The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-25)

C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, MAY 25 , 2022

book world

existence.

Adelmann isn’t the first modern

author to take on old-fashioned fairy

tales, but her spins on “Bluebeard,”

“Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,”

“Hansel and Gretel” and

“Rumpelstiltskin” in “How to Be Eaten”

have to be some of the most inventive.

The conceit: Bernice, Ruby, Ashlee,

Gretel and Raina have been invited to

group sessions by their therapist, Will.

Fortified by coffee and store-bought

cookies, they each tell their story,

although not without plenty of

intragroup commentary.

Bernice details her affair with and

escape from Bluebeard, here a tech

billionaire whose pride in his distinctive

furnishings conceals grotesque habits.

Ruby won’t take off her nasty, matted fur

coat regardless of the weather, while

Ashlee’s reality-TV engagement

introduces a Prince Charming whose

post-marriage habits verge on the

slovenly. Gretel insists that she and her

brother found a candy house in the

woods, but it’s possible they were simply

taken in by an abusive neighborhood

woman. And Raina? Well, Raina’s help

from someone she calls “Little Man”

results in her life’s work, but the scenario

isn’t playing out the way she had

planned.

Each narrative has a strangeness

heightened by twists and modern details,

including the couture cake Bluebeard has

delivered to Bernice’s house, Gretel’s

lifelong eating disorder and Ashlee’s

constant drunkenness while

participating in “The One” TV show.

Adelmann wants us to reconsider stories

we think we know inside out and see the

inequity and terror we’ve ingested from

fairy tales. Her most fiendish trick may be

one that she shows to the reader long

before the characters learn it — an

important reminder not to take anything

at face value.

Saint, Michalski and Adelmann share

a certain feminist outlook in these three

literary retellings. And while their

perspectives vary, they all focus more on

how women learn to live their lives rather

than on the wrongs they have endured.

That’s not to say the authors shy away

from characters who do wrong, rather

that, in these books, built on other books,

new possibilities for old stories create

unique paths for historical characters.

Bethanne Patrick is the editor, most recently,

of “The Books That Changed My Life:

Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians

and Other Remarkable People.”

Literary Calendar

THURSDAY | 7 P.M. Marie Myung-Ok Lee

discusses “The Evening Hero” with John

Darnielle, streamed through P&P Live,

politics-prose.com/events. Free.

Literary retellings can be either

lighthearted fan fiction or classics in

their own right, running the gamut from

Jean Rhys’s brilliant “Wide Sargasso Sea,”

inspired by “Jane Eyre,” to Seth Grahame-

Smith’s pulpy “Pride and Prejudice and

Zombies.”

Readers can find different tones in this

spring’s crop of retellings, too. The three

novels here include a powerful glimpse of

ancient Greece in “Elektra,” by Jennifer

Saint; a dark inversion of J.M. Barrie’s

“Peter Pan” in “Darling Girl,” by Liz

Michalski; and a wild feminist take on

fairy tales in “How to Be Eaten,” by Maria

Adelmann.

“Elektra” starts a bit slowly. After all,

Saint (also the author of 2021’s “Ariadne”)

has to introduce three intense women

with complicated backstories:

Clytemnestra, wife of warrior

Agamemnon; their daughter, Elektra,

who seeks to escape the curse on her

family’s house; and Cassandra, a Trojan

princess whose prophesies are largely

ignored. Explaining the various

relationships, battlefields and ancient

traditions takes time but proves useful. If

you were ever confused after learning

about these characters and their stories

in school, you won’t be once “Elektra”

speeds up and dives into the action.

Aeschylus’s “Oresteia,” the trilogy of

Greek tragedies that features all three

women (though they appear in other

ancient stories, too), contains as many

murders as a season of “The Sopranos.”

Saint’s take on her source material is

serious and forthright. She doesn’t

minimize the violence and aggression

between opposing societies Mycenae and

Troy, but she makes space to highlight

how the historical systems affect women

in different positions, and how their

sometimes-dark deeds underscore their

need for change. Although

Clytemnestra’s sister, the famous Helen

of Troy, makes a few appearances, the real

action in “Elektra” belongs to schemers

and dreamers.

There’s plenty of scheming and

dreaming in Michalski’s “Darling Girl: A

Novel of Peter Pan,” as well. Protagonist

Holly Darling is the granddaughter of

Wendy, the girl whose life was changed

by meeting Peter Pan, the boy who never

grew up. Holly, whose mother founded a

luxury skin-care line, is on the cusp of

making that brand’s coveted “Pixie Dust”

into a global bestseller when she’s

notified of an emergency involving her

daughter, Eden. That crisis will upend

her deal’s closure and jeopardize the life

of her handsome and talented son, Jack.

It’s tough to decide how much to reveal

about this book, because one if its

strengths lies in how masterfully the

author twists Barrie’s ideas. Peter,

Tinkerbell and the Captain are all here,

but they’re not exactly the characters you

remember, and the setting is far darker.

In this world, people steal from the sick

to maintain youth, fairies shuffle around

looking like unwashed goths, and dreams

can quickly turn into nightmares. But

Michalski’s writing moves light as a

specter between moments of pain and

action, keeping readers breathless in an

enchanted race to find out who will

receive the true gift: ordinary mortal

REMAKES

by Bethanne Patrick

together. It’s a process that continually

consoles and torments her. “I would

sometimes forget that she had died,”

Zuhour says, inspiring a new wave of

sorrow. “She had died, gone silent, left

the world as she lived in it, without a

home, without a field, without a beloved

to hold her close, without a brother to

take care of her, and never having had

children who came out of her own body.”

If “Bitter Orange Tree” has a weakness,

it’s this emphasis on the narrator’s static

grief, which may tax readers’ sympathy

and then exceed their interest. But fortu-

nately, the swirling current of the narra-

tive pushes against the narrow confines

of Zuhour’s extravagant mourning. In the

undulating rhythms of this story, we’re

repeatedly drawn into the early details of

Bint Aamir’s life as a woman in Oman.

Thrown out of her father’s house at 13

and partially blinded by an herbal treat-

ment, Bint Aamir survived shocking

poverty and subsisted only on her wits

and determination. From the fog of these

harrowing years, anecdotes arise with

arresting clarity.

Subjected to such a precarious exis-

tence, all Bint Aamir ever wanted was

“her own little plot of land to till,” but

that was not to be. Instead, a kind

relative on her mother’s side took her

into his house, and there she lived into

her 80s. The life that Alharthi describes

is one of almost saintly self-abnegation.

Not quite a servant nor a guest, Bint

Aamir nonetheless assumes the house-

hold chores and cares for her hosts’ child

and then grandchildren, which include

Zuhour.

Bint Aamir was no masochist, but

there’s a masochistic element to Zuhour’s

ruminations. Every memory of Bint

Aamir’s tireless devotion reminds the

young narrator again how cavalierly she

treated her adopted grandma. Zuhour’s

thoughtlessness was nothing but the

typical cruelty of youth — those blissful

years when “what we had was certainty

and contentment and pleasure in life” —

but she’s haunted by how repulsed she

was by Bint Aamir’s aging body, how

impatient with her wandering mind.

What would it really have cost, she

berates herself, to have responded more

kindly to Bint Aamir’s little requests or to

acknowledge the woman’s tireless care

before heading off to college?

Between the leaves of that mournful

story of recrimination and retrospection,

Alharthi gently explores Zuhour’s trou-

bled life in Britain. The picture is ellipti-

cal and impressionistic. We catch mostly

glimpses — a college party with bad

snacks, Chinese students laughing in the

dorm. But what becomes clear is that

Zuhour has fallen in love with her best

friend’s husband, an anxious Pakistani

man who seems equally uncomfortable

in England. The agony of x unquenchable

desire creates a weird emotional triangle

that keeps her vacillating between “the

fear of abandonment and the dread of

togetherness.”

“I was longing to tell the two of them

how much I loved them,” Zuhour says.

“But I couldn’t. I was frozen in my

torment, tongue-tied in my destiny.”

Aside from how emotionally painful

that sounds, frozen in torment and

tongue-tied in destiny are particularly

challenging conditions to sustain in a

novel, which demands at least a modi-

cum of dynamic movement. Zuhour

hints at the same problem when she

describes her sessions with a campus

therapist as futile. With perfectly West-

ern optimism, a British friend assures

her that “there was a solution to every

problem, even sadness.” But to Zuhour,

“sadness is not an illness” to be cured.

She cannot express to her therapist the

way she feels “bound to a wheelchair that

was language’s incapacity to fully express

me.”

That awkward metaphor goes a long

way toward suggesting why this exqui-

sitely sensitive novel spins its wheels

without going anywhere.

Ron Charles writes about books for The

Washington Post.

HAILEY HAYMOND/THE WASHINGTON POST

BITTER

ORANGE TREE

By Jokha

Alharthi,

translated from

Arabic by

Marilyn Booth

Catapult.

224 pp. $26

BY RON CHARLES

I

n 2019, Omani author Jokha Alhar-

thi won the International Booker

Prize for “Celestial Bodies.” Her

multifaceted generational story,

translated from the Arabic by Mari-

lyn Booth, offered English readers a rare

look at Omani literature, particularly

Omani fiction by a woman. Indeed, amid

the surge of international attention gen-

erated by the U.K. award, Alharthi noted,

“People were surprised by the book, and

some even said they had no idea a

country named Oman existed.”

The second of Alharthi’s novels to be

translated into English, “Bitter Orange

Tree,” arrives this month and should find

a primed and better-informed audience.

As before, the author continues to dem-

onstrate a deep sympathy for the ways

women suffer and survive the vicissi-

tudes of a society that gives them little

agency. And fans will recognize Alhar-

thi’s fluid treatment of chronology and

setting, once again gorgeously translated

by Booth.

Alharthi, who earned a Ph.D. at the

University of Edinburgh and now teach-

es in Oman, can simultaneously empha-

size the universality of her characters’

feelings and the unique cultural context

of their experiences. “Bitter Orange Tree”

is a story of mourning and alienation,

and Alharthi has developed a tone that

captures that sense of being suspended

in the timelessness of grief.

The heroine is a young Omani woman

named Zuhour studying at an unnamed

British university. Her adventure in the

West should be a period of excitement

and discovery, but Zuhour is caught

between past and present, Britain and

Oman. Her displacement confronts us in

the novel’s very first words. On a snowy

morning in her dorm room, she tells us,

“I open my eyes suddenly and see her

fingers.” Those fingers, described in al-

most grotesquely intimate detail, be-

longed to Bint Aamir, a woman Zuhour

regarded as her grandmother. She was

the only person who ever showed Zuhour

unconditional affection, and that belated

realization produces some of the novel’s

most beautiful lines of tribute:

“Her love just seemed there, simple,

like the air that meant I could breathe,

without thinking about it; given freely

and generously, bestowed as the sun

gives its light, freely enough to allow me

to see my way ahead. Her love had to be

deserved, it was true; but it left no

obligation. My grandmother never made

me feel — or made my father or brother

or sister feel — that we were in debt to

her. We deserved her as we deserve to be

alive, and breathing, and turning our

faces to the sun.”

Now, lonely and grieving, far from her

family, Zuhour is transfixed by her loss of

Bint Aamir. “I had gone. And then she

had gone,” Zuhour says, suggesting a

grim correspondence between their de-

partures — one geographical, the other

existential. Convinced she didn’t express

her appreciation sufficiently while the

old woman was alive, Zuhour keeps

combing through memories of their time

The grief

consumes

her (and

her story)

BY RON CHARLES

In the wake of a recent mass shooting

in which Payton Gendron allegedly

killed 10 Black people in Buffalo, Ameri-

ca has suddenly discovered “the great

replacement theory.” Or, worse, we’ve

discovered that an alarming number of

us share Gendron’s belief in it. According

to an AP-NORC poll, “nearly half of

Republicans agree to at least some extent

with the idea that there’s a deliberate

intent to ‘replace’ native-born Americans

with immigrants.”

Since the Buffalo massacre, conserva-

tives like New York congresswoman

Elise Stefanik and Fox News’s Tucker

Carlson have been indignantly explain-

ing why their fervent promotion of great

replacement theory has nothing to do

with great replacement theory.

But efforts to find the source of this

conspiracy are misleading. It didn’t re-

cently slither out from some neo-Nazi

message board on the dark web. The

claim that “legitimate” Americans are

being systematically replaced by non-

White immigrants has deep roots in U.S.

political culture that’s echoed in litera-

ture, particularly in the character of Tom

Buchanan.

Early in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s master-

piece, “The Great Gatsby,” we meet Tom

at his grand mansion in East Egg. He’s

agitated, as though he’s just finished

watching an hour of Fox News:

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” Tom

tells his startled guests. “I’ve gotten to be

a terrible pessimist about things. Have

you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Em-

pires’ by this man Goddard?... It’s a fine

book, and everybody ought to read it.

The idea is if we don’t look out the white

race will be — w ill be utterly submerged.

It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

It’s clear that Fitzgerald thinks Tom’s

little learning is a dangerous thing. Daisy

openly mocks him: “Tom’s getting very

profound,” she sighs. “He reads deep

books with long words in them.”

Tom barrels on: “It’s up to us, who are

the dominant race, to watch out or these

other races will have control of things.”

In her illuminating study “So We Read

On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came to Be

and Why It Endures,” Maureen Corrigan

explains that Fitzgerald is satirizing

Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 bestseller, “The

Rising Tide of Color Against White

World-Supremacy” and a popular 1916

book that Stoddard relied on, “The

Passing of the Great Race,” by Madison

Grant.

To read Stoddard’s book, as I did last

week (you owe me), is to endure a racist

screed of pseudoscience, faulty history

and economic bunk designed to spur

White people to resist dilution of their

precious genetic purity. The content is

dully disgusting, but what’s most alarm-

ing is the currency of the book’s panicked

tone. Though written a century ago, this

is essentially the Trump-Fox playbook: a

xenophobic jeremiad gassed up with

numbingly repetitive fear-mongering:

“We stand at a crisis — the supreme

crisis of the ages,” Stoddard announces

with his typically grandiose rhetoric.

“Unless we set our house in order, the

doom will sooner or later overtake us

all.”

“One fact should be clearly under-

stood: if America is not true to her own

race soul, she will inevitably lose it, and

the brightest star that has appeared

since Hellas” — Stoddard loves the en-

slaving Greeks — “will fall like a meteor

from the human sky, its brilliant radi-

ance fading into the night.”

Daisy just rolled her eyes at such

claptrap, and Nick was too polite to

object. But here we are in 2022 comfort-

ing fresh victims of this vile paranoia.

“So we beat on, boats against the current,

borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

This article was excerpted from our free Book

Club newsletter. To subscribe, visit wapo.st/

booknewsletter.

The Tucker

Carlsons of

the Jazz Age

ILHAM ALHARTHI

“Bitter Orange Tree” is the

second novel by p rizewinning

Omani writer Jokha Alharthi.