A Calamity of Noble Houses

August 1, 2024

Ghenim's first novel to be translated into English (a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction) explores Tunisia's sociopolitical history from the 1930s to the present day, as 11 voices each tell their version of one momentous evening in 1935 whose effects reverberated across two families. Prepub Alert.

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November 25, 2024
Ghenim (The Yellow Dossier) offers an enthralling saga of two upper-class families linked by marriage and roiled by an explosive letter in 1935 Tunis. The contents of the note, smuggled to Zbaida Ali Rassaa in a package of bread by her former tutor, Tahar, remain a mystery throughout the novel, as 11 narrators recount their version of what happened leading up to and following the letter’s interception by Zbaida’s in-laws. Her father is forward-thinking enough to provide his twin daughters with an education in Arabic and French literature, but is aghast when Tahar, an intellectual from the lower classes who advocates for women’s rights, emerges as a potential suitor for Zbaida. In response, he arranges for her to marry Moshen, son of the conservative Ennaifer family. As Zbaida’s and Moshen’s families and servants weigh in, the reader learns how Zbaida’s reputation is irrevocably tainted and her fidelity questioned over the following decades. While the multiple narrators can make it challenging to keep track of the characters, Ghenim provides a rich backdrop with descriptions of Tunis’s culinary traditions and Tunisia’s fight for independence. Readers will be transported.

Starred review from December 1, 2024
The story of a fateful night. On December 7, 1935, two wealthy Tunisian families were torn apart when a young wife and mother was accused of adultery. In Tunisian novelist Ghenim's captivating narrative, translated by Faiza and McNeill, 11 of the characters involved recall an event that has continued to haunt them for decades, revealing in their confessions and testimonies a tangled web of lies, suspicions, and betrayals, as well as a society pervaded by homophobia, classism, antisemitism, and racism. French colonialism sparked social unrest and political upheaval. Medicine was undermined by superstition; jinns, demons, and ghouls abounded; and the evil eye, it was believed, could be diverted by a Black child's face. In a rabidly patriarchal society, the accused woman, Zbaida Rassaa, grew up in a relatively progressive family. Rare among Tunisian women, she and her sisters attended a French school, and to supplement their education, their father hired a young man to tutor them in Arabic and the Quran. That tutor, Tahar Haddad, a social reformer, wrote a book criticizing women's oppression under Islamic law and advocating for women's rights--a book that proved dangerously incendiary. For years, Zbaida and Tahar had been in love, but when he dared to ask for her hand, her father summarily married her off to Mohsen Ennaifer, the son of a staunchly conservative patriarch. "There's nothing in this life more harmful to women than trying to imitate men," Mohsen's father declared about the folly of educating women. Although the urbane, cosmopolitan Mohsen shared Zbaida's pleasure in theater and music, her feelings for Tahar were not quashed by marriage and motherhood. But were they ever lovers? Ghenim keeps the reader guessing, as she does her characters, with passion and anguish, disclosing devastating secrets of lives maliciously destroyed. A stirring, engrossing tale.

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