Stealth

In this novel, first published in Egypt in 2007, Ibrahim (That Smell) offers a gripping and coolly mesmerizing account of a young boy’s growing awareness of the adult world. Written in his trademark telegraphic realism, the novel brings into being mid-20th-century Cairo: “Old doors and stone benches in front of tiny shops. Smells of mud, decay, and axle grease.” The novel is narrated by an 11-year-old boy living with his father, Khalil Bey, and struggling to make sense of their existence together since his mother’s death. Interspersed amid the main text are italicized sentences presenting the boy’s memories of his parents, such as, “My father teaches mother to play poker.” The book is driven by a slow, affectless layering of details of Egyptian life prior to Nasser’s 1952 revolution, rather than by plot development. The different aspects of life touched on include air raid sirens during WWII, budding sexuality, and political discontentment. The young narrator’s voice conveys the unnerving detachment of limited understanding, giving the same weight to mundane moments like the lighting of a cigarette as it does to an attempted rape witnessed by the boy. Ibrahim’s achievement is that he has convincingly reanimated a vanished Cairo and conveyed the wonder and tragedy of youth. (June)