Changes

|reviewer=Andy Lancaster

|genre=Literary Fiction

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=978-1906697341

|pages=201

|publisher=Arabia Books

|date=October 2011

|website=

|video=

|summary=The best authors use their words to spin a web and inveigle the reader into a world which has its own logic, meaning and reality. Fadi Azzam does this and much more in a small gem of a novel located in in Druze village in Syria – a brilliant jewel of modern Middle Eastern fiction. If 'Sarmada' is in part the product of the Arab Spring, then we should be on the lookout for a feast of new literature about to reach our bookstores.

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'Sarmada' is small and remote village in the Northern hills of Syria, close to the Turkish border. And for much of Azzam's novel it seems a forgotten village, lost in the rituals and mysticism of ancient Druze belief and folk tales that inform the collective consciousness of the place. For the novel weaves the tales of three Syrian women and their relationships with each other, the men of their lives and the fabric of a life almost caught in the timeless past of the Middle East.

But in another sense, he helps us see the more than rational roots of Middle Eastern conflicts by revealing the swirling magical and metaphorical belief world, a state of mind in which events are never mere events but the workings of great forces beyond our understanding, where it would be possible to simultaneously believe in the iPad and the Great Shatan himself.

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[[Category: Fadi Azzam]]

[[Category: Adam Talib]]