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juliadejong's review against another edition
3.0
Read for the second time for my BA thesis. Honestly don't know why I gave it 4 stars the last time I read it.
nikkimcgee's review against another edition
challenging
dark
sad
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
A relentless and brutal allegory about the abuse of religion and power in an Egyptian village.
Zakeya’s family are victims of the mayor’s sadistic control which is enabled by the leader of the local mosque, the head of the village guard and the barber. Politics, tradition and religion come together to abuse, terrorise and murder women.
I did find parts of this had to follow, it switches between perspectives and some chapters have a dream like other wording quality that are challenging to follow. This could be down to translation issues.
Religion fuels the abuse but also deadens the ability of the victims to fight back.
Zakeya’s family are victims of the mayor’s sadistic control which is enabled by the leader of the local mosque, the head of the village guard and the barber. Politics, tradition and religion come together to abuse, terrorise and murder women.
I did find parts of this had to follow, it switches between perspectives and some chapters have a dream like other wording quality that are challenging to follow. This could be down to translation issues.
Religion fuels the abuse but also deadens the ability of the victims to fight back.
agnesanka's review against another edition
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
nealadolph's review against another edition
4.0
As readers we like to imagine silly things of the writers whose books we read, like that Nawal El Sadaawi is somehow found in her language and her stories. I have no doubt that this is somewhat true, but it is an unusual conceit which, I suspect, writers often wish to separate themselves from. Now, I don’t think that it is necessarily untrue, but I think we must be careful to trust our judgements of people when we make judgements about their books.
Nonetheless I’m going to make some of those silly type of judgements about El Sadaawi - all of this based on reading one novella over a period of about ten days. It is not much information with which to determine a person’s character. But it will be good enough. El Sadaari is clear, precise, gentle, incisive. She views the world as she tells her stories, carefully, but economically. Like a wartime surgeon opening a body filled with unknown illnesses and wounds, she peels back the layers of her world knowing exactly what is out of place, exactly where things should be, exactly how things should operate, hoping to bring healing by extracting the shrapnel and letting each piece that she removes from the body tell it's individual story. The process of extracting these pieces is simple, artistic, nearly poetic, if surgeons can be poets and story tellers can be surgeons. The end result is a table of shrapnel, each piece uglier than the piece which preceded it, each one adding to the calamity of the body and the pain it felt, each making the history of injustice that much more hideous and difficult to accept.
El Sadaari writes about the pieces of shrapnel with attention to its magnitude and its relation to the other pieces which have entered the human body of history. None is necessarily more deadly than the others, but each piece is a scourge on the body and dramatically alters how justly it can operate. The patriarchy is prominent, as is class, as is age, and certainly government corruption and domination as well. But they are connected and related to each other, and all the more powerful for it. It is clear, as a result, that the human body of history is broken, damaged, and, as far as can be told in El Sadaari’s judgement, not going through a process of healing.
It is interesting to read this book so soon after having read Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood. For some reason I feel that a comparison between the two is necessarily, if only because they are from the same continent and because as readers from the West we often feel the need to construct some grand narrative across those thousands of miles. Both love their country, be it along the Nile or found in the hills of Kenya, and both describe their natural environment and the way it plays with the sun beautifully. Repetition in these descriptions for both is important, and I suspect this speaks to some localist claim of space and also of tradition. Both are clearly talking about injustices experienced by the common people of their nation, and both are clearly somewhat concerned with class, the patriarchy, and government corruption. To my recollection, though, El Sadaari writes about the problems of Egypt as being a product of something inherently human and Egyptian rather than a product of colonialism and neo-colonialism; Ngugi, on the other hand, discusses the relationship between Africa and Africans and the outside world a great deal while also pointing to the unfortunate treatment of Africans by Africans in the post-colonial era. Ngugi also writes at length about his ideas and characters, and the protagonists and their adventure become memorable as a result. This is largely because his goal is different - he is attempting to write an African epic. El Sadaawi is sparse, careful with her words, but writes beautifully about a broad swath of characters from this small and damaged community; Are they as memorable? Is the order of events as clear in my mind today? No. But some wonderful figures and horrific events remain.
After finishing this book I wrote this short paragraph about it on a literature forum that I try to contribute to on a semi-regular basis. I think it does a good job of outlining how I felt about this book after completing it, and the sense of power that still resonates with me more than a month later.
“Over the weekend I finished reading God Dies On The Nile by Nawal El-Sadaawi. She's an Egyptian writer, a feminist, and she's damned good at what she does - which is, quite simply, to extend humanism to include women (who are so easily and quickly forgotten by great white men who think egalitarianism means that they can forget about writing about them). It is a short novel, a mere 140 pages, but it packs a whole lot of content into it - sexual exploitation, gendered violence, capitalism, modernity, the class divide, corrupt politics. It sounds like a laundry list, but it isn't treated like one. They fold into each other subtly and carefully, creating a small but alarming web, and at a moment feeling as grand in scope and shape as something written for the ancient Greek stage but by somebody writing in a style similar to Camus. I'd definitely recommend her and this novel, and I hope to find some more of her work in English translation in due time. She may be a serious contender for the Nobel Prize.”
I'd like to end by acknowledging Aubrey, the moderator of a the 500 Great Books By Women group here on Goodreads. It is due to her tireless efforts in promoting the works of female authors that I knew to pick up this book when I recognized the author's name in a used book store. May I be so fortunate as to come across her work again.
Nonetheless I’m going to make some of those silly type of judgements about El Sadaawi - all of this based on reading one novella over a period of about ten days. It is not much information with which to determine a person’s character. But it will be good enough. El Sadaari is clear, precise, gentle, incisive. She views the world as she tells her stories, carefully, but economically. Like a wartime surgeon opening a body filled with unknown illnesses and wounds, she peels back the layers of her world knowing exactly what is out of place, exactly where things should be, exactly how things should operate, hoping to bring healing by extracting the shrapnel and letting each piece that she removes from the body tell it's individual story. The process of extracting these pieces is simple, artistic, nearly poetic, if surgeons can be poets and story tellers can be surgeons. The end result is a table of shrapnel, each piece uglier than the piece which preceded it, each one adding to the calamity of the body and the pain it felt, each making the history of injustice that much more hideous and difficult to accept.
El Sadaari writes about the pieces of shrapnel with attention to its magnitude and its relation to the other pieces which have entered the human body of history. None is necessarily more deadly than the others, but each piece is a scourge on the body and dramatically alters how justly it can operate. The patriarchy is prominent, as is class, as is age, and certainly government corruption and domination as well. But they are connected and related to each other, and all the more powerful for it. It is clear, as a result, that the human body of history is broken, damaged, and, as far as can be told in El Sadaari’s judgement, not going through a process of healing.
It is interesting to read this book so soon after having read Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood. For some reason I feel that a comparison between the two is necessarily, if only because they are from the same continent and because as readers from the West we often feel the need to construct some grand narrative across those thousands of miles. Both love their country, be it along the Nile or found in the hills of Kenya, and both describe their natural environment and the way it plays with the sun beautifully. Repetition in these descriptions for both is important, and I suspect this speaks to some localist claim of space and also of tradition. Both are clearly talking about injustices experienced by the common people of their nation, and both are clearly somewhat concerned with class, the patriarchy, and government corruption. To my recollection, though, El Sadaari writes about the problems of Egypt as being a product of something inherently human and Egyptian rather than a product of colonialism and neo-colonialism; Ngugi, on the other hand, discusses the relationship between Africa and Africans and the outside world a great deal while also pointing to the unfortunate treatment of Africans by Africans in the post-colonial era. Ngugi also writes at length about his ideas and characters, and the protagonists and their adventure become memorable as a result. This is largely because his goal is different - he is attempting to write an African epic. El Sadaawi is sparse, careful with her words, but writes beautifully about a broad swath of characters from this small and damaged community; Are they as memorable? Is the order of events as clear in my mind today? No. But some wonderful figures and horrific events remain.
After finishing this book I wrote this short paragraph about it on a literature forum that I try to contribute to on a semi-regular basis. I think it does a good job of outlining how I felt about this book after completing it, and the sense of power that still resonates with me more than a month later.
“Over the weekend I finished reading God Dies On The Nile by Nawal El-Sadaawi. She's an Egyptian writer, a feminist, and she's damned good at what she does - which is, quite simply, to extend humanism to include women (who are so easily and quickly forgotten by great white men who think egalitarianism means that they can forget about writing about them). It is a short novel, a mere 140 pages, but it packs a whole lot of content into it - sexual exploitation, gendered violence, capitalism, modernity, the class divide, corrupt politics. It sounds like a laundry list, but it isn't treated like one. They fold into each other subtly and carefully, creating a small but alarming web, and at a moment feeling as grand in scope and shape as something written for the ancient Greek stage but by somebody writing in a style similar to Camus. I'd definitely recommend her and this novel, and I hope to find some more of her work in English translation in due time. She may be a serious contender for the Nobel Prize.”
I'd like to end by acknowledging Aubrey, the moderator of a the 500 Great Books By Women group here on Goodreads. It is due to her tireless efforts in promoting the works of female authors that I knew to pick up this book when I recognized the author's name in a used book store. May I be so fortunate as to come across her work again.
myatrietley's review
I DIDN'T READ THE ENTIRE BOOK (3 NOVELS). I JUST READ GOD DIES BY THE NILE AND WILL THEREFORE NOT GIVE THIS BOOK AN OVERALL STAR RATING.
GDbtN: 4/5 stars. The only thing I didn't like was that I was confused the entire time on the characters, but other than that, it was very moving and well written! And I shall be reading the other novels in this at some point.
GDbtN: 4/5 stars. The only thing I didn't like was that I was confused the entire time on the characters, but other than that, it was very moving and well written! And I shall be reading the other novels in this at some point.
xterminal's review against another edition
3.0
Nawal el Saadawi, God Dies by the Nile (Zed, 1974)
Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian doctor, feminist, and activist, has written close to thirty books, spent time in prison for being a subversive, and for more than forty years has been a leader of progressive thinking in Egypt. So why is she almost unknown in America? I'm not entirely sure anyone can answer that question completely. Better to just try and correct the problem.
God Dies by the Nile, originally published in Egypt in 1974, is the story of a family living across the street from the mayor of the peasant village of Kafr el Teen, along the banks of the Nile. We learn early on that the Mayor is a nasty fellow, and with his three cronies (the village doctor, the Captain of the Guard, and the head of the mosque), he controls all the power in the village. Needless to say, he uses this power for the most corrupt of ends.
Zakeya is the titular head of the family across the street. Four years ago, her son Galal went off to fight at Suez, and has never been heard from again. Her brother, a widower, and his two daughters, Nefissa and Zeinab, live with Zakeya. The four of them work in the fields, as does everyone else in the village, until a summons comes from the Mayor: if Nefissa will work in his house as a maid, he will pay the family an almost unimaginable sum per month. Nefissa goes. All this happens before the beginning of the story (but it's better than doing the synopsis on the back of the Zed paperback, which is truly a synopsis--right up to the final chapter, a spoiler extraordinaire). After Nefissa runs away, the Mayor becomes taken with Zeinab, and the whole painful cycle begins again.
God Dies by the Nile is worth reading to the American reader for the same reasons as most other African novels: to get a sense of how similar we are in our cultures despite the various differences in them. Apart from that, while the writing is a tad on the clunky side (this could easily be a problem of translation rather than the original work), the book, which clocks in at a slight 108 pages, is an easy and somewhat compelling read in the vein of classical metatragedy ("meta-" in that the agents of tragedy here are human, and thus the protagonists can do something about them). El Saadawi's characters are wonderfully drawn, for the most part, and the differences in culture mean little when characters are drawn in this detail; you get a feel for the body language of the characters, and what it means, even if it is unfamiliar to you. In this is the book's largest weakness; el Saadawi is so excellent at drawing these characters and showing us their feelings and motivations that when she reiterates them explicitly, she's redoing a job she's already done very well, and so the book tends to slow with repetition now and again. Still, that makes it no less pleasurable, if a story this tragic can be in any way pleasurable. ***
Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian doctor, feminist, and activist, has written close to thirty books, spent time in prison for being a subversive, and for more than forty years has been a leader of progressive thinking in Egypt. So why is she almost unknown in America? I'm not entirely sure anyone can answer that question completely. Better to just try and correct the problem.
God Dies by the Nile, originally published in Egypt in 1974, is the story of a family living across the street from the mayor of the peasant village of Kafr el Teen, along the banks of the Nile. We learn early on that the Mayor is a nasty fellow, and with his three cronies (the village doctor, the Captain of the Guard, and the head of the mosque), he controls all the power in the village. Needless to say, he uses this power for the most corrupt of ends.
Zakeya is the titular head of the family across the street. Four years ago, her son Galal went off to fight at Suez, and has never been heard from again. Her brother, a widower, and his two daughters, Nefissa and Zeinab, live with Zakeya. The four of them work in the fields, as does everyone else in the village, until a summons comes from the Mayor: if Nefissa will work in his house as a maid, he will pay the family an almost unimaginable sum per month. Nefissa goes. All this happens before the beginning of the story (but it's better than doing the synopsis on the back of the Zed paperback, which is truly a synopsis--right up to the final chapter, a spoiler extraordinaire). After Nefissa runs away, the Mayor becomes taken with Zeinab, and the whole painful cycle begins again.
God Dies by the Nile is worth reading to the American reader for the same reasons as most other African novels: to get a sense of how similar we are in our cultures despite the various differences in them. Apart from that, while the writing is a tad on the clunky side (this could easily be a problem of translation rather than the original work), the book, which clocks in at a slight 108 pages, is an easy and somewhat compelling read in the vein of classical metatragedy ("meta-" in that the agents of tragedy here are human, and thus the protagonists can do something about them). El Saadawi's characters are wonderfully drawn, for the most part, and the differences in culture mean little when characters are drawn in this detail; you get a feel for the body language of the characters, and what it means, even if it is unfamiliar to you. In this is the book's largest weakness; el Saadawi is so excellent at drawing these characters and showing us their feelings and motivations that when she reiterates them explicitly, she's redoing a job she's already done very well, and so the book tends to slow with repetition now and again. Still, that makes it no less pleasurable, if a story this tragic can be in any way pleasurable. ***
ld2's review against another edition
2.0
The story itself was powerful. It looked at the ways that people who are poorer or in a lower position of power are manipulated and taken advantage of, how easily their lives can be ruined by the greedy and power hungry. I did not enjoy the prose style. The author had too many dream sequences that became tedious to read and really didn't add anything to the story.