If the moon moves closer to another celestial body then it gives more force to whatever that body can tell us or give us.

I probably wouldn't have read Celestial Bodies if it hadn't won the Man Booker International Prize for 2019, and this kind of book is precisely why I value this particular literary award: written by an Omani woman, Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies tells the stories of several generations of a family living in Oman – a setting which was completely new to me – and along the way, Alharthi describes that country's political and social history, its legacy of slavery and having been a British colony, the rivalries between the urban shaykhs and the rural imams, domestic customs, religion and superstition and the slow liberalisation of a patriarchal society. It's a lot to pack into 243 pages, and as much as I enjoyed this glimpse into a new-to-me culture, Alharthi's real focus is on the hearts and minds of her characters; people whose motivations are familiar and universal. The profusion of characters was a little confusing for me (even with a family tree to refer to) and the plot itself felt a little light (more a series of vignettes than a satisfying whole) but I still really enjoyed this overall experience.

The plot mainly follows three sisters living in the (fictional) village of al-Awafi and the marriages that they make: the mousy Mayya marries the wealthy son of a merchant, Abdallah; book-loving Asma marries the artist Khalid; and the beauty, Khawla, vows to wait for the cousin she was betrothed to as a child to return from his studies in Canada. Point-of-view rotates between an omniscient narrator following something like fifteen different characters, with a continuing, intermittent storyline following Abdallah on a flight to Germany as he considers (and sometimes contradicts) the details previously outlined. It was interesting to see how, in Omani culture, even with the sexes more or less separated from each other from adolescence, each of these characters expected a love match; that everyone seemed to fall in love with someone at a glance, yet for the most part, ended up marrying whomever their parents chose for them. There is a subtle evolution throughout the generations – with the young women being given ever more control over who they will marry – but the main theme seems to be (and the title seems to imply) that fate is written in the stars (even if sometimes, when the celestial bodies are aligned just so, humans can encourage the moon and planets to intervene in human affairs). As someone who has read extensively in Muslim scholarship, Asma believes the following:

Some of those who fancy themselves philosophers claim that God, Mighty is He, created every soul in the shape of a ball. And then He split every one of these spheres into two, and apportioned to each and every human body one half. It is decreed that each body will meet the body that holds the other half of that rent soul. Between the two a passion arises from that ancient bond. From one human being to the next, the effect of this union will vary, according to the delicacy of each person’s nature.

But the reality of her marriage to Khalid, content as it may be, turns out to be something different:

She began to realise that there was no way she could be Khalid’s other half, once upon a time sundered but which (he assured her) he had now found. This was because Khalid, on his own, took on the likeness of a celestial sphere complete unto itself, orbiting only along its already defined path...In the end, and with a great deal of patience, self-examination, and occasional sacrifice, they learned to create enough space that each could orbit freely. When they collided, and if they fused, Asma and Khaled knew it was only a temporary disruption, and that each path would return to its own course.

Fate vs freedom was a recurring theme, and while I appreciate that Abdallah's continuing story on the airplane demonstrates that even the son of a wealthy merchant may have little real freedom (particularly his inability to free himself from reliving unhappy childhood scenes under a strong man's thumb), it was the women's stories that most intrigued me here. From the story of a slave whose daughter will grow up into servitude long after slavery is officially abolished:

On the 26th of September 1926, Ankubuta was roaming the sparse expanse outside of town, bending over to pick up the few branches she could find, when the first pangs came. As she saw to the birth of her own daughter, with a rusty knife to separate the baby's life from her own, the men gathered in Geneva to sign an accord. Their signatures abolished slavery and criminalised the slave trade. It was Ankubuta's fifteenth birthday, but she was as unaware of that as she was that the world held a place called Geneva.

What the thought of marriage to a virtual stranger offers to Asma:

She'd be one of the women now, and finally she would have the right to come and go, to mix freely with the older women and listen to their talk, to attend weddings, all of them, near and far, and funerals too. Now she would be one of the women who sat around their coffee in the late mornings and then again at the end of the day. She would be invited to lunch and dinner, and she would issue her own invitations, since she was no longer merely a girl. Marriage was her identity document, her passport to a world wider than home.

And what “freedom” meant to Salima, mother of the three daughters, as she was growing up:

She felt pangs of hunger, that most familiar of sensations from her childhood, all the time she was growing older, crouched at the foot of the kitchen wall in her uncle's fortress-like compound, denied the bounties of its kitchen. True, she had not spent her childhood stirring big pots or sweeping or carrying water or wood on her head. True, she was not a slave or a servant. But nor had she ever had the satisfaction of a full stomach or the pleasures of wearing pretty clothes or learning embroidery, since Shaykh Said was not her father but only her father's brother. She couldn't leave the confines of the walled compound or play with the girls who lived nearby. She didn't have a part in the shared laughter and play when women and girls were bathing in the falaj, nor in the dancing at weddings like the girls from slave families did. She couldn't be given remnants of old clothes out of which she could make gowns for wooden dolls. But equally, she didn't have gold chains or bracelets to put on, nor could she enjoy the delicacies of the table like the daughters of the shaykhs did. She grew up at the foot of the kitchen wall, always hungry, always observing slave women's freedom to live and dance, and mistress women's freedom to command others, adorn themselves as they liked, and make visits to their likes to other well-off families.

But the times do change: by the end of the book, a young woman can cancel a marriage contract when her betrothed becomes abusive; a middle-aged woman can ask for a divorce when small seeds of dissatisfaction grow into a mass too large to ignore; an older woman can call down an effective curse upon her philandering husband, and freedom is gained whether written in the stars or not. There is a lot happening in this small book, and while I don't think the format worked 100% for me, I learned plenty and was often surprised by where the story went; an ultimately satisfying reading experience. ...more

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Jun 08, 2019 Lynne King added it · review of another edition

Shelves: women-s-fiction, 2019-books-toread, middle-east

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019

Having lived in Saudi Arabia for sixteen years, I was looking forward to reading Jokha Alharthi's book on Oman, especially Muscat, a place I always wanted to visit but never did.

But what a disappointment reading this book! I cannot believe that the author has won the Man Booker International Prize 2019. I'm always rather nervous about translations but evidently the translator Marilyn Booth is excellent and so I should imagine she has followed the ...more

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Jul 15, 2019 Viv JM rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: author-female, z2019-atw-trans-lang-challenge, in-translation, read-in-2019, z2019-wit, women-in-translation, fiction-literary, z2019-atw-challenge

I never really warmed to this book. I found the constant switching between characters and time periods confusing and fragmentary, and there was no coherent story arc that I could perceive. I can appreciate that the book portrays the upheaval of rapid cultural and societal changes in the country of Oman but it just never really drew me in and I never made a connection with it.

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May 09, 2020 John Anthony rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A mesmeric read which rather reminded me of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the way that it flashed back and forth, focussing on a particular character, one at a time. Confusing or mesmerising, a question of choice. I prefer the latter.

The translation is awe inspiring and I regret reading it on kindle, otherwise I’d be quoting chunks of it here.

The novel is set in Oman, a country I know little about but now want to know more..It seems to centre upon two families and their connections and relati ...more

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Apr 13, 2019 Tommi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mbi-2019

But the one text she had found truly memorable and compelling was the passage she had memorized without even really understanding what it meant. Something about spirits or souls that were perfectly round once upon a time but had been split apart. For as long as they were separated they would search out their other half until they found it. That is how she imagined love: a meeting of spirit-twins.

Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, taps into the age-old But the one text she had found truly memorable and compelling was the passage she had memorized without even really understanding what it meant. Something about spirits or souls that were perfectly round once upon a time but had been split apart. For as long as they were separated they would search out their other half until they found it. That is how she imagined love: a meeting of spirit-twins.

Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, taps into the age-old theme of love by traversing several generations of an Omani family in a gradually changing society. It deals with slavery, religion, gendered roles, travel, but above all with love, which is the one thing that hasn’t quite changed over the course of centuries. Into her novel, Alharthi has woven excerpts from classic Arabic literature in which love appears as something consisting of two halves, often in celestial proportions. Asma, the book-enthusiast sister of Mayya and Khawla (all three are important characters in the novel), reads a passage from one of the old books, a passage she has memorized in childhood:

Some of those who fancy themselves philosophers claim that God, Mighty is He, created every soul in the shape of a ball. And then He split every one of these spheres into two, and apportioned to each and every human body one half.

What made Celestial Bodies an intriguing read for me was the way it’s unabashedly a story from another culture, faithfully translated into English with only a brief introduction. There’s a character who appeals to God all soliloquy-style right on page 5, and the idea of slaves brought from Africa is not as distant as it might be in the European context today (not to belittle how much there is still modern slavery all over the world). On the other hand, the story is relevant and relatable in the Western context (hence the Man Booker International nomination) because with a theme as universal as love you are evidently dealing with the general human condition.

By focusing on these planetary metaphors of love, I’m talking about a rather tiny section of the novel. There is a big cast of characters with varying life experiences and interests. At least one character bluntly rejects all the talk of “poetry, flowers, the moon, nights of conversations, stars… – this isnt big on rationality.” There is no grand narrative pull, so adjust your reading goggles that way and enjoy as Alharthi paints an interesting picture of (mostly high-class) Omani life through these 240 pages or so. The thread I personally enjoyed following the most was indeed the search for soul union. Near the end of the novel, Asma, right before her wedding procession, may finally find what she has been looking for:

She looked the mirror-figure in the eye, and both of them shivered. It was the thought that she was about to join the other half of her, the self which had been separated from her self ever since earliest creation.

I’m drawn to this theme because it coincides with a book I’m reading for research very slowly, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s massive trilogy (Bubbles: Spheres I), where he charts, among other things, the ways human life has been depicted in images of spheres – i.e. round spaces that collide and coalesce – in art. It’s a fascinating book that enriched my reading of Celestial Bodies. ...more

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Aug 31, 2020 Johara rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: arabic-books, popsugar-2020

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

I am actually pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this book... very much actually. My previous attempts with Arabic literature coming from the GCC counties haven't been very successful, and I picked up this one for a number of reasons: 1) She is Omani, and I just love Oman as a country and as people. 2) She is the winner of 2019 Man Booker International Prize.. the first in the Arab world. I chose to read it in it's original form - in Arabic... And I am glad Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

I am actually pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this book... very much actually. My previous attempts with Arabic literature coming from the GCC counties haven't been very successful, and I picked up this one for a number of reasons: 1) She is Omani, and I just love Oman as a country and as people. 2) She is the winner of 2019 Man Booker International Prize.. the first in the Arab world. I chose to read it in it's original form - in Arabic... And I am glad I did.

From the first page you are immersed in the beautiful world of Alharthi's writing. I might be bias here but I found it flawless! The flow was magical, easy to read, poetic at times, and raw. I think that's where some people might have been lost in translation if they read the book in another language. There was a lot of cultural, old proverbs, superstitious, religious and dark magic references that might be vague to others.

The story is about the lives of women who lived in post-colonial period in an Omani village, that takes us through the development of their lives, personalities, and principles according to the culture. It sheds a light on the conditions and nature of life during slavery as well. A topic that is not always included in Arabic literature. There is also the patriarchal society where women (and men) are controlled by the wills of their fathers, and how that shapes up their lives and the lives around them. There is also the story of the three sisters, and how each perceived love and marriage differently.

The narration is mixed between a first person (by the man character), and third person (almost all women characters). It moves back and forth between past & present, and generations. Apparently the English book comes with a family tree, which my Arabic edition didn't have. But that didn't confuse me much, as the names were very unique and didn't find it hard to connect the dots.

The book concludes by wrapping up the stories, and putting closures to some missing links.

I just loved it... and will highly recommend it to anyone who wish to learn more about the Khaleeji culture & society, in the eyes of marginalized people... ...more

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Jan 15, 2020 ·Karen· added it · review of another edition

Shelves: coverlove

Daytime's for people but night-time's for the jinn.

Written at night-time, I'm sure, Alharthi's novel is full of magic.
Written in the daytime, I'm sure, it is full of people: what a wealth of people. But the jinn is at work too, conjuring life into each and every one. It's not always easy to remember the relationships between them; Cousin Marwan, for example, whose cousin was he again? Ah yes, he's that cousin of Mayya's husband that Asma was taken with. That sense of tranquil purity he radiated, ...more

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About Jokha Alharthi

Jokha Alharthi

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Jokha al-Harthi (Arabic: جوخة الحارثي‎; born July 1978) is an Omani writer and academic. She was educated in Oman and in the United Kingdom. She obtained her PhD in classical Arabic literature from Edinburgh University. She is currently an associate professor in the Arabic department at Sultan Qaboos University.

al-Harthi has published three collections of short stories and three novels (Manamat, S ...more

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“about spirits or souls that were perfectly round once upon a time but had been split apart. For as long as they were separated they would search out their other half until they found it. That is how she imagined love:” — 7 likes

“The feet walk fast for the loving heart’s sake, but when you feel no longing, your feet drag and ache” — 6 likes

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