Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.
You are going to either love or hate this book.
Can I just leave that as the review?
I suppose not.
My experience with Egyptian literature is solely confined to the myths, legends, the odd short story or the odd novel by Mahfouz; therefore, I have no knowledge about how Eltoukhy’s style fits into modern Egyptian literature.
You’ve been warned.
In some ways, the cover (at least to the English translation that American University in Cairo Press provided via Netgalley) is slightly misleading. The novel is not quite as cartoonish as the illustration of the women on the cover implies.
Eltoukhy tells the story of two families in the Karantina section of Alexandria. The story larges focuses on the women from the families, but to call it a feminist traditional novel in the standard sense of the word would be in correct.
It starts with the death of a dog that eventually leads to a murder at a train station. It is a story of two lovers who separate and come back together. There is the man who sorta becomes a hermit, there is a love quadrangle, and lots of train tracks.
The style is almost heretic and a constantly dipping in and dipping out of a storyteller’s voice. This makes it feel as if you are sitting in a crowded bar or square listening to a storyteller spin the story out. It almost like a gossip session or one of those long soap opera like stories that your grandmother tells you – though far more violent.
The story itself is like the Godfather meets the Golden Girls meets Monty Python meets something uniquely Egyptian that you see in the fiction of Mahfouz. It’s Angela Carter without the werewolves. It’s something unique.
It does seem to speak to the role of women in society because the women are defined and hindered by the roles assigned to them or the lens that men or society view them.
The drawback is that at times, especially towards the end of the novel, it almost seems as if it is too much, or strangely and slightly contradicting, too little.
Yet there is such magic in the story.
7
