cover image I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing

I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing

Brian Kiteley. Simon & Schuster, $19.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80905-2

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. (Jan.)