"I'm in Abu Dhabi," I wrote. "What should I do?"
"Go to the mall," suggested Ed's text.
That didn't sound very cultural. "So apart from the mall, what would you do in Abu Dhabi?"
"Cry!" advised the best-travelled person I know. "Well no. Go to the beach at one of the posh hotels. Or take a cab to Dubai."
Ed's unkind diagnosis seems to be the standard one. Abu Dhabi is a place where, until very recently, there was no there there. Now there's some there there, but the there there is a bunch of luxury hotels and a conference centre the size of Switzerland and a 44-lane motorway and an unimaginable forest of cranes in perpetual motion, building more hotels and conference centres and motorways and cranes. It's a place, runs the general say-so, that makes Las Vegas look like Ruskin's Venice.
It was culture that brought me here, too: the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair and the second International Prize for Arabic Fiction—or "Arabic Booker" as it is inevitably known.
The IPAF is, necessarily perhaps, an Arabic prize that looks somewhat westward. The novel is a relatively new form in Arabic, and a western import—though, as one of the judges reminded me, it's not as if the language lacks a tradition of long-form storytelling. Its cachet comes in large part from its association with Britain's Booker foundation.
The panel of judges was international, academically high-powered and—to allay the possibility of lobbying or improper influence—secret until the shortlist was announced. In every speech on the night it was striking how strongly, as if anxiously, "transparency" and "integrity" were stressed.
After all, this was a prize intended—as Booker's Jonathan Taylor put it—to reward literary merit "regardless of nationality, religion, politics, gender or age": a tall order in a language community where nearly every one of those issues is violently schismatic. This year's shortlist included two Egyptians, a Jordanian, a Tunisian, a Syrian and, in the shape of Inaam Kachachi, an Iraqi—and a woman, at that.
It's possible to admire and applaud a prize like the IPAF while still wondering, in a friendly way, what it's for. Is the prize intended primarily to introduce Arabic fiction to a wider Anglophone (and international) audience—or to broaden its Arabic-reading public? The question, too, is what Arabic publishing world? The hubs of Arabic-language publishing are Beirut and Cairo, where speech is in most respects free. But readers are scarce—a print run of 2,000-3,000, for an Arabic novel, is a big one—distribution is tricky, and there are local censorship issues. Piracy is a problem, too.
So recognition of any sort for these writers is a start. So, too, is getting paid. The short-listed Syrian Fawaz Haddad wrote 14 novels before he got published. The Tunisian-born novelist Habib Selmi, talking about the importance of IPAF, said: "The writer needs to feel that someone likes his work." Arabic novelists seem to need to come equipped with the sort of sense of vocation that you find elsewhere only in serially unpublished epic poets.
The experience of not writing for a public—there barely being one—perhaps has a feedback effect. This year's IPAF was won by Youssef Ziedan'sAzazeel(Beelzebub). It is by all accounts formidably accomplished, but it's not what you'd call commercial fiction. Its author is a manuscript scholar and expert on Sufi philosophy, andAzazeelis a dense, metatextual work about 5th-century Coptic Christianity. Interviewed by the local paper, Ziedan himself said: "The novel wasn't written for the average reader." I'm looking forward toAzazeel's appearance in English—but I very much doubt we'll be seeing it among the three-for-twos in Waterstone's.
If Arabic literature is little-translated, traffic in the other direction is even slower: more literature gets translated into Spanish every year than has ever been translated into Arabic. In this context, the IPAF and a professionalised book fair—complete, I was delighted to learn, with the regulation Scientologists—can only be good things. But these are top-down initiatives. There's a hill to climb; or, to make the metaphor more apt, a gulf to bridge. Let's think of these as cranes, and be grateful for them.
