Cairo
From Edge to Edge
SONALLAH IBRAHIM
Photographs by Jean Pierre Ribire 70 b/w
illustrations
Paperback 1998 96 pages
In English US$ 16.95
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The
Mother of the World as seen through the lens of French photographer
Jean Pierre Ribire and the pen of Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim.
The result is a rich and highly original portrait of a city.
Ribire's seventy powerful photographs capture fugitive moments in
urban life and architecture, in which historic grandeur meets
modernity in a race with time. Meanwhile, Sonallah Ibrahim's
incisive exploration of Cairo's past and his own past reveals a man
living on the edge of a city living on the edge of itself.
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Amrikanli
His recent novel, Americanli, portrays intellectuals as ordinary people. “We
should not expect intellectuals to act like heroes or to perform
mythological feats,” he said.
The neologism Americanli is reminiscent for Egyptians of the slang word
Othmanli, which used to mean Turkish when Egypt was under Turkish
domination. Its division into three words would mean in Arabic, “Once I Was
my Own Master” (Amri kan li).
Ibrahim is not the only Egyptian intellectual who draws a parallel between
the domination exerted by the Ottoman Empire and the Turks over Egypt in the
past and the current US political and economic influence in the country. |
Amrikanli
In Arabic
Price 6$
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Warda
The novel is the fourth in Ibrahim's line of documentary novels that employ a literary
style unique in Arabic writing. More than half of each of Ibrahim's documentary novels comes from sources
such as newspaper clippings, speeches by politicians and excerpts from
well-known books. Readers are often tempted to skip those uneventful parts but eventually find
out that the remaining part of the novel cannot be properly understood without them. |
In Arabic Price 5$
This book was our September 2001
selection for the Readers Club
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Zaat
In English Hardcover Price 24.95 $
In Arabic paperback Price 5$
This unusual and much lauded novel tells the story of the life of an Egyptian woman-the eponymous Zaat-during the regimes of three
Egyptian presidents: Abdel Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. Imbued with an Egyptian sense of humor and deeply rooted in the culture and
politics of the modern period, the novel takes a humorous but often black look at the changes that have occurred in Egypt over the past few
decades. Zaat's life experiences and relationships are set against economic and social upheavals in a style that is both sophisticated and
bawdy, highly ironic and often extremely poignant.
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