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Latest Review: "The Diesel" by Thani Al-Suwaidi

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lili Sarayrah on Thani Al-Suwaidi’s The Diesel, which is translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins and available from ANTIBOOKCLUB.

Lili was in my publishing class last semester, studies at the Eastman School, and is working towards her certificate in literary translation.

This is the first ANTIBOOKCLUB book that we’ve reviewed, but they seem really interesting, and hopefully we’ll have a chance to cover them more in the not-too-distant future.

Here’s the opening of Lili’s review:

“Neighbor, what can I say? All the fake moans of this world rail against the toil of ephemeral things. My moans, however, rail against the insanity of their toil in a time that we ignore and that ignores us, a time that is paralyzed, hand and foot, and that consumes only the fruit of pride. While we live out our days, time laughs from inside a dance circle. Donʼt be afraid. Who knows? Perhaps it will transport us to another region of this existence. There we may confront time with just the same number of moans, which we will transmute to laughs until they die away. Why donʼt you say something?”

Thus ends the two-page-long first chapter of The Diesel, the shortest and most experimental Arabic text that I have ever read. It was published in Beirut in 1994 but didnʼt make it into English until 2012. Because of its extremely sensitive subject matter it was dubbed “the shock novel” by the Arab news station Al-Jazeera, and even though itʼs been nearly twenty years since it was published, The Diesel is still highly relevant to the state of Middle Eastern affairs today. The author, Al-Suwaidi, was born in the United Arab Emirates in 1966, and this first and only novella was written in between two poetry collections (the style of The Diesel is itself both poetic and disjointed). His words are compact and carefully chosen, but at the same time follow the protagonistʼs stream of consciousness. The author explains that his style “is based on the oral culture found in the region. Therefore we cannot say that this literature is essentially a new literature; we say instead that the novel constituted a revolution in popular storytelling.”

Our protagonist is a young boy who remains unnamed until he comes of age and develops his identity as a wildly famous transgender entertainer known as “the Diesel.” See? Controversial. The setting is a small traditional Arab village by the sea which is torn between the old way and the pull of the new generation as led by the Diesel himself. The plot is subtle and woven into so many layers of description that it takes a while to find it.

Click here to read the entire book.



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