Season of Migration to the North (Penguin Modern Classics)

At the heart of this book is something mysterious. I finished it and wondered quite what l had read. It is both disciplined and yet elusive, poetic and prosaic. Utterly compelling from the beginning, a truly great novel. In many ways a simple story yet it has so much to say. Get it!!

Good

You could read this novel as a story of a man who became psychopathic and twisted by being taken away from his home and family 'for his own good', and who committed a dreadful crime as a result. We find out what this is early on in the book, so you read it knowing what will happen later on. But it's also about the terrible things that can happen to women when they give up control of their lives, or don't have it in the first place - when men act, or fail to act.It is beautifully written and the plot is multi-layered and complex. You can read it in an afternoon, but it deserves more time and attention than that.

Season of Migration to the North is a book I go back to again and again. The prose is incredibly poetic and the narrative arc loses nothing when the surprise has gone. The plot is bleak in the extreme and the contrast with the beauty of the prose gives it a power that leaves one thinking well after the book has ended.

A book I’ll never stop recommending. Utterly unique, deep, and special. Don’t miss to read the introduction :)

Used it for one of my modules. Came on time. One of the most interesting stories I've ever read

A man returns after having studied in England to his native village somewhere along the Nile in Sudan. There he meets another man, Sa'eed, who has a past very different to the life of a farmer he lives in the little village. The main story of the novel is this man's. But Sa'eed's story comes out in parts and in between there's a bit about the grandfather and his friends, the narrator himself, and the wife of Sa'eed.It's interesting reading about village life in the Sudan half a century ago. And the author is ambitious in his attempt to describe characters, passion, and the purpose of life. Sa'eed plays well as someone with much talent and good looks, no past and very little heart. What does it take to shake authentic emotions into him and how does he cope with it.I like the Joseph Conrad approach to the story and the setting as well. There is not something I think is bad about this novel but something is absent. It's a bit like a meal without the sauce connecting the components. Worth reading though.

this is a wonderful book - deceptively simple in its telling, but remarkably thought producing if read carefully. I raced through it first, to see what happened. I then came back and read it slowly and found so much more in it. I feel that I shall go on learning from it for a long time.

Couldn’t finish, it’s in the give-away bag. Big disappointment.

Bellissimo libro! Ne consiglio la letturaAmazon semore impeccabile con la consegna

For an Indian, it's easy to relate to the post colonial literature from Sudan. A magnificent novel!

Don't buy this book expecting an orientalist depiction of the Arab world, such that you would by it come to understand something which was previously mysterious. Instead, read this book for the trauma and chaos that lurks inside of it. For a sense of how the colonized is effected by the colonizer not just in the theft of territory, but in the dislocation of the soul. The impossibility of return, of making whole again, these are the themes of this book. Like Camus' "L'etranger" but from the perspective of the colonized, Tayeb's words spin a line not from start to end, but from end to ending, from a rift in time to an end of time. You can't go home, not only because it isn't there anymore, but more profoundly because you are no longer connected to it.

It's interesting to read reviews of this short novel. Half of the readers see it as a satirical version of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". The other half - who perhaps have never read Conrad - think it's a vain, silly (although lyrically written) tale of a sex-maniac guy who likes to seduce and abandon women. This is one of the inherent problems in a novel which is meant to reference another work. If you were to read "Bored of the Rings" (an awesome parody of Lord of the Rings) without ever reading Lord of the Rings you might think it silly. Read them side by side and you realize the brilliance at work. Not only is that true here as well, but I also do think that Season of Migration to the North stands alone as a work in its own right.First, if you've never read "Heart of Darkness", look it up on the web and read it. It's online in its full text (it is out of copyright now) and you can read it for free. It's a short novel, just like Season, and should only take you an hour or two. It is a brilliant work, well deserving of its high acclaim. Go on, we'll wait for you to come back.Now, having read Heart, you can see the many similarities with Season. Both tell of someone starting from their own civilization and venturing out into the "opposite", and being changed by the experience. In Heart, an Englishman ventured into the Congo. In Season, Mustafa - a brilliant but anchorless student - is sent for education up to Cairo and then to London. Rather then becoming "refined" by the experience, he quickly bores with the women continually throwing themselves at his "exotic excitement". He deliberately lies to them about his background, his country's history, the meaning of his culture, and they don't care - they just want to be held by his ebony hands.Both novels create meaning in the power of the river, with the way it twists and turns around obstacles and keeps going. It is water which brings new life and destroys existing ones. Both novels use a second hand narration style, so you are hearing a lot of the story from a more neutral observer.Some people take exception with Season's focus-character, Mustafa, being a playboy. Really, he is in no way any worse than many novel protagonists! The only difference here is that the women he abandons then all decide life is not worth living :) Hopefully nobody was taking that as a serious fact-ridden narration, that this beautiful dark man was waltzing through London society leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake and it was another common happening. To me it was a social commentary on how certain types of individuals glamorize "powerful savages", give themselves over fully to the fantasy and then cannot deal with reality when it rears its head. Wrap this up with the aforementioned tongue-in-cheek references to Heart and you begin to understand where this was all coming from.I loved the lyrical beauty of the telling, the wealth of details about Sudan life, about how individuals felt about the colonization of Sudan and the subsequent social upheavals. Changes are coming - they are hinted at throughout the story. Wooden water mills are turning into pumps. Cars are traveling roads once only seen by camels. Even so, a 30 year old widow who does not want to marry is forced into a wedding with a man 40 years her senior, solely because her father orders her to.I think there's a lot to learn here, and that the journey is full of beautiful imagery. If you've read this once and it didn't make sense to you, then read Heart of Darkness. Read a book or two on the history of Sudan. Then come back to this, and see what new layers present themselves.