Archives » Egyptian Fiction

Heart of the Night by Naguib Mahfouz

American University in Cairo Press, 2011, 101 p. First published as Qalb al-layl, 1975.

Jafaar Ibrahim Sayyid al-Rawi lives as a pauper in the ruins of his grandfather’s house. The novel consists in the telling of his life story to our (unnamed) narrator who occasionally interjects comments to or asks questions of him. Jafaar seeks advice on the possibility of breaking his grandfather’s will in which his fortune was left to a charitable cause known as a waqf, thereby disinheriting Jafaar. Our narrator tells him a waqf cannot be set aside.

There is a knotty history here. Jafar’s father too had been disinherited when he married someone his father deemed unsuitable. Jafaar was the offspring of that union. In adolescence Jafaar had been taken in by his grandfather, a religious man who desired Jafaar to follow a religious life. He had been content with this till of course his life too strayed off-course. Again it was an attraction to a woman which caused the rift. In the end, though, she had gone back to her Bedouin family leaving Jafaar to try to rebuild his life via the (somewhat unmanly to Jafaar’s mind) profession of singer – background only, his voice being not good enough for a leading role.

Jafaar also becomes involved in a project to found a political party based on a concocted ideology that was “the logical heir of Islam, the French Revolution, and the communist revolution,” again something unlikely to recommend him to a traditionalist grandfather.

His conversation with our narrator wanders over life, religion and philosophy. Jafaar at one point says, “There is no ‘truth and fiction,’ but different kinds of truths that vary depending on the phases of life and the quality of the system that helps us become aware of them.” A contention which literary fiction is well-suited to examine.

Pedant’s corner:- “an id ea” (idea,) dumpster (seems to me a not very Egyptian type of description of a refuse container,) “the truth of the matter is that that man was and continues to be in a period of transition where the instincts and the mind are both present” (the truth of the matter is that man was and continues to be,) “the abolishment of private property” (abolition.) In the Glossary; “the income generated by ….. are aimed at the needy” (income ….. is aimed at.)

 

Friendly Fire: ten tales of today’s Egypt by Alaa Al Aswany

The American University in Cairo Press, 2008, 181 p. Translated from the Arabic, Niuran sadiqa, by Humphrey Davis

I have previously read the author’s most famous novel The Yacoubian Building but this is a collection of Aswamy’s shorter works and preceded by a Preface which apart from that word and its pagination is, curiously, entirely blank.

The first and by far the longest piece here is He Who Drew Close and Saw in which the narrator, Isam, describes at length his relationships with his family – an artist father whose hopes of changing Art history have been dashed, a mother who refuses to accept the death sentence of a cancer diagnosis, her mother with whom she has developed an antipathy and who revenges herself graphically – and at his work at the government Chemicals Department where he has managed to annoy everyone, especially his boss, with his air of superiority. Along the way he reflects on love of country and its spurious nature. He affects to despise the mass of Egyptians equally and tells a German woman whom he meets at a photography exhibition that her impressions of, and so fondness for, Egypt are misguided. The ending, however, casts doubt on all that passed before, or at least on Isam’s views on it.

Izzat Amin Iskander was a schoolmate of the narrator – a schoolmate with an artificial leg and a crutch. Neverthelees he sets off on a ride on the narrator’s new bicycle.

An Old Blue Dress and A Close-fitting Covering for the Head, Brightly Coloured comprises accounts of two contrasting relationships. In the first a woman puts up with the realities of life but her partner is more cynical. In the second the narrator is beguiled by a straight-laced ‘moral’ girl.

Mme Zitta Mendès, A Last Image again has two parts. In the first the narrator recalls his visits to Tante Zitta – whom the reader soon works out is his father’s mistress. The second sees him recognise her in old age at the foreigners’ table in Groppi’s.

Dear Sister Makarim takes the form of a letter, couched in very pious terms, of a worker abroad explaining to his sister in Egypt why he cannot possibly send money back home for their mother’s medical treatment.

Games are what Mohammad el-Dawakhli, an extremely fat schoolboy, tries to avoid at all costs. The gym teacher Miss Souad tacitly accepts this. One day she is replaced by Mr Hamid, who is not so indulgent. Thereafter the story writes itself.

The Kitchen Boy. Hisham is pushed by his mother into training as a doctor. Despite good exam results and practical experience on the wards he still finds his faculty head overly critical, necessitating a change of attitude towards him.

The Society of the Faithful is the remnants of a former political grouping whose dead leader one of their number experiences speaking to him.

The Sorrows of Hagg Ahmad are due to his father dying just as Hagg is starting his predawn Ramadan meal.

A Look into Nagi’s Face is again set in a school environment. Nagi is the new boy who shines academically and eventually even refuses the teacher’s corporal punishment. What happens next isn’t what you might expect from that circumstance.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian, “wasn’t one of those husbands who lay down the law” (laid down,) a missing full stop at the end of one sentence, “he would be compelled to loosened the belt of his pants” (to loosen,) “showing how both sad he is and also how he clings” (showing both how sad he is and also….)

The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif

Bloomsbury, 2000, 540 p (including xii p Glossary of Arabic terms.)

The Map of Love cover

This novel is set in two time lines, the Egypt of its present day, the late 1990s, and of the same country in the 1900s. The present day sections are told from the viewpoint of Amal al-Gamrawi whose brother, ‘Omar, a famous musician, has fallen into a relationship with US citizen Isabel Parkman, but its main thrust comes via the letters and journal of Isabel’s great grandmother, Lady Anna Winterbourne, which relate to her experiences in Egypt almost a century before. Isabel’s discovery of a trunk containing her grandmother’s letters was recognized by ‘Omar as a family connection and he encouraged Isabel to take them to his sister in Egypt for transcription. While in Egypt Lady Anna had formed a mutual attachment to Amal’s great uncle, Sharif Basha al-Baroudi, an Egyptian patriot, and married him; much to the dismay of all but two of the English contingent in Egypt at the time. Anna’s letters and journal track the course of that love affair and marriage. Isabel is their descendant and so related to Amal and ‘Omar. Some sections of the narrative are Amal’s imaginings of incidents from the past, others are seen via the viewpoint of Layla, Sharif’s sister.

Soueif wrote this in English but in some respects the novel feels like a translation as its immersion in Egyptian culture is total, though the Western perspective is acknowledged. But it is Egyptian concerns and history that dominate. “Egypt, mother of civilisation, dreaming herself through the centuries. Dreaming us all, her children: those who stay and work for her and complain of her, and those who leave and yearn for her and blame her with bitterness for driving them away.” (Yet, barring ‘the mother of civilisation’ and with just the name changed, that quote could apply to almost any country. It certainly does to Scotland.)

There are multiple resonances between the two times. The trouble with contemporary Israelis in Palestine – “putting things on the ground that will be impossible to dismantle,” ….. “It’s either Israeli domination – backed by America – or the Islamic radicals. Take your pick,” is mirrored by events in the 1900s when 50,000 Russian Jews escaping from persecution wanted to settle in the Holy Land. “Europe simply does not see the people of the countries it wishes to annex – and when it does , it sees them in accordance with its own old and accepted definitions: backward people , lacking rational abilities and subject to religious fanaticism.” At one point Layla says of the de facto ruler of Egypt, “‘Lord Cromer is a patriot and he serves his country well. We understand that. Only he should not pretend that he is serving Egypt.’” Cromer’s attitude ignores that, “We in Egypt have been proud of our history; proud to belong to the land that was the first mother of civilization. In time she passed the banner of leadership to Greece and then Rome, and from there it reverted to the lands of Islam until in the seventeenth century it was taken hold of by Europe.” As one Egyptian says to Isabel, in a phrase that perhaps prefigures and goes some way to explain the attack on the twin towers only a year after the novel was published, “all the Americans I meet are good people, but your government’s foreign policy is so bad. It’s not good, you know, for a country to be hated by so many people.”

The politics may be an essential background but it is not the focus. That is the love story between Anna and Sharif and the ever fascinating nature of human interactions. Soueif’s ability as a novelist to portray these is not in doubt. The tapestry triptych which Anna weaved on the loom Sharif bought for her and of which one part had disappeared in the intervening years is perhaps a little too obvious a metaphor, though, and I did have a reservation at the introduction of a further possible twist in the net of relationships here, a thread picked at but not truly resolved.

Nevertheless this is a very well written, engaging novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize, which, while not, quite, in the absolutely highest class is certainly not far off.

Pedant’s corner:- Abd el-Nasser (in the epigraph it was ‘Abd el-Nasser,) hostess’ (hostess’s,) occasional unnecessary spaces after quotation marks, the odd missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “more that an eccentric Englishwoman” (more than,) Selfridges’ foodhall (I know the shop is now named Selfridges but it was founded by a Harry Gordon Selfridge as Selfridge & Co so its possessive should always have been Selfridge’s, therefore Selfridge’s foodhall,) staunched (stanched.)

Autumn Quail by Naguib Mahfouz

Doubleday, 1990, 171 p. Translated from the Arabic, Al-Summan wal-Kharif (1962,) by Roger Allen, revised by John Roddenbeck.

 Autumn Quail cover

There is a quality to some translated fiction that is opaque. Whether it is due to a too literal translation or a different cultural outlook it lends a certain distance to the reading experience. Something isn’t quite in focus. There is a little of that to Autumn Quail but the lack of sharpness here may simply be due to the nature of the novel’s protagonist.

After the Egyptian military coup of 1952 Isa ad-Dabbagh, a high ranking civil servant whose fortunes had previously looked assured, is dismissed from his post for corruption. With his future disrupted, his fiancée’s father’s permission for the marriage now refused and unwilling to compromise by getting a job he dithers through the days, not settling between remaining in Cairo, Alexandria or Ra’s al-Barr, allowing Riri, a prostitute he encounters on the Alexandria Corniche, to keep house for him (a mutually beneficial arrangement till he throws her out when she becomes pregnant,) making a marriage with a much older woman whom he does not love and taking to gambling unsuccessfully. A friend tells him, “You’re a boat drifting without a sail.” Only after the Suez crisis and further encounters (with a now successful Riri, and with a man for whose imprisonment he had once been responsible) does he begin to reassess his life.

The introduction (as usual I left it till after reading the novel proper – and it did contain spoilers) suggests Mahfouz wrote this partly to express his disquiet with the way that the 1952 revolution had evolved. Throughout there was the sensation that perhaps you have to be Egyptian to understand all the implications and nuances Mahfouz was writing about. It’s perfectly serviceable fiction but I didn’t really connect with it.

Pedant’s corner:- shaikh (usually sheikh,) “who let’s himself” (lets,) oblivious of (oblivious to,) “a group of economists were going to hold a discussion” (a group was.)

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