Harare Review of Books

186 pages.

First published on Apr 12, 2022.

Genre: Literary Fiction.

I could quote entire sections of this wonderfully conceived novel for their beauty. Its structure is so finely wrought that other writers should imitate it, but any copy will definitely come off as such. I have just put it down, but I could re-read it again right now, because that’s how clever Noor Naga’s book is: a quick read, feeling light, but packing a terrific punch. 

Naga’s protagonist, who remains unnamed until near the end of the novel, has moved to Cairo to reconnect with her roots. She is a “third-culture kid” raised in the US by Egyptian parents; she marks her race as “other” on the US census form, while her parents check “white.”

Although you can’t tell initially, the first of the three parts of the book, the one that introduces her, has another voice: that of the man—referred to throughout the book as the boy from Shobrakheit—that she meets when she gets to Cairo, and with whom she enters into an entanglement. They are both strangers in Cairo, and in that first section, their voices alternate to tell the story of their increasingly disturbing interactions.

How is it that the rich are surrounded by so much beauty? …

No one ever talks about the punishing aesthetics of being poor. The shack on the roof where I have been living for  years is more outside than inside—­the floor is unfinished concrete, littered with cigarette butts, broken glass, and rat pellets in  the darkest corner. The mattress is without sheets, the window is without glass; I hang up a towel by feeding its corners into the holes between the bricks, and this is how I keep out the sun. Every surface is clothed with dust. I’ve lived there since the death of photojournalism, since the foreigners left, taking their drugs with them, since the lines for gas and subsidized bread began. All these years, I never once complained about my little home on the roof. Only  now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.

From the novel

In a stroke of genius, paralleling their relationship, their voices are split in the second part of the novel, where things are finally made more explicit, and local terms, previously used without any assistance to the reader, are explained in footnotes. This second part ratchets up the tension until you just know something is going to happen, which, of course, it does, the climactic scene of the novel coming at the end of this section. I shall not spoil the third and final part of the novel for you, except to say that it is an unexpected choice on the part of the author, and enough to make this novel even more remarkable, and memorable.

This story is both character- and plot-driven, with a nice balance between the two. It is about class, identity, naivety, violence, and men and women. The novel won the 2019 Graywolf Press Africa Fiction Prize, and a section of the manuscript won the 2019 Disquiet Prize in Fiction. Noor Naga lives in Cairo, Egypt.

Look out for Chekhov’s gun.

Rated: a high 9/10.