Girls of Riyadh

#196
Title: Girls of Riyadh
Author: Rajaa Alsanea
Publisher:
Year: 2005/2007
Country: Saudi Arabia
296 pages

Touted as a breakthrough, this epistolary novel needs to be understood in its cultural context in order to be something other than not-very-engaging chick lit. Within that cultural context, this novel-in-one-sided-e-mails is discrepant, jarring, and revolutionary (at least within the domestic sphere of the rich). However, even from this perspective, I had trouble with what felt like a self-conscious effort to mimic "Sex in the City." The characters' cattiness and meanspirited comments about other women's looks didn't make me like or respect them. Unlike the real women of RAWA and other revolutionaries, these self-preoccupied characters inspire no admiration. While the premise could work, the book suffers from telling, not showing, and is more like a gloss of the story than the story itself. The narrative itself just dribbles away and does not actually follow through on some of the promises the narrator makes to the reader-as-e-mail-recipient. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't stand as a work of literature without its political and historical frame. This is not your mother's feminism, and not in a good way. For a more nuanced perspecive, try Satrapi's  Complete Persepolis.