Struggled a bit to get through this book. 
The many points of view were sometimes confusing for me. I don’t know if this was the translation but I got a bit confused sometimes. 

Overall, I’m glad I read it. I honestly didn’t know much about Oman - especially the history of slavery amongst other things. It was a very interesting view into the lives of these women and the struggles in this world they lived in as it changed over time. 

 Celestial Bodies is a multi-generational family saga, looking at the intertwined households of two Omani families. It is the first book by an Omani woman to be translated into English. It found it to be a challenging book in a couple of ways. After several attempts on audio I managed to track down an ebook and tandem read which helped considerably, although the book was still a challenge. Part of it is the structure. The chapters are mostly short and frequently switch point of view. Many are in the third person, but Abdallah’s are in the first person. The large cast of characters- the family tree in the ebook helped somewhat- and the constant switching made it difficult to settle into the story. The other challenging factor was that the chapters moved back and forward in time in no discernible order. Additionally I felt the ending was open to several interpretations and I wish I had been reading with a group so I could have discussed it with other readers.

In other words this is a book that requires plenty of effort and concentration from the reader. Thankfully I felt my effort was worth it. It was a complicated family story which I always enjoy, one which highlighted the challenges faced by women, challenges which some navigated to their own advantage better than others. However, the story also emphasised the way traditional societal practices had negative impacts on men as well. I couldn’t help but feel for Abdallah, who suffered at the hands of an abusive father and whose wife did not love him the way way he loved her. While reading this novel I built up a picture of Omani society, the way it traditionally operated and the way it changed, little by little, over the twentieth century, from an insular, patriarchal slave holding society to one where western influences and practises were more pervasive. The uneasy coexistence of the old and the new was evident, as were the class divides and disparities of wealth. While I struggled to settle into the flow of the story, the big picture as it were, many of the chapters were excellent, and the novel included some compelling character studies.
 

I am not entirely sure what I just read. Celestial Bodies is vastly different from my normal reading fare, and I don’t know that I really understood it. It’s densely populated with characters, time jumps back and forth, and the story of this one family gets woven against the backdrop of a changing Oman and the tensions between tradition and modernity. 

From the back cover, it seems like the story will focus on the three sisters, Mayya, Asma, and Khawla. And that’s where it starts – with the man Mayya loves never acknowledging her, her marriage to someone else, and the birth of her first child, a daughter she names London. But then it branches off to follow other people at other points in time. 

Mayya’s husband Abdullah is the only one to narrate in first person as he reminisces about his childhood with his nursemaid and his abusive father, his marriage with Mayya, and their children, and interacts with his daughter London as an adult. The rest of the story is told omnisciently, with third-person narration seamlessly slipping between Khawla, Asma, the three sisters’ mother and father, Abdullah’s nursemaid, London as an adult, and many other more minor characters (including Asma’s husband, Abdullah’s nursemaid’s mother, and Mayya’s father’s lover) that provide history and context to this family’s saga. 

Time is a fluid thing here. The story slips seamlessly between what I’m calling the “present” – the time where Mayya has just given birth to London and Asma and Khawla are getting ready to be married – and the past and the future. It delves into childhoods of parents and grandparents, then slides ahead to decades beyond the “present.” There are no temporal anchors here, and I’m only calling one part of the story as the “present” because that’s where the book opened. 

I wanted to categorize this as magical realism, because it has a strong magical realism feel, but there is no magic in this story and nothing supernatural besides traditional superstitions. The audiobook is only 8 hours and per the StoryGraph it’s 250 pages in print, but Celestial Bodies somehow feels like a sweeping family saga anyway. There isn’t a plot, just life, the tangled timelines illustrating the interconnectedness of family and how past influences present influences future. 

I am not sure I understand this book. It packs more into its 250 pages than should be possible, and balances such a massive cast of characters that it did get a little confusing at times. But it’s deftly woven and somehow kept my interest despite a complete lack of plot in the usual sense. I absolutely see how it won its awards. 

CW: racism, xenophobia (mild), colourism, slavery, ableism, child abuse, domestic abuse, stalking, implied eugenics related to ableism

Quite poetical in narration, Celestial Bodies depicts intersectional existence, reflecting how class & wealth modulates the racist & sexist structure in the characters' world. It also explores how the society & its norms shaped one's being. Based on my limited knowledge, the poetry-like writing style resembles the dramatization and lyricism quite familiar in Arab poetry. It also shows how religiosity & spirituality are tightly interweaved into their literature. 

I think going into this, one should anticipate reading it as a series of short stories told in rather personalised observational manner. It can be considered containing multiple overlapping stories relating to a big casts of characters narrated nonlinearly. That may caused confusion at times, especially as some of the characters were quite unreliable as narrators, e.g. Abdallah.
But if you see the stories as belonging to each individual characters whom happened to have connections with other characters, I think you can appreciate the book better.

The approach to the storytelling reminds me quite a bit to Orhan Pamuk's and his epic intergenerational stories centering around one family/character, except of course, Alharthi's less of an epic, more of a fleeting summation of one's lived or lingering moment/memory.

I quite liked the aspect to the story that depicts how women were raised into thinking that sacrifices were inherent in their existence. That servitude is expected from them. It could be extracted that anything related to men's well-being (i.e. to love them, to heal them, to change them, to protect them, etc) was stated to be women's responsibility. I thought it did well showing the consequences of being raised in a highly patriarchal society, how it shaped the women holding up the same system that impede them -  something I could relate to.

Warning: Slavery is also depicted in the story. There are instances where victims of slavery's view on their given rights to freedom was framed negatively. Though, it is also contrasted by an opposing view through Habib & Sanjar. Also notable is Mayya's colonized perspective in the admiration for the European/imperialist views. That makes for an interesting read, because coming from a formerly colonized country, we too have many such people in our nation. I think Alharthi's intent with both topics are to highlight how sometimes people will fall-in-line & even uphold the system that failed them due to lack of awareness and/or knowledge or even familiarity (think herd mentality); a rather prominent theme in the book.

Regardless, if you like reading an intergenerational story that narrates its cast of characters' introspections, allowing for insights into moments in their lives, this book will be perfect for you.