Bitter Orange Tree, Jokha Alharthi, tr. Marilyn Booth

I listened to this on audiobook, which is either the best or the worst way to do this particular book, depending. I had thought that maybe I wasn’t doing a very good job listening, because it seemed to swerve suddenly from one character to another and shift unexpectedly in time and place, and I wasn’t quite sure if I had missed some major element that connected the dots, plot-wise. But I discovered afterwards that quite a few reviewers complained that the book jumped around in jarring or confusing ways and didn’t seem to go anywhere, so maybe it wasn’t just me. In any case, because I was listening to it rather than reading (and the narrator had a lovely voice), I enjoyed being carried along by the somewhat dreamy prose and lyrical dialogues. It’s a kaleidoscopic mural of a broad cast of characters, and I found them wonderfully vivid, even though I couldn’t always keep them straight. This is why I say that it might be the best way to encounter the book — I really enjoyed it, precisely because I just let it wash over me.