BITTER ORANGE TREE

Alharthi, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for Celestial Bodies (2019), uses a dreamlike, nonlinear structure to show how the complications faced by a young Omani woman studying abroad merge with her remorse-filled memories of her very traditional surrogate grandmother.

While Zuhour spends her days interacting with a coterie of international students at a university in a cold, unnamed English city, her nights are full of dreams concerning Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour calls grandmother although she was actually a distant relation. Brought into the family home by Zuhour’s real grandparents, Bint Aamir helped raise Zuhour’s father, Mansour, who was her great love, and then Zuhour and her siblings. Zuhour is haunted by regret that she never said a formal goodbye before she left Oman; Bint Aamir died soon after. Zuhour remembers Bint Aamir’s hard, lonely life—she was abandoned in childhood, permanently blinded in one eye, her one possibility of marriage thwarted, living in constant service to others without family, land, or possessions of her own—in bits of memory that merge with Zuhour’s own present life. So Zuhour’s description of Bint Aamir’s ruined eyesight slides into Zuhour’s own “still misty and blurred” sight. In talking about her own life, Zuhour is not a fully trustworthy narrator; her feelings toward Bint Aamir and the past she envisions for the dead woman reflect her own confused emotions surrounding her Pakistani friend Kuhl. Kuhl is passionately involved with fellow medical student Imran, although her wealthy, cosmopolitan parents would never approve of the match because Imran comes from a family of peasant farmers. Zuhour likes to think of herself bonded with Kuhl and Imran, but it is not a neat triangle. Attracted to Imran and perhaps to Kuhl as well, Zuhour remains shut outside their love for each other. The parallel of Zuhour’s and Bint Aamir’s lonely outsider status echoes through Zuhour’s never-ending dreams and thoughts.

Nostalgia and longing conveyed through abstract metaphors and interior dialogue.