Lina: A Portrait of a Damascus Girl.

Boullata, Issa J.

Samar Attar is a well-known Syrian poet, literary critic, and novelist who currently teaches Arabic language and literature at the University of Sydney in Australia. Although she has several English and Arabic books to her credit, Lina is her first novel published originally in Arabic (Beirut, 1982) and translated by the author herself into English. The translation was done on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1990-91 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The novel consists of three chapters of unequal length: "Childhood" (51 pages), "Adolescence" (127 pages), and "Womanhood" (45 pages), in which the life of a Damascene girl named Lina is portrayed against the changing social and political background of Syria in the 1950s. The chapters are laid out in sections separated from one another by three stars, each section describing a particular scene or incident. The mode of narration is linear, and although the sections are not always thematically connected, the accumulating scenes and incidents build up the novel's movement, serving as a plot. Lina is mostly a passive observer -- in fact, she does not begin to say anything until about the middle of the novel. But her thoughts and feelings are made known to the reader by an omniscient narrator, sometimes recording her daydreams and imagined flights to other climes and historical periods.

In her middle-class family, Lina's brother dominates after the death of her father, but an elder sister, Rima, resists and rebels. In the classroom, first at school and later at university, the authority of the teacher is supreme. In politics and religion as well as in social mores, constraint and repression are the rule. Lina joins a communist cell but does not find satisfaction in it. Neither does she find satisfaction in a love relationship, on account of the male attempt at domination. In the end Lina decides to leave Damascus, as her sister Rima has done before her.

The reader meanwhile is treated to vividly described scenes from Damascene life and traditions in the 1950s and is made to feel the suffocating atmosphere of an autocratic regime and a repressive society. Samar Attar's language is as rich in English as it is in the original Arabic, and her translation is accurate and sensitive. The printed text, however, could have had the benefit of a careful editor. For example, General De Gaulle is referred to as General De Gaul (page 87); the Soviet leader Bulganin is called Bolganin (165); Karl Marx's book Capital is named The Capital (85, 97); al-Mu`tamid, the eleventh-century Arab ruler of Seville, is erroneously said to be the Caliph of Granada (97); Ali Baba is made to enter the cave of seventy thieves (61), not that of the famous forty. Lapses in English are left glaring: eg., "she lay her head on the pillow" (9), "lest the land becomes desolate" (137), "breasts dangling to her naval" (156), "an uneasy air hang about the room" (170), "a tourist with fair goatee" (181), "there was a plenty of time" (181), and "what a nonsense" (193). Other errors include misspellings such as "occured" (206) or slips like "Adam apple" (173) for "Adam's apple" and "Chinese plates" (52, 118, 179) for "china" the usual porcelain tableware. In the four-page chronology appended to the novel, the Egyptian Revolution is wrongly dated July 1955 instead of July 1952.