Another one for us girls

I seem to be on a real streak here. First it was Sex and the City (see film review below) and now, I’ve just finished The Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea. As the title suggests, it is all about 4 friends who are trying to gracefully make their way through the tangled weave that is modern love and life. Just as an aside, it’s interesting to note that four seems to be the new magical number for women’s groups in current literature and pop culture. Anyway, the lot of the Riyadh girls is complicated by the fact of that they are young modern Arabic women with strict cultural and religious traditions to contend with.
the stoyry unfolds through a series of emails sent every week after Friday prayers. The four girls are Gamrah, Michelle, Sadeem and Lamees and they are pretty much like other modern girls everywhere. They are preoccupied with finding their place in society and leaving their mark on it. Of course it goes without saying that they are deeply preoccupied with love, specifically the search and finding of the One. And maybe because I’ve just seen Sex and the City, but one of the girls predicament was so cannily echoed by Charlotte’s plaintive cry that she’d been dating since 15 and was tired of not finding the ONE! After all that’s been said and done, the search for the One seems to remain the Holy Grail for women. Though I’m sure there would others who would disagree with me.
What easily lifts this book out from the pile of easily dismissed chick lit genre is that it is one of the few books written by a distinctly modern Arabic female writer that is available to us non-Arabic readers. And if it seems that much emphasis is placed on the writer’s gender, it cannot be emphasized enough that it is a rare enough occasion that readers are treated to a an insider’s account (albeit a literary one) of women’s lives in a part of the world that remains veiled, pun unintended, to non Western eyes. If its only achievement is to open our eyes to the daily struggle, frustrations and even triumphs of young Arabic women, then it is more than enough. But as it is, the Girls of Riyadh is also funny, smart and well written with plenty of things to say about women that is worth listening to.