LOVE IN EXILE

A brooding 1995 novel by Taher (Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, 1996), winner of the prestigious Egyptian State Prize. It’s the first-person narrative of an unnamed veteran journalist whose support of former President Nasser has led him into self-exile in an also unnamed European city, at the time of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982. A love affair with a young Austrian woman ensues, as does a debilitating stroke, as the disappointed idealist—spurred to activism again by news of massacres in Palestinian refugee camps—discovers that he can neither ignore the demands posed by current events, nor recapture energies that had formerly kept him at the center of them. Incidental echoes of Hemingway, Malraux, and Camus enrich the texture of an unusually intelligent and absorbing political tale.