Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The intrigues of an old Cairo quarter: gossip, spells, betrayals, and busybodies in a parable about political and personal freedoms
"Absurdist and bleakly comic"—Robert Irwin, Times Literary Supplement
An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo’s old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the café owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband—all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher’s reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humor prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.
"Ghitani's account of ordinary folk faced with a catastrophe that will spread across the world might suggest comparisons with British science-fiction novels of the 1950s, such as John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids or John Christopher's The Death of Grass, but the tone of the Egyptian novel is absurdist and bleakly comic and a more appropriate comparison might be with Ionesco's Rhinoceros. The translator, Farouk Abdel Wahab, has done his work so well that it is almost invisible and I often forgot that I was reading a translation."—Robert Irwin, Times Literary Supplement
"An incredibly funny, inventive novel"—Chad Post, Three Percent
Gamal al-Ghitani (1945–2015) was an Egyptian novelist, literary editor, political commentator, and public intellectual. He published over a dozen novels, including Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004) and The Zafarani Files (AUC Press, 2009), as well as several collections of short stories. He was also founding editor of the literary magazine, Akhbar al-adab (1993–2011). He was awarded the Egyptian State Prize for the Novel (1980), the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France (1987), and the Egyptian State Prize for Literature (2007). In 2015, he received the Nile Award in Literature, Egypt’s highest literary honor.
Farouk Abdel Wahab was Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago. He was the translator of many works of Arabic fiction, including Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Book of Epiphanies (AUC Press, 2012). He won the 2007 Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of The Lodging House, by Khairy Shalaby (AUC Press pbk, 2008). He died in 2013.