Traces of Enayat

Egyptian poet Mersal (Threshold) recounts in this haunting report her quest to uncover the life story of writer Enayat al-Zayyat (1936–1963) after stumbling upon al-Zayyat’s posthumous 1967 debut novel, Love and Silence, at a Cairo bookstall in 1993. Mersal was taken with al-Zayyat’s startlingly modern tale of an Egyptian woman’s search for personal freedom amid disillusionment with work and love, shocked the book had gone largely unheralded, and shaken by the discovery that al-Zayyat killed herself four years before the novel’s publication. Setting out to unearth the circumstances of al-Zayyat’s life and death, Mersal tracked down the writer’s surviving friends and family, their fragmentary perspectives revealing an introspective, depressed young woman who in the days leading up to her death was discouraged by a publisher’s rejection of Love and Silence and feared losing custody of her six-year-old son in a contentious divorce. Mersal’s meticulous research occasionally breaks the spell of her otherwise hypnotic storytelling, as when she reproduces the full seven-page obituary for a German Egyptologist that al-Zayyat apparently intended to write her second novel about, but the prose shines (Mersal, in Moger’s sensitive translation, describes al-Zayyat’s voice as “the whisper that never speaks to the masses... like weeping heard on the other side of a wall”) and the central literary mystery will keep readers turning pages. This beguiling volume captivates. Photos. Agent: Szilvia Molnár, Sterling Lord. (Apr.)