Zeina by Nawal El Saadawi – review

El Saadawi's training as a psychiatrist perhaps helped her to write this disturbing, oneiric novel in which the sanity of Bodour, a well-to-do Egyptian woman, gives way to frightening psychosis. As a young woman, Bodour gave birth to an illegitimate daughter and, to avoid ignominy, abandoned her on the streets of Cairo. Now guilt and regret have infected her mind and seem close to destroying it. The boldness of the narrative lies in El Saadawi's willingness to allow the suffocating unreality of Bodour's state of mind to take over. Dissociated, depersonalised, and returning constantly to the same obsessive tropes – genitalia, fat white fingers, rape, castration fantasies – her story is repetitive, non-linear, punishing. Beyond this specific madness one senses, overwhelmingly, the madness of an entire culture, sick to the core with religious hypocrisy, corrupt politics, rapacious men. Read this novel to grasp the bravery of El Saadawi's activism in Egypt or to learn more about her country than we saw on our TV screens this spring, but perhaps not for pleasure.