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Last update - 22:24 06/07/2008 Fiction Between privilege and alienation By Ilene R. Prusher Tags: Ferraris, Saudi Arabia  In a fascinating mystery, set in Saudi Arabia, Zoe Ferraris takes us on a unique journey to investigate a young girl's disappearance Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris, Houghton Mifflin, 320 pages, $24 Advertisement Occasionally a book can be all the more engaging to read when the subject of interest is dead. This was the case in "The Lovely Bones," the Alice Sebold novel that holds a prominent spot on my shelf of favorite books written in the last decade, and in which murdered 14-year-old Susie Salmon is narrating her story from heaven. This is also what draws us into "Finding Nouf," the debut novel by American writer Zoe Ferraris. Nouf, a 16-year-old Saudi daughter of privilege who has disappeared and quickly turns up dead, is the subject of rumor and fascination, leading us to wonder whether her demise was an accident, a suicide or a murder. The very premise might suggest a been-there, read-that stock plot of the mystery genre that I have always found tedious, in which all that seems to distinguish one book from another is a series of variables the author has plugged into the basic template. What makes this mystery fascinating and fresh for most Western readers is that it is set in Saudi Arabia, in both the port city of Jeddah and on a nearby island off the coast, where we're led to imagine a society so closed that men don't even know what the faces of their females cousins look like, though they're all living on the same family estate. And yet, the very same young women occasionally go zipping around the Red Sea waterfront on their jet skis, and when not buried beneath a burka, are wearing pink pumps and dreaming of escaping to America, as we soon learn Nouf wanted to do. Here, we are led into the domain of the Shrawis, a wealthy family who live like landed gentry on the unnamed island and hold to famously strict cultural norms that prevent a girl from having much of a life of her own, much less any fun. A woman -- and certainly a soon-to-be-married teenager like Nouf -- needs to have a male guardian with her wherever she might go, which means that if she were trying to run away when she left her well-guarded home in a pick-up truck, with her best-loved camel tucked into the back of it, headed for the mainland and gunning for the desert, some man in her life must have been in on the plan. Ferraris, who herself lived in Saudi Arabia after marrying into a Saudi-Palestinian Bedouin family, manages to get beyond some of the stereotypes of cloistered Arab women, as she takes us along on a journey with Nayir, a Palestinian friend of Nouf's family who sets out to investigate the girl's disappearance. It is Nayir who is the book's real protagonist, and it largely through his eyes that we watch the tale unfold. We can't help but feel much more curious about him than Nouf, who throughout much of the story remains too elusive for us to empathize with. It is only late in the novel, when we learn of her rebellious streak, her motorcycle outings dressed as a man, and her desire to skip out on an upcoming arranged marriage, that we begin to give her some posthumous credit. Nayir, in his 40s, makes for a fascinating character, in large part because of his origins. Noble and painfully modest, he grew up in the Saudi kingdom under the care of an unconventional bachelor uncle, after his parents died in an accident. Uncle Samir, a scientist, fought the state to be able to keep custody of Nayir, who might otherwise have been sent back to Palestine to live with Samir's sister, a widowed mother of seven: "Samir liked to remind Nayir that Palestine was a terrible place to raise a child, and that if he had grown up there, he would likely be dead or imprisoned by the Israelis today." Quintessential outsider Nayir may speak the same language, live in the same land, and pray in the same Sunni tradition as the Saudis around him, but as a Palestinian who doesn't come from a big family, he is the quintessential outsider. It is through Nayir's observations and through his perpetual alienation that we learn much about Saudi society. He is a participant in the mainstream culture who simultaneously walks on its fringe. Even something about his appearance, perhaps more Levantine than Arabian, puts him in a position of always being seen as the "other": "The recognition was instant. You must be a Bedouin. It meant, You can't be a Saudi. And people were right. He wasn't a Saudi. He belonged nowhere, and like most Palestinians he was essentially stateless." With his not-quite-one-of-us status, his family's wandering and his psychic and physical exile, Nayir is almost the archetypal Jew in the story, as if James Joyce's Leopold Bloom had picked himself up from Dublin and relocated to Jeddah. As if to drive home the extent to which he has a peripatetic soul, Nayir lives on a docked boat. But there are moments when the imagination of Nayir's point of view feels altogether forced, and in which bits of his Arabic or religious musings seem to have been wedged in by the author in an attempt at verisimilitude, meant more to impress the reader than to advance the narrative. Nayir is always referring to "Allah" rather than "God," though of course one is just a translation of the other, and at times his religiosity seems too fundamentalist for someone who is an otherwise complex character, such as in the opening scene, when he thinks Nouf might be out lost in the desert, with her ankles getting sunburned as she walks. "Allah, forgive me for imagining her ankles, he thought. And then: At least I think she's still alive." Ferraris introduces us to some of the particulars of Saudi and Bedouin culture -- and the tensions and differences between them. One of the key themes involves the unique Bedouin art of tracking footprints in the desert, whose practitioners are able to decipher the gender, age or size of the person being followed, whether or not they were in a hurry and what kind of gait they have. In this connection, the author introduces us to firaasa, defined as "the ancient skill of identifying blood relationships based on the study of the feet." Nayir is initially dubious of this practice, but then he meets Mutlaq, a tracker who had once worked for the Jeddah police, and he comes to see it as an investigation tool no less legitimate than fingerprinting. "I have seen it all," Mutlaq says in one lovely little soliloquy. "People trying to disguise their tracks with every sort of a trick. Women wearing men's shoes, men wearing women's shoes. People use old car tires and cardboard. They use a broom to brush away their tracks, forgetting that a broom has a footprint of its own. After a while, you learn to tell the difference between the foot and the footwear. You can change your shoes, but you cannot change the way your feet carry you through the world." Filtered through the tribal norms that are being pushed and tested by the young generation of Saudis are the complications of class differences. We meet Katya, a 28-year-old woman with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, who is assigned by Jeddah Police's new women's division to investigate Nouf's death. Katya is seen by her aging father -- and perhaps by herself -- as having very limited marriage prospects. She may be pretty, but she's over the hill for a Saudi marriage, and the fact that she has a career she intends to keep suggests her family isn't wealthy. She is close to marrying one of the Shrawi men, in itself unpalatable to her father and others in the older generation because the marriage wasn't arranged: The couple chose one another. Women versus women The story takes its most interesting turn at the point when we realize that perhaps this is not a predictable Middle Eastern tale of an honor killing. The final tension here is not just one of men against women, but also women against women. The convoluted labyrinth through which Nayir treads as he works to unravel Nouf's death leads to a conclusion that we wouldn't have expected at the outset, and paints a disturbing picture of how ultra-conservative mores, though perhaps intended to keep a society morally upright, can at times end up driving people to extreme acts. Even Nayir, who starts off sounding vaguely puritanical in his vision of how women should behave, and who can't look at a woman's unveiled face without feeling guilty, ends up softened and saddened by the lack of choices Nouf had, and the extent to which, at the ripe age of 16, she already felt stuck. He is surprised to find himself feeling so much sympathy for "women like Nouf who felt trapped by their lives, by prescriptions of modesty and domesticity that might have suited the Prophet's wives but that didn't suit the women of this world, infected as it was by desires to go to school and travel and work and have ever greater options and appetites. He tried not to feel that the world was collapsing," we learn, "but it was collapsing, and there was nothing he could do, just watch with a painful, bitter sense of loss." Ilene R. Prusher is Jerusalem bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor. She teaches creative writing at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem. Haaretz Books, July 2008 Bookmark to del.icio.us   Video attack West Bank settlers tie Palestinian man to phone pole and beat him. A static future Iran's nuclear program remains unchanged despite economic incentives.

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