Sardines and Oranges: Short Stories from North Africa

by Peter Clark (Editor/Introduction), Mansoura Ez-Eldin

Twenty-six hard-hitting, passionate, moving, funny and human stories from North Africa by 21 authors from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia. Latifa Baqa, Ahmed Bouzfour, Rachida el-Charni, Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Dib, Tarek Eltayeb, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Gamal el-Ghitani, Said al-Kafrawi, Idriss el-Kouri, Ahmed el-Madini, Ali Mosbah, Hassouna Mosbahi, Muhammad Mustagab, Hassan Nasr, Rabia Raihane, Tayeb Salih, Habib Selmi, Izz al-Din Tazi and Mohammed Zefzaf. Many of these authors are major literary figures in their own countries, and the Arab world. They have broken with taboos and censorship, and established standards of innovation that have encouraged younger generations of authors. Pain, hardship, heartache, humour, identity, joy, loss and strategies for survival are universal themes and all are represented here, writes Peter Clark, who edited and introduces the stories, and is one of the thirteen translators of the volume.

Genres: Morocco

222 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2005

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Alex Dikelsky]

All of the stories are about North Africa, focusing on Morocco/Tunisia/Egypt in the 1960s to 2005 when the book was published, every story was published earlier in Banipal Magazine. This is a best of collection from that magazine. "The Flower Girl" was my favorite, about a woman who died, but no one knows her real background. "The Crop", about a group of urban people pranking rural farmers by pretending to be working at an international hotel, leading the farmers to lose their crops, was also great. The person writing the preface misinterpreted that story pretty seriously, I think he thought the urbanite's story was the truth. The last story had some great phrases, but I think some annotations or mentions in the preface would have been helpful.

> Over there myself and over there language, each claiming to master the other as each declares total independence. (Ahmed El-Madini, translated by Ayman El-Desouky in The Laws of Absence)

The other reviews on goodreads of this are bad. Saying the violence in some of the stories is "medieval" is wrong, in some stories 1980s Europeans were the ones doing the violence! We haven't "outgrown" violence in the US or Europe.

The letter spacing had major issues throughout, I think this was the press's first book after previously only releasing magazines.

[Janice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short stories, all have the same vibe whether from the translations, the original editing or publication magazine, regional style. Interesting in that it depicts a north african culture of 1990-2010.

[Kerry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really struggled to get through this anthology. In the end the medieval brutality and misogyny of these stories got the better of me and I just couldn't enjoy them. Looked at this book because it has been taught at my school but, in the end, nothing would make me use this in a classroom. Happy to send it back to the library!

[Laila Taji · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not convinced the translations are the best they could be but I really enjoyed reading the short stories and found a lot of the characters to be fascinating. They were on the whole a bit depressing but it was interesting to see the differences and similarities between the various Arab countries around North Africa.

[El Maghfour]

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