Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed
Saudi writer Yousef Al-Mohiameed Wolves of the Crescent Moon (Fikhakh al-rai'ha) is a provocative and sometime disturbing tale set in contemporary Riyadh. It is short, quick paced story that brings together three men that are living in the periphery of the Saudi society. There's the middle-aged Bedouin, Turad, who has come in from the desert in search of work. Nasir, an orphan, and Amm Tawfiq, an old ex-slave brought from the Sudan decades ago as a youth. The allegorical style of the book poses some of the thorny questions the Saudi society is facing. The book is banned in the Kingdom, the author had to publish is from Beirut.
The story unfolds in a bus station with Turad, who lost his left ear during a failed robbery in the desert. This deformity haunts him everyday and later we find the other two also has similar deformity: Tawfiq who lost his testicles and Nasir, lost an eye when he was an infant. Al-Mohiameed is at his best in describing these incidents with gruesome detail, as a result some other parts of the story feels flat. However, overall the structure works out nicely with different points of view, sometime even in the same page. He brings together these three deformed men with flashbacks and dreams and connecting their pasts during one night in Riyadh and ends when the city is "like a young woman wiping the sleep from her eyes".
Al-Mohiameed uses some nice poetic touch while describing the brutality of slavery and Bedouin life. As Turad sits in the bus station trying decide where to go, we get a glimpse of the these people eariler lifes with the crescent moon looming behind:On one occasion, at the beginning of the night with the crescent moon just over the horizon like the slender sculpted eyebrow of a sleeping woman, the scent of camels came upon them, like a herd in the desert. It invaded Turad's nose and he mentioned to his companion to be silent. They lay motionless in the sand like two rocks. They had tied bands of cloth around their waists to keep up their tattered thobes for ease of movement. They had their sharp knives ready, for it was their intention to sneak up past the guards and slip into the middle.
Or later we hear Amm Tawfiq's account on how he was transported from Sudan I was sad. The sun was drawing its golden mantle across the shoulders of the houses in the quarter of al-Mazlum. They had just pushed me into the back of a Ford truck with a pile of furniture and household items: rugs and blankets, and pillows with colorful linen covers. I took one and placed it under my head as we drove along the darkness. It was stuffed with feathers, and the sharp quills scratched my face. Ah, if only I could put the feathers along my arms and fly. Slowly, I would ascend, little by little, until I was a bird in the open sky.
Although overwhelming few times, it was a good quick read. A good translation from Arabic by Anthony Calderbank.