Today, the Read Kutub group in Dubai will meet (at 7:45 p.m.) to discuss Leila Abouzeid’s The Last Chapter (ألفصل ألأخير).
Abouzeid, considered a pioneer among Moroccans because she writes in Arabic rather than in French, was the first female literary author from Morocco to be translated into English. The Last Chapter is semi-autobiographical and tells the story of Aisha, a young Moroccan woman who struggles to find an identity in the second half of the twentieth century.
Read Kutub shares a bit about Abouzeid, summarizes the novel, and has this from an old Cairo Times review:
With an author as talented as Abouzeid and the heroine an intellectual with the tongue of a Moroccan Dorothy Parker, there is a lot of substance to the novel.
You can also read several GoodReads reviews of the novel.
Abouzeid’s other books include Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence, Return to Childhood, and The Director and Other Stories from Morocco.
If you aren’t available tonight (but are close enough to Dubai to think about going), you can join the group on Monday, October 4 for its discussion of Men in the Sun and Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani. (If you haven’t yet read this, surely you must.)
And—if you aren’t close enough to Dubai, as I’m not—maybe we should start an adjunct group that discusses these books online….
Starting an adjunct book discussion group would be awesome. I’m nowhere near Dubai, or even Europe, for that matter, but I have just started reading Abouzeid’s “The Last Chapter” and would love to discuss it with someone.
In hopes that something will develop for Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun” discussion, I have ordered it from my library and it should be here in about a week. I will read it, regardless, but hope we can find an online forum to discuss it. Thanks.