Reviewed by Harry Readhead

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So begins Anna Karenina. And so proves Jokha Alharthi in Celestial Bodies, a family saga which, like Tolstoy's epic, takes place against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society. In Oman, three sisters with their own distinctive takes on love and duty set out along divergent paths or, rather, are carried down them. "Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matter of this lower world," reads the quotation that gives Alharthi's novel its name. "And so it is the guide to all things."

This is the second of Alharthi's three novels, and the first novel written by an Omani woman to be translated into English. It also happens to be the first novel written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. But Alharthi's book stands out for other reasons, among them its intricate structure. It is in some ways more like a collage than a work of narrative fiction: a richly woven tapestry of stories in part obscured, in part intensified, by the dense fog of memory.

The setting is Oman, and our guide is Abdallah ibn Sulayman, a man born into "easy times, times of plenty." Even at 30,000 feet, on a flight from Muscat to Frankfurt, his troubled thoughts condemn him to remain in the desert village in which he grew up. It was here, in al-Awafi, we learn, where the slave trade once thrived; slavery was not outlawed in Oman until 1970. And it was also here where, in punishment, Abdallah's father once hung him upside down in the blackness of a well and left him there.

Now, Abdallah is the kind of man who can afford to buy his daughter an expensive car. Yet he has an arms-dealing grandfather—named as Hilal the Merchant—and a slave-merchant father to thank for the wealth he inherits: 

It was Sulayman who inherited everything: his father's mercantile savvy, quick mind, tall and imposing figure, grave dignity, and the large house built of plaster—as well as his nervous disposition and the title of Merchant. But Sulayman did not trade in weapons. To all appearances, dates were what occupied his work days, although his real profits were built on the slave trade.

In many ways Abdallah reflects the way in which Oman, having finally struck oil in the second half of the twentieth century, has radically changed over the past half-century. He is also the story's only male protagonist and its only first-person narrator. Yet even in comfortable middle age he is at the mercy of the strong women in his life, if not in reality, then in his dreams. As for his mother, her death shortly after his birth remains a mystery.

But Abdallah is only one of a number of characters in Alharthi's book, and the author names each chapter for the person in focus. There is Mayya, the reluctant wife of Abdallah, who names her daughter London in defiance of convention and the wishes of her family. Having been denied marriage to the man she adores, she rebels. She laughs "loud enough to shatter every wall in the new house" when her husband asks her if she loves him, and resolves to express her longing for independence through her daughter, whose clothes "would not look like anyone else's just as her name echoed no other girl's."

Her sister Asma is the most studious of three siblings, and gives the husband she marries out of a sense of duty more than a dozen children by the time she's forty-five. We're told that Asma isn't "in any hurry to embrace all the joys of love in one gulp of intoxicating ether," and invests in her relationship as a means to further her own education. Completing the three is Khawla, regarded by her sisters and everyone else as the most beautiful member of this mostly unhappy family. She yearns, however, for the hand of her cousin, Nasir, who emigrates to Canada and is not expected to return.

All of Alharthi's characters are in some way trapped, if not by their relationships, then by history itself. Abdallah's childhood  experiences weigh on his adult brain like a nightmare, while even Mayya's attempt to liberate herself through her child fails almost as soon as it's begun. Having fallen prey to resentment, she can't help but judge her husband by the standards of traditional society. As for Salima, the fearsome family matriarch, she remains stranded in what was once a rural patriarchal culture in which slavery was permitted and spirit-worship common.

Mixed up in this confusion are poets and wife-beaters and holy men. These supporting characters are themselves a reflection of elements of Omani society at times and places in its recent history. Though they're often introduced and sent away again in the space of just a few pages, they leave an impression and render Alharthi's depiction of Oman more vivid.

The vignettes in which we encounter these characters are often more memorable than lengthier accounts. It isn't too surprising, then, to learn that Alharthi's first published contribution to literature was a short story, and that among her favorite writers are Chekhov, Yasunari Kawabata, and Gabriel García Márquez. Her writing is poetic, even songlike, and some of her chapters sufficiently self-contained to function as flash fiction. In fact Mayya's opening chapter, which makes up the first nine pages of the book, presents us with a story of a broken heart, of childbirth—"So I stood straight, clinging to the pole, until you slipped out of me, ya Mayya, right into my sirwal. There was room enough for you in those baggy trousers!"—and the naming of a girl "London . . . a place, my dear, a place that is very far away, in the land of the Christians."

All this is rendered deftly by Alharthi's translator (and former PhD supervisor), Marilyn Booth. Now a professor in the study of the contemporary Arab world at Oxford, she said she found the novel so compelling that she completed her translation of it before Alharthi had even found a publisher. She peppers her translation with the sounds of Arabic and does a fine job of maintaining the rhythm of the language throughout the novel, skillfully preserving the rhymes contained in the many proverbs Alharthi scatters throughout the book: "Morning or sunset, the beloved's loved ever, but no welcome for the other, though proud and clever."

It's in spite of all this that at times, a kind of lethargy creeps into Alharthi's storytelling, if not into the prose itself. As lovingly and as diligently put together as Celestial Bodies may be, the narrative isn't itself always engaging, to the extent that the dreamlike atmosphere conjured up by its creator begins to dissipate, along with the inclination to read on. Yet the book remains even in those instances a penetrating poetic examination of the peculiar strength of a place, of the complexity of relationships, of the power of the past to govern the future. At its best, Celestial Bodies feels like a winding stream in which you can immerse yourself entirely and be carried along, through time and place and the lives of highly distinctive, often contradictory, indisputably individual characters.