Guernica Editions

It is the easiest thing in the world to write a story that poses no challenges, that follows the expected contours of narration. Modernists broke away from those conventions, and now, in a revived age of capitalist realism, we need new ways around the canonical formations. In “Hunter of Virgins” -- a story of repressed sexuality taken to bizarre extremes: we may call it contemporary Arab Gothic -- Eteraz constantly contravenes established discourses about gender, class, and social norms in Kuwaiti society, each time challenging us to rethink our own collaboration in these practices. There is a technically astute way to subvert expectations and a clumsier way, and what Eteraz does is to exploit the techniques of buildup, suspense, and thwarted plot development to take us in a wholly surprising direction from where the story starts out, a surprise that can then be read back to the beginning to lend retrospective urgency to what was calculatedly presented as meandering and hesitant. This is a very artful story that refuses to take the reader by the hand and comfort him, and displays the narrator’s resilient confidence in stopping and going, as though taking a dispassionate overview of the realist fictional landscape and suggesting many contingent ways of looking through it. Having long been an admirer of Eteraz’s writing, I am very gratified to witness his maturity as a fiction writer; I feel like he has big surprises up his sleeve and I look forward to being further enchanted.

Why does what we look like matter so much? Why do we seem more motivated to fix others versus ourselves? Why do we often have so little say over our own lives? These are just some of the quandaries explored in Ali Eteraz’s story, “A Beautiful Woman.” Set in Abu Dhabi and crackling with strangeness, “A Beautiful Woman” drops us into a chaotic, dangerous, and unjust microcosm with Samia at its center, a heretofore marginalized maid whose preferred mode of transportation is a miniature, motorized trike and whom hecklers have dubbed the Bandit Queen. With true empathy, I will remember Samia less as the Bandit Queen, however much I like that image and title, and more as the overlooked woman who, “in the recessed parts of her, where vestiges of femininity were still strong, she felt anguish.

Barry Hannah said that great fiction ‘Takes Us There.’ When you read Ali Eteraz’s brave, wonderful stories, you are transported by strength of detail, diction and image to a landscape that is at once both strange and familiar, fabulist and realist. The effect is that of being simultaneously on an island, in a desert, in gridlock traffic on a sandstorm-battered highway. You want to see how Eteraz imagines and re-imagines the worlds we live in now, and the worlds we’ve experienced in our dreams, in our pasts. If you like stories that challenge and delight, this is your book.

I have read "Volkodlak" several times … it’s fascinating and sensual, and a great exploration of ‘humanity’ in all senses of the word.