Traces of Enayat

Egyptian poet Mersal (Threshold) recounts in this haunting report her quest to uncover the life story of writer Enayat al-Zayyat (1936--1963) after stumbling upon al-Zayyat's posthumous 1967 debut novel, Love and Silence, at a Cairo bookstall in 1993. Mersal was taken with al-Zayyat's startlingly modern tale of an Egyptian woman's search for personal freedom amid disillusionment with work and love, shocked the book had gone largely unheralded, and shaken by the discovery that al-Zayyat killed herself four years before the novel's publication. Setting out to unearth the circumstances of al-Zayyat's life and death, Mersal tracked down the writer's surviving friends and family, their fragmentary perspectives revealing an introspective, depressed young woman who in the days leading up to her death was discouraged by a publisher's rejection of Love and Silence and feared losing custody of her six-year-old son in a contentious divorce. Mersal's meticulous research occasionally breaks the spell of her otherwise hypnotic storytelling, as when she reproduces the full seven-page obituary for a German Egyptologist that al-Zayyat apparently intended to write her second novel about, but the prose shines (Mersal, in Moger's sensitive translation, describes al-Zayyat's voice as "the whisper that never speaks to the masses... like weeping heard on the other side of a wall") and the central literary mystery will keep readers turning pages. This beguiling volume captivates. Photos. Agent: Szilvia Molnár, Sterling Lord. (Apr.)

One woman's search to uncover the story of Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-1963), a figure in Egyptian literature who nearly disappeared from the canon. In 1963, al-Zayyat killed herself just days after hearing publishers were not interested in her novel Love and Silence. Mersal describes the novel's steadfast contemporary relevance, its "feminist 'consciousness,'" and how "you sense the ponderous influence of contemporary romance novels, but elsewhere it is modern, strange, limpid, and beyond categorization." Yet the novel is "entirely absent from every history of twentieth century Egyptian and Arabic literature." In this sharp investigation, Mersal fights against al-Zayyat's erasure, piecing together the author's short life and illuminating Egypt's literary scene and the many societal difficulties faced by a young creative woman in the 1960s. Mersal writes like a detective who lets their case get personal: She calls al-Zayyat's tragedy "seductive" and recognizes the obsession in her own research. "It had begun to dawn on me that I wasn't fully in control of myself," she acknowledges. "I was writing these long emails and sending them out the way some people put a message in a bottle and cast it into the sea: not because they want it to be found, but because they will do anything they can to sleep." The author traces her leads back as far as she can, and her exhaustive research often sidelines her storytelling. For example, the discovery of a renamed street sparks a sluice of records from the city-planning and surveying offices, and Mersal introduces an investigation of al-Zayyat's kindergarten with the story of a wartime freighter docking in Alexandria. Excessively thorough, Mersal eventually reveals secrets about her subject's depression and unhappy marriage, reframing the book into a profound work that is more about al-Zayyat's mental health than about her being simply a curiosity of world literature. A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.