Gold Dust

First of all, I want to thank everyone for participating in reading this book that our group assigned.  I was very nervous about how everyone would receive it, and I could see that there were some in the class who enjoyed the text and others who were not so keen on it.  That's fine, good even because it benefits discussion in our class.  I appreciate that everyone had an opinion on the novel, and am glad that in this class we are free to express these opinions.

Now for my own opinion on the novel.  At first I was not sure where the story was going.  I had read part of a novel by this same author before this, and was aware that he uses the desert setting in an interpretive way, and often represents human spiritualism through animals.  Because of this prior knowledge, I was looking for religious symbolism in the novel.  I was able to make a connection between the devotion that Ukhyyad felt toward the piebald and the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins, wrath, gluttony, envy, lust, sloth, greed, and pride.  I felt that all of these sins were represented in the relationship between boy and camel, and in the end did just what they could be expected to do; they dismantled an otherwise good and prosperous life.  The relationship that Ukhyyad had with his camel was certainly out of the norm to our audience, but I believe that to the Middle Eastern reader it would have ben steeped in in religious meaning.  

I also came to appreciate that the novel was a desert setting with nomadic people.  It was more difficult to understand the characters because of the less modern society in this novel, but I liked this aspect of the story because it was a side of Middle Eastern culture that I had not experienced before.  I really ended up enjoying this novel more than what I had originally planned, and am glad that we assigned it to the class, even though it was clear that not everyone enjoyed it as much as I did.