Short takes

Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia
By Carmen bin Ladin
Warner, 206 pp., illustrated, $23.95

Despite the childish writing, nave point of view, and sentimental justification, this is a compelling story. Carmen bin Ladin, married to a brother of the infamous Osama, has a lot to tell and tells it in her own words.

As a beautiful young woman of Persian and Swiss descent, Carmen met, fell in love with, and married Yeslam, a younger son in the huge and powerful bin Laden family. Without understanding the consequences of being a woman in Saudi Arabia, she left her Swiss home and moved to the bin Laden family compound in Jeddah. There she found herself in the company of helpless, almost mindless women, who were not allowed to leave the compound without a male chaperone and without being completely covered by a heavy black abaya. Gossip and shopping were the only approved activities. Piety and prayer were the only areas in which a woman could excel. Motherhood brought Carmen some degree of happiness, but producing two daughters in a society that valued only boys created its own anxieties. Divorce was easy, discarded wives common. Fearing for the future, she eventually found the courage to leave, return with her daughters to Switzerland, and obtain a divorce.

The Saudi women's religious fervor and complicity in their own enslavement are conveyed with candor and sympathy. Carmen, a woman of foreign birth and formal education, understands well how women of all cultures mute their disagreements and submerge their desires in their need to please.

Without Blood
By Alessandro Baricco
Knopf, 97 pp., $18

A war has just ended. But men with guns roam the countryside, hunting and hiding, settling old scores. We are in a farmhouse somewhere. In this novel, we share the point of view of a little girl, curled in on herself, hiding in a hole beneath a trapdoor. She has been told to remain hidden and silent until the activity above her has finished. That activity results in the murder of her father and brother. As instructed, she waits patiently until the three gunmen cease speaking, until the gunshots cease blasting, until her father and brother cease to plead, moan, and breathe.

Years later, this little girl, now an older woman, arrives to exact her revenge. She has already dispatched two of the three killers. She must now deal with the last, the one who located her hiding place, peered down at her lying like a round pink shell, and retreated without revealing his discovery. While we expect wrath and blood, what we get is something much more subtle. "She understood only that nothing is stronger than the instinct to return, to where they broke us, and to replicate that moment forever. Only thinking that the one who saved us once can do it forever." The ending of this brief tale returns to the beginning with the power and perfection of a parable. It is utterly satisfying in its compression of image and meaning.

The Silver Screen
By Maureen Howard
Viking, 244 pp., $24.95

Isabel Maher walks away from a Hollywood stardom on the silent screen, opting for domestic life over beauty, excitement, fame, riches. Marrying Tim Murphy, an insurance agent, moving to the suburbs, raising two children, tending her garden, are her conscious choices. While she seems too extravagant for this humdrum existence, she turns domestic life into a lavish performance. Her children, comfortable with their suburban mom, remain fascinated and confused by the myth she created and then inexplicably denied.

Joe is the gifted child, handsome, bright, charming. Becoming a Jesuit priest, he fulfills some of his mother's theatrical and heroic ambitions. Rita, the fat girl, the unlovely and unlucky younger child, seems to have missed out on her share of glamour. Gemma, a neighborhood child, in love with the enchantment next door, attaches herself to Bel. She becomes a photographer, a maker of bright images.

Bel exerts a powerful spell on all around her. Her children live in her thrall. As a dying old woman, she finally outlives her myth, but death is not her last performance.

Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.