In the Eye of the Sun

May 31, 1993
This densely detailed, richly textured novel impeccably recreates the milieus of Cairo, London and English university life as it recounts the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian who, by her own admission, ``feels more comfortable with art than with life.'' Soueif, a Londoner making her American debut, tells Asya's story cinematically, beginning in 1979 and going back to 1967, with chapters formally divided into scenes and a plethora of flashbacks, flash-forwards and different perspectives. During the course of those years, Asya, daughter of an intellectual Cairo family, falls in love with and marries Saif, a highly successful computer expert who indulges her with considerable luxuries. But the marriage is plagued by sexual problems; going to England to pursue a doctorate, Asya eventually takes up with Gerald, a pseudo-sensitive boor studying marketing. Finally, her marriage over, she returns to a very different and less hospitable Cairo than the one in which she grew up to begin a teaching career about which she is, at best, ambivalent. The author invests scenes of childhood with the burnished glow of fond memory; these are among the most poignant passages here. Her impressive and only slightly overlong novel, with its acutely observed vision of male-female relations as a series of complex power struggles, suggests the emergence of a major new talent.