"Memoirs of a Woman Doctor": Sound and Fury and Hope

On a short novel about life for women in Egypt, which tells us something universal about hope and transcendence.

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, Naval El Saadawi; trans. Catherine Cobham (1988; trans. 1988)

There’s something endearing about the bold recklessness of certain first works. They often display an unabashed intimacy with passion – the kind inspired by first contact with life’s joys and hardships – that more cautious artists sacrifice when they follow “the rules”. I’m thinking of the lack of self-consciousness (both a positive and a negative) in Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut, How to Have Sex, or the melodrama of Françoise Sagan’s first novel, Bonjour Tristesse. There’s a charm to the same qualities that perhaps hold the work back from true greatness.

To this list of delightfully reckless works, add the first novel by Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. In her introduction to the book, El Saadawi tells us that she wrote Memoirs when she was in her twenties, having just graduated from the School of Medicine in Cairo. It was intended to express her “feelings and experiences as…