One of Egypt's greatest contemporary writers, Gamal al-Ghitani
(1945-2015) was born into a family of modest means in the Egyptian
countryside. He trained as a carpet maker before turning his
attention to writing, publishing over a dozen novels and several
collections of short stories. This haunting memoir, one of seven
autobiographical "notebooks" written before Ghitani's death, weaves
together a series of vignettes in a style that mimics the uneven,
discontinuous nature of memory itself. These fragments, or traces,
are summoned from across the span of a singular lifetime, from
Ghitani's rural birthplace in Upper Egypt to Cairo, to the Arab
world and beyond. We read of his childhood adventures, his erotic
awakenings, his time as a political prisoner, and his reports from
the battlefront in Iraq and the corridors of power in Syria. There
are vivid passages that capture fleeting glances of strangers
through car windows, flavors and scents of delicacies he still
savored, dreams and sorrows of neighbors in the apartment blocks of
Cairo before Nasser, as well as recollections of chance
conversations at points of transit, in cafes and on elegant
streets, and trysts with unnamed paramours. These memories, and
Ghitani's musings on memory's own finitude and mutability, make
Traces both memoir and a meditation on memory itself, in all its
inscrutable workings and inevitable betrayals.
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