First Great Saudi Novel?

Included on our list of best translations of 2007, Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed got a nice review in the NY Sun this. In fact, Ben Lytal goes so far as to point to this as the “First Great Saudi Novel”:

Those Saudi novels that do get published — even those that must be published abroad — do not always serve the cause of literature. There is a thriving interest in the women of Saudi Arabia — because they suffer a rare degree of isolation under Sharia law, but also because there is something exotic about that isolation. Saudi critics have accused novels such as “The Girls of Riyadh” and memoirs such as “Single in Saudi” of pandering to a salacious Western audience.

Mr. Al-Mohaimeed, a sincere writer who claims Balzac and Dickens along with Dostoevsky as influences, wants to distinguish himself from those exoticizing Saudi writers who “are writing with the aim only of exciting the reader.” Serious writers worldwide would like to politic on behalf of “quality lit,” but only a few have a legitimate campaign. The “Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction,” published last year, contained only one Saudi writer, Abd al-Rahman Munif, who hardly ever lived there. Other Saudi authors, such as Ghazi Algosaibi, have tended to write about other places, Jordan or Cairo or Paris. Mr. Al-Mohaimeed, then, is an honest literary pioneer.