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language: Arabic (English tr. Sawad Hussain)
country: Algeria
year: 2017
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 20.12.24-21.12.24
Djamila Morani’s The Djinn’s Apple (translated by Sawad Hussain) is an odd and engaging little book; I’ve seen it described as “YA”, and I see where that’s coming from, although it seems to me to be straddling the boundary between YA and adult a bit.
it’s a historical novel with a mild fantastic element set in Baghdad during the caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, following Nardeen, the daughter of a Barmakid who turned his back on his family and high politics to become a doctor but was murdered (with the rest of Nardeen’s family) anyway. Nardeen is taken in by Muallim Ishaq, a prominent doctor, who teaches her (almost) everything he knows about medicine and attempts to guide her in her quest for vengeance on Al-Aasefi, the man who ordered the murder of her family. Nardeen finds herself tangled up in a network of relationships that she must unravel in order to fully understand her own history and — maybe — to build a future with the young man she’s falling in love with.
Nardeen’s narration is lively — she’s clearly speaking from some time later in her life, and the narration moves freely between tenses and moods: present when she feels the past as something immediate, past when she feels it as past; pensive and melancholy when she is musing on the vicissitudes of life and the way she becomes trapped in a complex political web, personable and even effusive when she’s thinking about her love of reading and the practice of medicine.
the plot feels at times a bit like an afterthought, but I didn’t mind it — the resolution was satisfying though perhaps a bit rushed. the heart of the novel is really Nardeen’s relationships — with the memory of her family, with Muallim Ishaq, and with Suhaib, the young man she’s falling in love with — and its handling of the politics she’s surrounded by. Morani does a good job not getting too bogged down in the Abbasid political context of the suppression of the Barmakids and keeping the focus narrowly on Nardeen’s immediate family and the tensions between Ishaq and Al-Aasefi. it’s a fairly dark book — it does very much begin with Nardeen’s entire family being murdered in the night.
the one not exactly red flag but thing that raised my eyebrows is that Ishaq has a Jewish neighbor who’s portrayed as a demanding busybody who gets offended when — for example — Nardeen works on a Saturday. she does ultimately come around to Nardeen (who learns to accommodate Jewish religious observances to some extent), but it felt a bit odd — out of place, I would say, more than anything else.
the translation is fine; I think Hussain’s translation of Edo’s Souls was better. this felt a bit clunky at times, and in particular it suffers from a common translation problem, namely, sticking much too closely to the original language’s punctuation regardless of the rules for punctuation in English. still, in spite of this it was an enjoyable, quick read — if the premise sounds interesting to you I’d say it’s worth a look!
moods: dark, reflective