Elias, chapter from the novel, by the Egyptian writer Ahmad AbdulatifMy name is Elias. A Hebrew name, they say. From Eliyahu. The ‘s’ was added in the Greek. They say it’s a Muslim and a Christian name both. Of a prophet mentioned in the Torah and in the Quran. A coincidence. It’s nothing more than a coincidence. I’m not a prophet, nor a saint, nor a righteous man. Nor sinner either, as it happens. I’m just Elias. Elias plain and simple. In some respects my life, like that of others, might intersect with the prophet’s story. In some respects, like others, it might not. The prophet’s life might, in some respects, intersect with others’ stories, and my story play no part in it at all. Everything’s on the table.
Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel by Samira Aghacy
Jonathan Wright reviews Iraqi Jewish Novelists by Khalida Hatim AlwanThey range from Samir Naqqash, a tragic genius who clung to his Iraqiness and to the Arabic language throughout his troubled and peripatetic life, to Sami Michael, who switched to Hebrew in the 1970s and found a place for himself in Israeli society, albeit as a leftist, a defender of civil rights and a critic of discrimination against Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews inside Israel. One of the writers, Naim Kattan, has spent very little time in Israel, moving in Montreal in 1954 and flourishing as a prolific writer in French on a variety of themes, not exclusively on his Iraqi heritage or memories. Yet another, Anwar Shaul, who was well established by the 1940s as a writer of short stories and of poetry in traditional styles, stayed on in Iraq despite the harassments and ran a printing business there until he finally gave up and moved to Israel in 1971 at the age of 67.
Stephanie Petit reviews, The Mariner by Taleb AlrefaiThis two-fold unravelling – the old captain’s solemn grief over what was lost, the sudden, perilous storm – make up an engaging novel which, in Russell Harris’s faultless translation, reads effortlessly and sustains the reader’s attention throughout. Because it runs in parallel with, and reflects back on, Villiers’s famous record it is an undoubtedly interesting story, but as a standalone work of fiction too it is a worthy addition to an already substantial body of literary references to Kuwait’s maritime past.
Banipal Magazine 68 - Arabic Short Stories
In the feature we introduce, for the first time in Banipal, and in the main in English too, four of the finalists, including the winner, and three further great short story writers, with 21 very diverse, engaging and thoughtful stories, which comment on the uneven vagaries of life today and on the pulls of human emotions and desires
Banipal Magazine 67 Special feature on Lebanese writer Elias Khoury
The feature, “Elias Khoury, The Novelist”, opens with three excerpts from his latest novel Stella Maris, the second part of the trilogy, translated by the inimitable Humphrey Davies. It is followed by essays, articles on the corpus of novels, and reviews. The excerpts from Stella Maris pinpoint the endless contradiction that Adam lives, so he must “divide Adam into two halves, one for presence and one for absence”, and though victims are enveloped in silence and “stripped of language” in the face of humanity’s barbarity, the essence of civilisation is that language is “the only tool the dead can use to speak”.
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