SOURCE: Accad, Evelyne. Review of Searching, by Nawal El Saadawi. World Literature Today 66, no. 2 (spring 1992): 396.

In the following review, Accad presents an enthusiastically positive assessment of Searching, stating that in this novel, El Saadawi explores women's self-actualization and independence in a repressive, male-dominated atmosphere.

The well-known Egyptian novelist, physician, and psychiatrist Nawal El Saadawi, whose many achievements were made in spite of the bias she encountered within her society and who has already amazed us with her courage and her relentless struggle against the harmful stereotypes of women in the Arab world, has once more, in her poignant “search,” hit upon the important questions and problems plaguing Arab society and most other societies around the globe. It is no wonder that the first publication in English of her novel Searching, originally written in Arabic, has won critical acclaim from the judges for this year's Feminist Book Fortnight.

On...