From Publishers Weekly
Again demonstrating the facility he showed in his well-received debut, Still Life with Insects, Kitely here offers another entrancing miniature, which pairs two dissimilar outcasts in contemporary Cairo. Ib, an expatriate American historian and translator of the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, finds his easygoing lifestyle disrupted by Gamal-Leon, an Armenian-born theater critic and drama teacher raised in Cairo. Gamal spies on the rattled American, follows him everywhere and plays practical jokes intended to challenge Ib's preconceptions of Egyptians and the Middle East. Their friendship is a duet of mutual cultural misunderstandings played out during the last weeks of Ramadan, the month-long Muslim holy period of daytime fasting and nighttime feasting. Kitely compellingly evokes the tensions of contemporary Egypt: its jarring juxtapositions of antiquity and Western pop culture; the million homeless refugees who camp out on the streets and in the parks of Cairo; the ubiquitous police informers who record ordinary citizens' conversations. His polyglot characters are complex. Ib is anguished at the recent death of his Dutch stepfather, whom Ib's mother divorced so that she could remarry Ib's father. Ib feuds with his sisters, who are jealous because he received his stepfather's entire inheritance. (Ib is a Danish name akin to Jacob, the biblical twin who persuaded his brother, Esau, to part with his inheritance.) Meanwhile, Gamal, an Armenian Christian, wrestles with his unhappy marriage to a Coptic Egyptian whose sister, a convert to Islam, married a Muslim terrorist now in jail. Kitely's motley circle of expatriates lends a cosmopolitan flavor to an exquisitely wrought mosaic.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
A combination of a Kafka novel, Robert Altman movie, and psychedelic record album, this strange, dreamy little novel from the author of the well-regarded Still Life with Insects (Graywolf, 1993) takes on themes of inversion, foreignness, and communications breakdown. Set in Cairo during Ramadan (the Muslim festival during which participants fast during the day and feast by night), the tale unfolds as an American known only as Ib is joined more or less purposefully by an Armenian named Gamal-Leon (who eventually deconstructs his own name: a "quick-change artist, a slippery tongued mimic who does not know his own voice or face") to visit playhouses, executive office parties, a prison. All these activities are overcast with a significance not totally apparent. Kiteley offers an elusive, hypnotic, even hallucinogenic novel about being as well as the mysteries of being. Highly recommended for literature collections serving sophisticated readers.
Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
