Friendly Fire

July 20, 2009
In his deft new collection, the ever-controversial Al Aswany (The Yacoubian Building
) again delves into the various miseries of modern Egyptian life. In the long story “The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers,” the title character rants against Egypt and its citizens with irresistible venom. Isam's hobbies include denouncing the “stupid tribal loyalty” of his compatriots, humiliating his defeated cartoon-drawing father, sleeping with his mother's maid and infuriating his co-workers by blatantly sipping coffee during Ramadan. But when Isam meets the enchanting German, Jutta, it appears that he may have found just the Western woman to ease his existential pain. In the powerful “A Look into Nagi's Face,” Nagi, a half-French student, becomes a sadistic teacher's favorite, upsetting the classroom's balance of power. Domestic violence in a bourgeois Egyptian household gets out of hand in “When the Glass Shatters”; “Dearest Sister Makarim” mocks the formalities and traditions that hinder real communication between the sexes in modern Muslim culture. Acerbic critique of Egyptian culture is what weaves these stories into a coherent collection. The author systematically unveils his country's most revered institutions, from hospitals and schools to religion and marriage.

September 1, 2009
Best-selling Egyptian novelist Al Aswany ("The Yacoubian Building") returns with a startling first collection, elegant yet pointedly sharp-tongued and sarcastic. The opening and longest work, "The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers," tests the boundaries of fiction, leaving the reader in doubt about the narrator's sanity. The succeeding stories follow in a similar vein, both shocking and outrageous in their critical and iconoclastic view of Egyptian life. For instance, in "The Kitchen Boy," medical student Hisham seems destined for failure as a surgeon but stands up to his bullying superiors and wins an academic appointment; the author pokes fun at the arbitrary nature of success in a highly bureaucratic culture. Throughout, the stories examine the opposition between the mores of society and the needs of the individual. Al Aswany is an insightful student of the human condition whose trenchant characters evoke a weird hybrid of Albert Camus and Charles Bukowski; the strange landscape depicted is at once painful and playful, rich in meaning and understatement. Useful notes help readers understand Egyptian and Islamic history and customs. VERDICT For readers of literary fiction, fans of existentialism, and students of short story writing.Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2009
Egyptian writer Al Aswany, author of the internationally acclaimed novel Chicago (2008), was unable to get The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers published because it was considered insulting to Egypt. The clarion preface recounts this story of censorship based on the erroneous conflation of fictional characters with Al Aswany. Finally available in excellent English, The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers, the propulsive novella about an Egyptian tormented by his countrys failings that launches this powerful collection, proves to be an electrifying tale of a psyche destroyed by oppression. In the equally intense stories that follow, Al Aswany depicts family life and jobs as small hells, where power struggles smother any impulse toward generosity. An intern suffers under the tyranny of the mercurial head surgeon, a marriage proposal turns into a chilly financial transaction, a shopping expedition illuminates geopolitical absurdities and terror. Al Aswany masterfully deciphers the forces behind social polarization over class, gender, race, religion, and politics, tracking the pendulum swings from sympathy to hate, dream to despair, sorrow to resignation, and refusing simple answers and tidy conclusions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)