The Buried

April 1, 2019
The New Yorker staff writer recounts five years of work as a correspondent in Egypt, where he witnessed the events of the so-called Cairo Spring. The great struggle of Egypt, suggests Hessler (Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, 2013, etc.) over the course of this long but economically written study, is both to forge a national identity and to enter history--the history that one can record accurately, that is. On the second matter, the author looks deeply into the Egyptian past and the pharaonic notion that the past is never even past but instead "exists forever in the present." It would also seem to be open to interpretation; Hessler opened a textbook to find that, as if by miracle, Egypt won the October War of 1973, which "actually ended with the Egyptian Third Army surrounded by the Israelis." So it is that Egyptian museums display but don't really interpret the past, even as that textbook noted, in passing, "Whoever has no history has no present." All of these ponderings have bearing on what Hessler witnesses on the streets of Cairo and surrounding small towns as Islamists battle modernist reformers and members of the old post-Nasserite regime, each with a different view of what it means to be an Egyptian--in some instances of which former "fellaheen," or "peasants," actually claim descent not from the pharaohs but instead from the Saudis across the Red Sea. Hessler's interlocutors are a fascinating lot, including a garbage collector who ports away his own empty bottles of beer after visits, knowing he's going to have to do so anyway, and an Arabic-language instructor with a subtle command of politics. In the chaos of the revolution, some of those interlocutors are forced to leave, finding exile in faraway lands. Nuanced and deeply intelligent--a view of Egyptian politics that sometimes seems to look at everything but and that opens onto an endlessly complex place and people.

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Starred review from April 15, 2019
New Yorker foreign correspondent Hessler (Oracle Bones) lived in Egypt during the months and years following the 2011 ouster of president Hosni Mubarak, and his account of learning Arabic, befriending a diverse array of characters, and gingerly probing the sore spots of Egyptian society is at once engrossing and illuminating. While Hessler lives in Cairo and much of the early action centers there, he ventures more widely than most foreigners in the country, and his reporting from sleepy upper Egyptian villages and remote Chinese development projects add complexity. Most of Hessler’s contacts get roughed up and imprisoned by the security services at one point or another, often for inscrutable reasons: “There was no point to the brutality—it served no larger purpose.” He returns frequently to the theme of internal tension and contradiction—that Egyptians “combined rigid tradition with ideas that could be surprisingly open-minded or nonconformist”—to contrast the brittle institutions of the state, such as courts, with the deep-seated social patterns and relationships that provide structure when the state is dysfunctional or ineffectual. Adroitly combining the color and pacing of travel writing and investigative journalism with the tools and insight of anthropological fieldwork and political theory, this stakes a strong claim to being the definitive book to emerge from the Egyptian revolution.

April 15, 2019
Archaeology is the science of interpreting a distant past without being misled by one's familiar present. Hessler (Strange Stones, 2013) conveys the near-impossibility of this challenge as he recounts his five years of reporting on the crisis of Egypt's Arab Spring while studying the mysteries of the land's ancient ruins. Hessler's inability to transcend his cultural biases and his condescending reduction of Egyptians in amusing anecdotes is grating, yet he has the self-awareness to recognize the West's childlike romanticization of Egypt in himself and his Western colleagues. The similarity between archaeology and politics, both involving a series of revelations and obfuscations, is made clear by Hessler's juxtaposition of seemingly disparate events. After the ousting of Mubarak and the ascension of Morsi, a portrait of the former leader disappears and is replaced by one of the new leader. Nothing else seems to change. Likewise, an American archaeological team excavates a tomb, then reburies it for the sake of preservation, leaving no trace. Whether in modern Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood or the ancient Egypt of the pharaohs, all is cyclical.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2019

After seven years in Beijing as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Hessler (River Town) moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011 just as Egypt's version of the Arab Spring was unfolding. The protests in Tahrir Square in early 2011 resulted in the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and a period of instability leading to the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood through parliamentary elections and Mohamed Morsi as president in June 2012. Hessler takes readers on a fascinating journey up and down the Nile to bear witness to the effects of these political upheavals on average Egyptians, including his Arabic tutor, an entrepreneurial garbage collector, a gay interpreter, and local officials. Along the way, he also visits Egyptologists at archaeological sites, particularly Abydos and Amarna, where he gains perspective on current events culminating in the military suppression of the Brotherhood and overthrow of Morsi by General el-Sisi on July 3, 2013, himself elected president on May 29, 2014. Through all of this, little changes for ordinary citizens within the constraints of Egyptian societal traditions. VERDICT This is writing at its best and highly recommended for anyone interested in Egypt, modern or ancient. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/18.]--Edward K. Werner, formerly with St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., FL

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2019

Having served as Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker from 1996 to 2007 (see the New York Times best-selling, National Book Award finalist Oracle Bones), MacArthur Fellow Hessler answered the lure of ancient Egypt and became the magazine's Cairo correspondent in 2011, arriving in time for the Arab Spring. Here's his view of Egypt's political situation, shaped by chats with his illiterate garbage collector and a Chinese small businessman, for instance, and his work on an archaeological dig.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.