Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs opens with the return of Khalid Bakhit, a government employee, to his hometown in Oman after a time away in the big city, and concludes with his return to the city with a new maturity born of a series of wrenching encounters with reality. Khalid’s return home, sparked by his flight from a painful love affair, coincides with events that reveal the force of long-established traditions that have a stranglehold on the town: from racial prejudice, to religious bigotry, to ossified patterns of leadership. Khalid’s awakening and transformation are catalyzed by his encounters with a certain ‘Saturnine poet’ who, in the course of chasing after an elusive ode, has stumbled upon this unnamed village. For a period of time ‘the Saturnine’ becomes Khalid’s closest companion: listening to his woes, helping him see himself with new eyes, and imparting to him a wisdom from a world beyond untainted by human smallness. ‘As the full moon listened in, Walad Sulaymi said, ‘Thirty years ago I heard my grandfather say to my father (God have mercy on them both), ‘If God allows a country to be chastised, He causes everyone who has left it to come back.’ So here you are again, and with your return, that completes the number of those who left the village and have come back. Mark my words: the chastisement will descend soon.»
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Abdulaziz Al Farsi was born in Shinas in the Sultanate of Oman in 1976. He graduated from medical school at Sultan Qaboos University in 2001. In 2006 he became a fellow in the British Royal Medical College in Edinburgh, and is currently a senior specialist in oncology at the National Oncology Centre at the Sultani Hospital in Muscat, Oman. He has been writing since 1998 and has had four short story collections published.
Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs
is his first novel. Nancy Roberts is the translator of Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour (AUC Press, 2007), for which she received a commendation in the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Translation. Her other recent translations include Naguib Mahfouz’s
Love in the Rain
(AUC Press, 2011) and
The Mirage
(AUC Press, 2009), and Ibrahim Nasrallah’s
Time of White Horses
(AUC Press, 2012).
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