Gamal al-Ghitani Book order (chronological)

One of Egypt's greatest contemporary writers reflects on life and love. This haunting memoir, written ten years before Ghitani's death, weaves together a series of vignettes in a style that mimics the uneven, discontinuous nature of memory itself. These fragments are summoned from across the span of a singular lifetime. 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. Vivid passages capture fleeting glances of strangers through car windows, flavors and scents of delicacies savored, dreams and sorrows of neighbors in the apartment blocks of Cairo before Nasser, as well as chance conversations at points of transit, in cafés, on elegant streets, and with unnamed paramours. These memories, and Ghitani's musings on memory's own finitude and mutability, make Traces both a memoir and a meditation on memory itself, in all its inscrutable workings and inevitable betrayals.

With its Sufistic parables of the human condition, rendered in a style redolent of both the austere meditations of Borges and the dark engorged ruminations of Arthur C. Clark, Pyramid Texts engages the mind and beguiles the imagination. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last―so that, like their subjects, they taper ultimately into nothingness―the author evokes the obsessions that have drawn men over the centuries to the brooding presence of mankind’s most ancient and mysterious monuments. Among others in a procession of exotic characters, a Moroccan seeker after knowledge spends years contemplating the pyramids in the hope that one day he will understand the mysterious writing that fitfully appears on their sides. Another waits patiently for the moment when the shadow of one will diverge from its accustomed path and bestow immortality, and the Sphinx performs a celestial dance. Pyramid Texts leads us into a world of endless passages and mysterious sighing winds, a world whose claustrophobic and shadowy spaces may be illuminated by flashes of ecstasy leading to scintillating transfigurations and dizzying annihilations.

Die Erzählung wird von Abdullah Abu Yahya al-Jusqi erzählt, der dem Tod nahe ist. Er berichtet von seinem Großvater, dem Bürgermeister Gharib Yusuf, der in den siebziger Jahren starb und ihm vor seinem Tod eine erstaunliche Geschichte erzählte. Der Großvater bat ihn, diese Geschichte geheim zu halten, da niemand sie glauben würde. Der Enkel hörte sie, war jedoch der Meinung, dass Wissen nicht verborgen werden sollte, auch wenn es nicht geglaubt wird. Nach dem Tod des Großvaters trug der Enkel die Last dieser Geschichte viele Jahre mit sich. Als er an einer unheilbaren Krankheit litt und sein Ende nahte, beschloss er, die Erzählung seines Großvaters aufzuschreiben und den Menschen die Freiheit zu lassen, zu glauben oder nicht zu glauben. Er sagte ihnen, wer sie nicht glaubt, könne sie als eine der Legenden betrachten und daraus Weisheit und Wissen schöpfen.