Novel
Zayni Barakat
الزيني بركات
Gamal al-Ghitani · 1974
Synopsis
In Cairo, in the last years of the Mamluks, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Zayni Barakat ibn Musa takes over the administration of the city. A man of puritanical rigour, he governs, according to the English publisher's presentation, through a vast network of spies and informers, while his legitimacy is contested. The narrative opens with a narrator who no longer recognises the city, which resembles “a sick man on the verge of bursting into tears”. Reports, decrees, diaries and first-person accounts make up the book.
Context
The novel appeared in 1974. The author said he had drawn it from his awareness of police repression in the 1960s, and he likened the defeat of 1967 to that of Marj Dabiq, in 1516, both born of quarrels among the rulers. Jean-François Fourcade translated it into French for Éditions du Seuil in 1985, and Farouk Abdel Wahab into English; the Times Literary Supplement saw in it a “brilliant” success. Yahya al-Alami made a television serial from it in 1995.
Who it is for
A novel made up of imitated archive documents, reports, decrees and chronicles; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
A fable that transposes the police surveillance of the Nasser era to sixteenth-century Cairo.
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