Latest Review: "Stealth" by Sonallah Ibrahim

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Stealth by Sonallah Ibrahim, translated by Hosam Aboul-Ela and published by New Directions.

Chris is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, and happens to be taking the next month off to participate in NaNoWriMo. We wish him endurance and good writing juju!

Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review:

From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, Egypt was going through a period of transition. The country’s people were growing unhappy with the corruption of power in the government, which had been under British rule for decades. The Egyptians’ performance at the 1948 Summer Olympics didn’t help bolster nationalism: of the 85 athletes who participated, only five won medals. Meanwhile, a group of Egyptian officers, including future Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, formed the Free Officers Movement. Originally organized to reinstate institutions removed by the government, the movement grew in strength—and ambition—during the Arab-Israeli War. By 1952, the officers not only overthrew King Farouk, but they ended the British occupation and established Egypt as a republic.

Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim lived through the period leading to and following the revolution, and he has written about the effects it has had on his country. His first novel, That Smell (1966), was written 12 years after Nasser’s rise to power, and according to an article in the New Yorker, which called Ibrahim “Egypt’s oracular novelist,” anticipated Nasser’s fall: a year after it was published, the Israelis defeated Egypt during the Six-Day War and took control of the Sinai Peninsula. Ibrahim wrote That Smell after spending five years as a political prisoner; it was during that time when, according to an article in the National, he conceived the idea for Stealth, which was originally published in Egypt in 2007.

The period of history leading to the revolution forms the backdrop of Stealth; however, it isn’t so much a political novel as it is a coming-of-age story. The narrator is an 11-year-old boy who closely observes the actions of adults, including his father, Kahlil, a retired military officer, whom he lives with in a dirty, bug-infested apartment in Cairo. The boy spends a lot of time spying on his father, as well as his friends and acquaintances. If he’s not peeking through keyholes to spy on their private, intimate moments, then he eavesdrops on their conversations. In fact, he seems much more interested in the world of adults than other children, as he only seems to play with other children when he’s forced to.

For the rest of the review, go here.