SOURCE: Cooke, Miriam. Review of The Circling Song, by Nawal El Saadawi. World Literature Today 64, no. 1 (winter 1990): 187.

In the following review of The Circling Song, Cooke notes El Saadawi's examination of gender roles and the oppressive power of men in the book.

Nawal El Saadawi wrote the original Arabic version of The Circling Song in 1973, published it two years later in Beirut (she was on the Egyptian government's blacklist at the time), and has now had it translated anonymously and published in the United Kingdom and the United States. From the dedication to the closing section, which is a two-page verbatim repetition of the opening, El Saadawi's preoccupations reflect those of many contemporary Egyptian writers: children born out of wedlock and abandoned out of terror; children without childhoods; social obsessions with women's nubility and, above all, virginity. For readers familiar with the author's writings, there are many intertextual...