"While the novel was not a particularly indigenous literary genre in the "third" or non-Western world, it quickly predominated as a privileged narrative construct. And yet, on the site of that hegemonic narrative form, there emerged counterhegemonic opposition as well. In this production of narrative forms, ideology, history, and culture intersect."



Layoun's central premise is that in reading non-Western novels we must revise our perceptions of them as jejune or inferior imitations of European literature. She emphasizes the need, as others have, to assess these text in light of the political and social institutions that serves as the agents for the promulgation of the genre outside the boundaries demarcated by the term "the West." In other words, as the persuasively argues, the genre of the novel necessarily functions to uphold and corroborate the ideologies implicit in the instruments of its own dissemination. Hence the works themselves reflect the tensions surrounding the inequality of power occasioned by Western imperialism and colonialism at their zenith in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Curiously, for so thoughtful and intelligent a book, the implicit argument appears somewhat reductive--appropriating Jameson, Layoun seems to argue ultimately for a reading of each of these novels as 'a utopic gesture in the face of an unacceptable socio-historical dilemma," whether that gesture be positive or negative

Hence every work discussed in this volume is viewed as either putting forth an idyllic vision that is then rent or shown to be false, or presenting a countervision suggesting the impossibility of utopia ("no place') in the world. All modern novels must by this reasoning be conscripted into the service of social progressivism. 
If the modern novel rose with the emergence of the petite bourgeoisie in Europe, how did it evolve to become the vehicle of resistance to Western hegemony in the Palestinian diaspora? In this timely, insightful study, Mary Layoun sets out to investigate the complex problematics of the migration of the novel to Greece, Japan, and the Arab world, where the genre, initially "foreign in both cultural and class origin," has been appropriated, fully domesticated, to reclaim history.

Layoun begins her analysis with three early twentieth-century writers, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Natsume Soseki, and Yahya Haqqi, to examine the debates surrounding the adoption of the genre which found their expression in tension, an opposition to "some unacceptable sociohistorical and cultural context," the uneasy juxtaposition of tradition and modernism. She aptly points out, however, that "it might not be modernization that is opposed here but the specific structure and definition of that modernization"—neocolonialism. The novel appears then as a "utopie gesture," moving away at one and the same time from the past, symbolized by nationalism and tradition, and the "modern," viewed as "inextricably linked to a foreign and hegemonic power."


 

Layoun qualifies her own use of the term "conclusion." Contemporary works, she argues, refuse all attempts at narrative integrity, providing only the most obviously manufactured textual closure, suggesting the "arbitrariness and contingency of the finished product," and thus challenging Language and the existing Symbolic order.

Layoun's book is soundly argumented and richly documented and provides a welcome post-Marxist textual and contextual analysis of "Third World" narratives. By applying European critics to the non-Western literary corpus, Layoun demonstrates the validity of Lukács' argument that the modern novel is truly "multinational." As such, it does reclaim history. Moving away from the imperialist East-West binary, the contemporary "Third World" novel provides a site of opposition, resisting the challenge of Western hegemony as it refuses to construct "authentic" or "indigenous" narratives to perpetuate Orientalist discourse.