Customer Reviews

The Cairo Diary

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love Paul Auster.

I mention that so you'll see where I'm coming from when I say that "The Cairo Diary" is the weirdest book I've ever read.

I spent the entire story feeling as if it were being told to me from a parallel universe where everything is off by a fraction of a kilter. Just enough to make you squirm. Characters' actions don't follow their thoughts, and dialogue flies in from somewhere on the far side of M1. Threats never get threatening enough to cause you a moment's true concern. Sinister people and equally sinister storms hover nearby, only to vanish as quickly as they appeared and leave no trace. Our heroine is supposedly in mortal danger, yet her fears come and go in the space of two lines.

These oddities are couched in prose that will also make you say, "huh"? If I could get a copy of this book in French, I'm just proficient enough to stumble around and see if those faults are the author's or the translator's. Without reading both versions, it's hard to say who is to blame for descriptions like this (though I have my ideas.): "The sea clashed its undulating cymbals, bringing forth a tremolo of foam that spurted onto the towers, soiling the stone with this choleric ejaculation."

That comes right after a line ascribing suicidal tendencies to a pair of window shutters.

If Chattam knows Poe, he probably also knows another American gothic master: William Faulkner. I sense a yearning for Mr. Faulkner in these pages, but Detective Matheson is no Benjy Compson, and the final twist is more like a half-thought-out kink.

In 2005 the French DST (secret police) move Marian from Paris to Mont-Saint-Michel on the west coast in order to keep her safe. To somewhat ease the ennui, she visits the library at Avranches. There she finds a journal written by Cairo Police Detective Jeremy Matheson in 1928.

Cairo 1928: Several young children vanished in thin air; they were later found dead at the tombs; all were horrifically mutilated. The head investigator Egyptian Inspector Azim el-Dayim believes the killer is a ghoul, a mythical inhuman monster. British expatriate Jeremy believes the wealthy husband of his former lover is the culprit. As the city panics over this giant serial killer, Marian believes the diary is real and that someone objects to her having it; she receives threatening notes to return what is not hers as she tries to solve the mystery of an almost eight decade old Egyptian serial killer.

Though Marian is looking back via the diary, readers will feel the atmosphere filled with tension of 1928 Cairo when Egypt was an English protectorate. The story line moves effortlessly between the two eras as Marian who has caused some sort of highest level scandal in Paris finds she is caught up in the intrigue of the historical murder investigation and pondering who in the present wants her to return what she assumes is the diary. With a slick touch of having the diary inside a Poe tale, mystery fans will appreciate THE CAIRO DIARY as the audience like the heroine will ponder the maxim truth is in the eye of the beholder as "what is truth at the end of the day" or tale.

Harriet Klausner

Initially I found this book fascinating and intriguing and I really wanted to get to grips with both mysteries contained in the story, but in the end I gave up on reading it, skipped to the end and then returned it to the library. Why? Because reading it drove me crazy! I don't know if it was the original french style or the translation but the numerous extremely short paragraphs intermingled with quite long and detailed descriptions made the novel very disjointed and jerky and impossible to really get involved with the story. I ended up just wishing the whole thing would come to an end so I could stop getting a headache from the constantly changing rhythmn of the text.

Having said that, the mystery is a good one, the character of Marion is sympathetic and the descriptions of 1920s Egypt are fascinating.

As usual with Maxime Chattam, I couldn't put the book down. He writes in such a colourful manner that you have to go to the end. And you're never disappointed!

Suspenseful. I enjoyed the pace of being exposed to information by reading a diary in increments. The main character finds a diary that explains the context of a murder investigation that involves a serial killer of children. I could not put the story down. I needed to know the outcome.

I too wanted to like this mystery. It had a great set up. The reader does not know initially why the heroine must be secreted at Mont St Michel, and then there is the mystery within the mystery when she discovers the secret diary.
There are red herrings everywhere since most every suspect wears a hood - both at the Mont St Michel of today and the Cairo of the 1920's. I at first suspected that the heroine's travails would somehow tie into the 1920's mystery. But instead there are a couple of reverse endings with am even more reverse conclusion. The writing or maybe it was the translation was not enough to keep me interested. The last 100 pages felt like filler. So I too skipped to the end. It had a nice ambience of Egypt back then and spoke to the casual racism of the colonial British to the Egyptians. Other than that, I would skip it.