EMPTY CAGES, latest read from Hoopoe Books for #WITMonth

EMPTY CAGES
FATMA QANDIL
Hoopoe Books|American University in Cairo Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Empty Cages is an urgent and raw confessional of memory and family and all that is lost and won in one woman's lifetime

The discovery of an old tin of chocolates, its contents long ago devoured, marks the entry into this intimate story that reaches back through a lifetime of memories in search of self and home.

In celebration and suffering, triumph and disappointment, Qandil’s voice is unflinching, revealing both a determination to speak the truth and a poetic sensitivity that is disarming. Reflecting on a family disintegrating—and with it, perhaps, a whole way of life—memories of a happy childhood melt away to reveal the fecklessness of selfish older brothers, a father’s addiction, a mother’s illness, and the violence and death—both literal and figurative—of those nearby.

Recipient of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, this stunning fictional debut marks the arrival of a stunning new voice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lyrically examining disappointment as a goad to seek one's own path is not an ordinary novelistic choice. Author Qandil chooses that course in this story of Fatma designing a life that suits her, that agrees with her, and that excludes the always unpleasant reality of family failures and failings. Quite radical for a woman in Egypt...or anywhere for that matter...to choose.

I can see the reasons Author Qandil was awarded a literary prize, and it is meet and right that she should receive one named for Nahfouz. Adam Talib has rendered her prose into fluid, mellifluous English, so I can feel the richness and harmony of her native language underpinning the translation. The story commences with meditations on a Cadbury's chocolates tin, and for several pages we follow Fatma's thoughts and memories as they swirl and coruscate to form a story out of what I'd see as trash.

When poets write prose it can be a beautiful gift. Poet and novelist Qandil's story exemplifies this in her (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) autobiographical novel. I was never sure, nor do I feel I was expected to be, how much Fatma was Everywoman, and how much was generalized from the unending fight against the plight of women in a patriarchal world.

That plight is exemplified by novel-Fatma's cultural expectation of her advantageous (to the men in her family) marriage. She bears much cultural weight in coping alone (dead mother, only girl) with her addict father and her unbearably narcissistic brothers. Marriage she flatly rejects. Takes bold, brassy confidence to do that, and succeed...yet never trigger a violent backlash in a world around her that is steeped in misogynistic violence.

Mostly.

Whenever you read a passage and think, "oh, that means this," don't get too invested in that interpretation. Author Qandil does not traffic in certainty or security or any other absolutes. Her story is smoke, water, sunlight...smooth to look at, seeming solid from this way or that of examining it, but grasp it and end up with something you did not expect left in your hands.

That, my friends, is how you know you're seeing Art being made before your dazzled gaze.

Why not five stars? Some details are culture-specific enough as to require explication that does not happen. I think none are holes that make the story unrelatable, just smaller moments that add nothing in English but feel like they did originally. If they did not, then the docked half-star stays the same.

A GIFT OF GEOLOGY:Ancient Egyptian Landscapes and Monuments, will give the mummyhead bad wanderlust

A GIFT OF GEOLOGY:Ancient Egyptian Landscapes and Monuments
COLIN D. READER
The American University in Cairo Press
$29.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An introduction to the geology of Egypt and its influence on ancient Egyptian culture

While much is known about Egypt’s towering pyramids, mighty obelisks, and extraordinary works of art, less is known about the role played by Egypt’s geological history in the formation of pharaonic culture’s artistic and architectural legacy. The fertile soils that lined the Nile Valley meant that the people of Egypt were able to live well off the land. Yet what allowed ancient Egypt to stand apart from other early civilizations was its access to the vast range of natural resources that lay beyond the Nile floodplain.

In this engagingly written book, Colin Reader invites readers to explore the influence of geology and landscape on the development of the cultures of ancient Egypt. After describing today’s Egyptian landscape and introducing key elements of the ancient Egyptian worldview, he provides a basic geological toolkit to address issues such as geological time and major earth-forming processes. The developments that gave the geology of Egypt its distinct character are explored, including the uplifting of mountains along the Red Sea coast, the evolution of the Nile river, and the formation of the vast desert areas beyond the Nile Valley. As the story unfolds, elements of Egypt’s archaeology are introduced, together with discussions of mining and quarrying, construction in stone, and the ways in which the country’s rich geological heritage allowed the culture of ancient Egypt to evolve.

Ideal for non-specialists and specialists alike, and supported with over one hundred illustrations, A Gift of Geology takes the reader on a fascinating journey into Egypt’s geological landscape and its relationship to the marvels of pharaonic culture.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm not a rockhound. I'm not an Egyptologist. I am, however, really glad I read this very accessible book about how geology affected, guided, and limited the culture and economy of Egypt during its entire history.

Is this your mental image of Egypt? Or maybe this:

Fine and dandy, both are correct and accurate. Neither is the Egypt that met the very first humans who settled it:

A wholly different world that met those very first refugees from the Sahara's vast grassland, containing a Lake Chad that had a greater surface area than the entire United Kingdom, as it gradually turned into the enormous desert of today. Those humans left us some petroglyphs to know them by:

...so we have a clear picture that they were culture-having modern human beings.

Before they turned into these guys:

...the cartouche-drawing people we think of as "the Egyptians" who populate our psyches, they had to learn to survive in a world that was HUGELY different than the one they found in that top map:

...an altogether less hospitable, drier place as you see...but still, as you also see from the sites marked on map, very much a homeland and a landscape that they were in command of and at home within.

The author takes us through the life and times of ancient Egypt in as thorough, and as interesting, a way as any I've ever read. I myownself am never really sure how the relative dating by stratigraphy really works, but felt much more able to follow what the author was telling me because:

...he showed me, in the actual landscape being discussed, what the heck was going on instead of only using useful-but-limited drawn diagrams. I am sure y'all being attentive readers have noticed my four-star rating above. It is not because I think the book is in any way deficient in its execution. I don't give it a full-five rating because the entire purpose of the book is to pass along information about Egypt, its culture, and its history, and the illustrative photos are not solely aesthetically purposed. This being the gifting season, and my purpose bringing the book to your attention being to inspire you to gift this to your Egypt-obsessed giftee, I wanted it to be clear that the book wears multiple hats that might not all suit the same visual reader.

Really, though, can any book do better evoking a sense of place than this?