In London, el-Shubbak (“A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture”) beyiftah for 20 days, from July 4-24. The program will host more than 70 events in more than 30 cultural venues throughout the city.
I was paging back through Khaled al-Khamissi’s Taxi, trans. Jonathan Wright, which is crammed with observations of and insights about contemporary Egypt. The prose here is not elegant, but one reads it and regrets that Anwar Sadat wasn’t “overthrown properly.”
The Fagoumy billboards have been up for several days now; the film, based on Ahmed Fouad Negm’s autobiography, is out today.
While head of the Egyptian Board of Censors Sayed Khattab believes “we are living in the age of freedom,” he adds that “nobody can reasonably say we should just cancel the whole institution” of censorship.
Even the ululations, if they exist, that heralded you birth
Take it all with you and leave,
And let us…
treads much the same ground as his 1972 novel, Cell Block 5. The earlier book has been called the “first Iraqi prison novel,” and much of the action of The Traveler and the Innkeeper, written in the mid-1970s, also takes place among political prisoners and police. Both novels draw on the acclaimed novelist and poet’s own experience in Iraqi jails.
During the discussion portion of the “Al Thawra al Daahika” talk yesterday, translator Humphrey Davies asked presenters: Would you, then, sacrifice any laughter in the reader?
His response sums up as: Book World Prague was right to honour Saudi Arabia
I am delighted to have discovered that AUC Press also thought that a good way to celebrate the “year of Naguib Mahfouz” would be to put out at least one re-translation of the Nobel Prize-winner’s work.
