An affectionate evocation of lost youth and life’s passage by a seasoned storyteller.
Nostalgic roman à clef by the Nobel Prize–winning Egyptian novelist and secularist.
As it opens, the characters of Mahfouz’s novel, first serialized in a Cairo newspaper in 1988, are young boys who meet in 1915 in elementary school and who, years later, “will all be buried in the Bab al-Nasr Cemetery.” Five at the core of the group “have never left each other” while others will move away, fall out of touch. Some are rich; some aspire to wealth and influence in a time when young Egyptians are increasingly insistent on independence from Britain. A couple are faithful observers of Islam—one is Ismail, a boy who “never stopped imagining God in a majestic form whose grandeur had no limit”—while others are “without any sort of religion at all.” Yet all harbor the same enthusiasms, eagerly watching Tom Mix cowboy movies at the local movie parlor, fighting the neighborhood bullies and getting trounced in the bargain. As they grow into adolescence, the boys find a second home in a coffeehouse far enough away from their homes that they won’t be seen smoking and whiling away the hours playing dominoes and talking politics, as they will do for years to come even as they come of age, marry, struggle, and try to cope with onrushing events to greater or lesser degrees of success: “Hamada al-Halawani’s life continued between the palace, the houseboat, and Khan al-Khalili, while he added the Allies and the Axis to his vacillation between schools of thought,” writes Mahfouz of one at the outbreak of World War II. Covering a broad sweep of nearly a century of history, Mahfouz’s last novella is a single narrative, not broken into chapters but flowing like the Nile and time itself. Writes the translator in a welcome afterword, while Mahfouz and his generation are gone, the coffeehouse still stands, full of “old men from the surrounding neighborhood playing dominoes and drinking tea long into the evening.”
An affectionate evocation of lost youth and life’s passage by a seasoned storyteller.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-977-416-999-1
Page Count: 122
Publisher: American Univ. in Cairo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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