Her high scores on national examinations permitted her to enter the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University during a time when the student population was still heavily male. Nawal El Saadawi (also spelled Nawal Sa’-dawi) was born in the Egyptian village of Kafr Tahla in the Nile Delta province of Qalubiyya in 1931. I would recommend Woman at Point Zero to anyone interested in feminism around the world or simply someone looking for their next great book.A novel based on El Saadawi’s interview with a woman incarcerated in Egypt’s Qanatir prison and executed circa 1973 published in Arabic (as Imra’ah ’Inda Nuqtat al-Sifr) in 1979, in English in 1983.Īwaiting execution, Firdaus, a prostitute who has murdered a pimp, relates her experiences as a woman in Egypt to a medical researcher/writer visiting the prison.Įvents in History at the Time the Novel Takes PlaceĮvents in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

I found Firdaus’s story extremely gripping – a page-turner where I was increasingly immersed in the plot with every twist. This 142-page novel explores the subjugation of women in Middle Eastern societies. Firdaus was executed in 1974 but she left a lasting impact on Saadawi, who said she could not rest until she had written about Firdaus’s story and finished the novel in one week. Woman at Point Zero was based on a true story: Saadawi visited many imprisoned women to conduct 21 in-depth case studies for her 1976 publication, Women and Neurosis in Egypt, but Firdaus remained “a woman apart”. Happy reading!įirdaus’s life story reveals her poor childhood of cruelty and neglect experiencing the horrors of FGM her passion for education being ignored in favour of her marriage to a much older man others trapping her into prostitution and finally, the series of events that led her to murder. As a young reader, I have found that the most common reason as to why many young people stop reading is because they either do not know what to read or have not found books that they really enjoyed.

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Welcome to my Must Reads For Youth weekly book review.

Firdaus nawal el saadawi