Hosam Aboul-Ela on Egypt

Hosam Aboul-Ela provides a brief overview of Egyptian writers on Words Without Borders:

Collectively, these novels embody contemporary Egyptian society’s tendency to play with time. The visitor feels time is moving backward and forward simultaneously here. Every time I stay for more than a few months, I’m impressed with how much talent exists in my generation and those coming after us. But too many of my talented friends too often seem like the superfluous man or woman in a Dostoevsky novel, living in a society that has a hard time keeping up with its youth. The novels say to me that in a place where time operated differently, the young talent filling the country would not be marginalized.