Friendly Fire
The Age
Saturday August 22, 2009
Friendly Fire Alaa Al Aswany Fourth Estate, $27.99DENTIST-TURNED-WRITER Alaa Al Aswany rose to prominence with his tragicomic dissection of contemporary Egyptian society, The Yacoubian Building. Friendly Fire gathers his shorter works in a masterful translation by Humphrey Davies. It opens with the startling, Dostoevsky-like novella, The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers, which was refused publication in Egypt for many years. Isam Abd el-Ati is an angry young dissident, ranting against a lack of personal and political freedom, unleashing an extraordinary philippic against Egyptian culture. He is inevitably doomed, his fate arriving in the guise of an attractive European. The ferocious, cannibalistic intelligence that animates the novella subsides into a quieter, more empathic frame in the short stories. Al Aswany's tales are tinged by sadness and defeat, submission and stagnation. Although many deal in universal trials €” loneliness, grief, frustration at work or in love €” there is a peculiarly Egyptian quality to the desolation portrayed.
© 2009 The Age
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