4 minute read
IF AN EGYPTIAN CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH by Noor Naga
if an egyptian cannot speak english
IF AN EGYPTIAN CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH
Naga, Noor Graywolf (192 pp.) $16.00 paper | April 5, 2022 978-1-64445-081-9
A fascinating novel about class and abuse. When the Egyptian American protagonist of Naga’s second book moves from the U.S. to Cairo, she finds herself unable to fit in. She gets stares because of her haircut (“What they really want to know is whether my head is shaved because I have cancer or because I’m a pervert”) and questions because of her heritage: “Here I keep saying I’m Egyptian and no one believes me. I’m the other kind of other, someone come from abroad who could just as easily return there.” The protagonist, unnamed until the last part of the novel, finds work teaching English for the British Council and befriends two fellow patrons at a downtown cafe. Her life changes when she meets a young man who years ago moved to Cairo from a small Egyptian town; he made a living selling photographs during the 2011 Egyptian revolution but fell into cocaine addiction after the Arab Spring ended. (“When the foreigners left, it all went to shit,” he reflects. “When it all went to shit, the foreigners left. The sequence hardly matters.”) “The boy from Shobrakheit” (his name is never revealed) and the American woman embark on a sexual relationship that’s not quite a romance, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that he’s violent—at one point, he swings a table at her head, telling her, “Look what you made me do.” After he disappears, the woman is torn, fighting the urge to make excuses for him. The man, for his part, alternates between regret and making excuses. Naga’s writing in the book’s first two parts is gripping, but the final section, metafictional and darkly funny, is an absolute master class. She deals with important issues with a gimlet eye and a rare sensitivity—it would be a massive understatement to call this novel a must-read.
In a word: brilliant.
such big dreams
SUCH BIG DREAMS
Patel, Reema Ballantine (336 pp.) $27.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-49950-4
Making an appealing debut, Canadian lawyer Patel draws on her experiences at a nongovernmental organization in India to follow the fortunes of Justice For All, a financially strapped human rights agency, where underpaid lawyers toil mightily to represent the poor of Mumbai.
Cynical, street-smart Rakhi is the agency’s 23-year-old office assistant whose menial tasks include taking care of a changing cast of naïve interns, who, she remarks, “come here wanting to fix India and leave after two stomach bugs, whining about how much they miss clean air and something they call almond milk.” Rakhi was hired by the agency’s director, Gauri, who first met her at a girls’ school where she had been remanded after living on the streets for 5 years—an experience that Patel recounts in gritty detail. Learning about Rakhi’s childhood—abandonment, hunger, physical harm—Gauri was astonished by the girl’s fierce spirit and intelligence: “Every door had been slammed in your face,” she tells Rakhi, “and yet there you were, still surviving.” When Rakhi turns 18, Gauri gives her a job that, she thinks, will grant the girl “another chance at life”; but for Rakhi, working for Gauri seems, instead, like another incarceration. Paid a pittance, she lives in a slum of “open sewers, monsoon floods,” and teeming “multilevel hutments”; and furthermore, Gauri monitors her every move. Rakhi’s longing for a different future and Gauri’s desperate effort to keep her agency afloat make them vulnerable to two characters—vivid though stereotypical—who seem to offer an answer to their dreams: a well-connected Canadian intern bound for Harvard’s Kennedy School who takes an outsized interest in Rakhi’s life; and a fading Bollywood star, hoping to revive her career, who promises to lure big donors in exchange for becoming the “public face” of the NGO.
A sharply drawn protagonist gives this novel power and zest.
DECIMATE
Rice, Christopher Thomas & Mercer (432 pp.) $24.95 | May 10, 2022 978-1-5420-3274-2
Rice puts a wicked spin on neardeath experiences. While camping with their father in Glacier National Park, Claire Huntley follows her younger brother, Poe, into the woods, where they’re attacked by an unknown force that changes their lives. The authorities say they’ve been attacked by a bear, but her father’s claim that it was aliens ruins his marriage and separates Claire, who stays with her mom, from Poe, who lives with his father. Years later, when Claire’s a teacher in California and Poe’s an artist and drug addict in New York, Poe’s plane crashes on a trip to visit his sister, and their mystical connection is dramatized when she feels his pain. Back at the crash site, Vernon Starnes, a deeply disturbed man who’s living in a nearby shack, investigates and discovers a seat covered in a blue shimmer that takes over his body, changing him into a powerful, dangerous killer. Thus begins a tale of coverups, government agents, private muscle, and a Nazi past hidden in Montana. Even in death Poe continues to communicate with Claire in different ways, calling her and Margot Hastings, their father’s ex-girlfriend, to travel to Montana to see him. There, they meet Randy Drummond and his friends, keepers of years’ worth of harrowing secrets that are slowly revealed as Claire and Poe work with them to contain a global threat.
