20th century
A01=Yasser Abdellatif
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
arabic writings
aswan dam
Author_Yasser Abdellatif
automatic-update
B06=Robin Moger
cairo university
Category1=Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FB
COP=United Kingdom
creative writing
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
egypt
egyptian literature
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
exile
global lit
homeland
identity
italian fascism
Language_English
literary works
lyrical
madness
national identities
novels
PA=Available
political engagement
Price_€10 to €20
prose poetry
PS=Active
radical politics
radicalization
relocation
SN=Arab List
softlaunch
student riots
translated work
translations
turmoil
vignettes
violence
wasteland
Product details
- ISBN 9780857425454
- Dimensions: 127 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2018
- Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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This lyrical novel tells the story of a young man living in Egypt in the 1990s, a time of great turmoil. We see student riots at Cairo University, radical politics, and the first steps towards the making of a writer. But his story is not told in isolation: through his experiences and memories Yasser Abdellatif also unfolds the experiences of his Nubian family through the epochal changes the country underwent in the twentieth-century. The symphonic four-part text presents us with narratives of Egyptian identity, a constant knitting and unraveling that moves us back and forth through time, as the reader slides and leaps across the shifting tectonic plates of Abdellatif's vignettes, his immaculately limpid prose poetry bringing forth the same questions. Nobody quite belongs in Cairo, it seems, but at the same time none of them belongs anywhere else: a relative emigrates from his Nubian village to the Cairo of the 1930s, where Italian fascists chase him through the streets and into a Maltese exile, only for him to return and make his way back South to the homeland he left. Another relative falls into religious esotericism and later madness, spinning away from Cairo and back to the wasteland of a village relocated after it had been flooded by the Aswan Dam. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, students fight security forces and binge on pills amid the dysfunctional remnants of a centralized state whose gravitational pull uprooted their parents and offered the possibility of assimilation into a national identity. Through the clear sky of Abdellatif's novel his characters, the spaces they call home, their way-stations, and even the nation that contains them all are a murmuration of starlings, held together and apart forever.
Yasser Abdellatif is an award-winning Egyptian poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, and novelist. Robin Moger is an Arabic translator currently living in Cape Town, South Africa.
