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Seen through the eyes of a strong-willed and perceptive young girl, Naphtalene beautifully captures the atmosphere of Baghdad in the 1940s and 1950s. Through her rich and lyrical descriptions, Alia Mamdouh vividly recreates a city of public steam baths, roadside butchers, and childhood games played in the same streets where political demonstrations against British colonialism are beginning to take place. At the heart of the novel is nine-year-old Huda, a girl whose fiery, defiant nature contrasts sharply with her own inherent powerlessness. Through Mamdouh's strikingly inventive use of language, Huda's stream-of-consciousness narrative expands to take in the life not only of a young girl and her family, but of her street, her neighborhood, and her country.
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Reviews
"Describes in poetic, incantatory language the city's domestic life . . . [and] around this private world swirl the politics of the 1950s in Iraq."
New York Times Book Review
"Employs shifts of narrative perspective and a sophisticated technique in this affectionate but critical dissection of her culture. . . . [Naptalene] is a pungent, episodic glimpse of childhood in a patriarchal society . . . often intense and lyrical."
Kirkus
"Mamdouh's prose is at once lush and refreshingly earthy . . . she anchors her tale with a spirited and highly sympathetic narrator coming of age in a Baghdad long gone."
Publishers Weekly