The novelist Mohammed Hasan Alwan’s most recent novel, Al-Qundus (The Beaver, 2011; recently translated from Arabic into French by by Stéphanie Dujols as Le Castor), is at once an unsparing account of a midlife crisis, a satire of well-off Saudi society, and an unusual immigration story laced with self-deprecating humor. The novel follows a man who travels from Saudi Arabia to Oregon, where, in the course of a fishing trip on the Willamette River, a beaver helps him to undertake an unsentimental examination of family and life in Riyadh.