The Zafarani Files
Published on 31. May 2009
Book
Paperback/Softback
335 pages
978-1-906697-15-0 (ISBN)
Description
An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the cafe owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband - all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher's reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humour prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.
Reviews / Votes
'[This] is only the third of [Ghitani's] books... to be translated into English... He is far better known, not just in the Arab world but in France and Germany, than he is in Britain... Some contemporary Arab novels read as though they have been written with translation into a major European language in mind. This is not the case with Ghitani's book, which is about local things and written for a local audience... Ghitani's account of ordinary folk faced with a catastrophe that will spread across the world might suggest comparisons with British science-fiction novels of the 1950s, such as John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids or John Christopher's The Death of Grass, but the tone of the Egyptian novel is absurdist and bleakly comic and a more appropriate comparison might be with Ionesco's Rhinoceros. The translator, Farouk Abdel Wahab, has done his work so well that it is almost invisible and I often forgot that I was reading a translation.' -- Robert Irwin Times Literary Supplement 20091001 'an incredibly funny, inventive novel' -- Chad W. Post Three Percent 20090201More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
With flaps
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 124 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
368 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-906697-15-0 (9781906697150)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
'Gamal al Ghitani [is] now perhaps Egypt 's leading novelist ' wrote Robert Irwin in the TLS. He is the author of The Zafarani Files (Arabia Books, May 2009), Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004) and The Mahfouz Dialogs (AUC Press, 2007) and has been awarded the Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature for his novel Rinn. Ghitani is the Editor-in-Chief of the Cairo literary review Akhbar aladab. His works are translated into several languages. He has previously been awarded the State Merit Novel Award.