Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad Book

Published in another edition as "Naphthalene," this is a coming of age story set in Baghdad during the 1950s. The author reveals the experience of growing up female in impressionistic vignettes, sometimes soaring into sequences of magical realism. She opens a window for western readers into a Muslim world where women band together in their often sequestered lives, surviving in an alien patriarchy that both limits and emboldens them.

Huda, the young girl at the center of this story, is not easily intimidated by the circumstances of her world, growing up female, her mother dying of tuberculosis and her father a police officer whose moods swing wildly between sentimentality and violence, taking a second wife and deserting his family, sending his first wife away and leaving sister, son and daughter in the care of his mother. Huda's younger brother Adil, a sensitive soul, is lovingly drawn, and her young aunt waits for a proposal of marriage that comes from a man who also, it turns out, is given to desertion. There are portraits of Huda's friends, including a lame girl and a boy who wins her heart, only to be drawn into perilous political unrest.

The most memorable scene for me is her reunion with her father, an officer at the prison in Karbala, and then his coming undone as others are promoted before him. You get a sense of the mystery of men, who are driven in this culture by social forces that both elevate them above women and destroy them. Vivid in its descriptions of scenes and people, the book represents an attempt to capture memories, fixing them in the naphtalene (mothballs) of the title, as time and circumstances move on, changing everything forever.