I don't really know anything about Oman. In fact, I had to look it up on a map to be certain of where it was. (I knew it was on the Arabian peninsula, but not the particular geography.) I certainly don't know anything about its history. I wouldn't say this was a handicap exactly when reading
Celestial Bodies, more that reading it made me aware of how completely outside my knowledge base Oman and its history are. I don't think I've ever read a book from a country I knew so little about, with the possible exceptions of Mauritius and Equatorial Guinea. Those, at least, I didn't have to look up on a map. (Though I did have to look up
Annobón, the island province of Equatorial Guinea where
By Night the Mountain Burns takes place.) In any case, somewhere I heard about
Celestial Bodies. I added it to my World Books List and forgot about it. And then it kept reasserting itself. I bought it - I thought! - on a whim one evening when I decided to order a bunch of books I'd never heard of on bookshop.org. Then when it arrived, I realized I had heard of it: it was already on my World Books List! Then, a couple days later, I saw that
Idlewild Books, which this year has been hosting a
Women In Translation book club had selected it as the June book for their club. Clearly, this book had been in the periphery of my vision for a little while and I just failed to make the connections. In any case, after finishing
This Is How It Always Is, I took a day off from reading. (I know: a day. But for me a day off is unusual, especially these days.) I was on the fence as to whether to go back to
The Famished Road right away (spoiler: after finishing
Celestial Bodies, I was again on the fence as to whether to go back to
The Famished Road right away; I did not). I decided it would be a good moment to start
Celestial Bodies and get it read in time for the Idlewild Book Club, should I decide to join.
The book feels very disjointed. It's a family drama spanning a bit over a hundred year period, told in short chapters focusing on various characters. One narrative recurs, is written in the first person and takes place in the present, while the rest are second person snippets from various points in the past, and yet that first person narrator somehow doesn't feel like the central character. Toward the end, I did understand a certain cohesion, and as I write this I see it almost more clearly. The celestial bodies of the book are the characters, the way they orbit and move around one another, sometimes drawing near, other times very remote. When I got this conceit (which is laid out pretty explicitly somewhere in the last 50 pages), I loved the idea. I saw, in retrospect, that there had been hints earlier, but I wish they had been a little stronger. Now, as I think about it, is the first person narrator like the sun? with all the other characters orbiting around him? I don't think that's quite it. It's not meant to be so heavy-handed, I think. More, it's an a way of understanding how human relationships actually work -- one I find very appealing.
