Traces : a memoir / Gamal Al-Ghitani ; translated by Nader K. Uthman
- Author
- Ghīṭānī, Jamāl
- Uniform Title
- Dafātir al-tadwīn : Dafātir al-khamis. English
- Published
- Cairo ; New York : The American University in Cairo Press, [2020]
- Copyright Date
- ©2020
- Physical Description
- 1 online resource (239 pages).
- Additional Creators
- Uthman, Nader K.
Access Online
- Series
- Language Note
- Translated from the Arabic.
- Summary
- "One of Egypt's greatest contemporary writers reflects on life and love This haunting memoir, written ten years before Ghitani's death, weaves together a series of vignettes in a style that mimics the uneven, discontinuous nature of memory itself. These fragments are summoned from across the span of a singular lifetime. We read of his childhood adventures, his erotic awakenings, his time as a political prisoner, and his reports from the battlefront in Iraq and the corridors of power in Syria. Vivid passages capture fleeting glances of strangers through car windows, flavors and scents of delicacies savored, dreams and sorrows of neighbors in the apartment blocks of Cairo before Nasser, as well as chance conversations at points of transit, in cafés, on elegant streets, and with unnamed paramours. These memories, and Ghitani's musings on memory's own finitude and mutability, make Traces both a memoir and a meditation on memory itself, in all its inscrutable workings and inevitable betrayals."--Publisher.
- Subject(s)
- Genre(s)
- ISBN
- 1617979759
9781617979750 (electronic bk.)
9789774169533 - Note
- Originally published in Arabic in 2005.
View MARC record | catkey: 43297924