The Zafarani Files

By Gamal al-Ghitani

An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the cafe owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband. All are subjects of surveillance. The watcherís reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret.

Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humour prevail in this darkly comic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind veils of satire.

Gamal al-Ghitani was born in 1945 and is the author of The Mahfouz Dialogues (2007), Zayni Barakat (1988) - a post-modern historical novel which doubles as an allegory of Nasser's police state and was praised by Edward Said as a 'gripping, unforgettable work of prose fiction, [displaying] originality of  conception and execution at every step' - and Pyramid Texts (2007). He is Editor in Chief of the Cairo Literary Review and was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair in 2009.

'[This] is only the third of [Ghitani's] books... to be translated into English... He is far better known, not just in the Arab world but in France and Germany, than he is in Britain... Some contemporary Arab novels read as though they have been written with translation into a major European language in mind. This is not the case with Ghitani's book, which is about local things and written for a local audience... Ghitani's account of ordinary folk faced with a catastrophe that will spread across the world might suggest comparisons with British science-fiction novels of the 1950s, such as John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids or John Christopher's The Death of Grass, but the tone of the Egyptian novel is absurdist and bleakly comic and a more appropriate comparison might be with Ionesco's Rhinoceros. The translator, Farouk Abdel Wahab, has done his work so well that it is almost invisible and I often forgot that I was reading a translation.'

Robert Irwin, Times Literary Supplement, October 2009

'an incredibly funny, inventive novel'

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=1936

The Zafarani Files is longlisted for the 2010 Best Translated Book award.

The results will be announced on February 16th.