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A Last Glass of Tea: And Other Stories
English (translation)
Original Arabic
Original Arabic
139 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 11, 2016
Set in the small villages in the Egyptian Delta where the author was born, El-Bisatie's collection of short stories illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present.
The stories are like a series of photographs: an impartial eye observes the action. Few characters have names. Interior monologue is rare: examples in the story "Confrontation" are set in italics. Without interior monologue, the camera-eye of the narrator sees only the action, and the reader receives few or no clues as to motivation. Likewise, the author provides no psychological development of the characters, and the reader knows nothing of their inner life.
In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."
Denys Johnson-Davies, the translator of the book, has been described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time."
The stories are like a series of photographs: an impartial eye observes the action. Few characters have names. Interior monologue is rare: examples in the story "Confrontation" are set in italics. Without interior monologue, the camera-eye of the narrator sees only the action, and the reader receives few or no clues as to motivation. Likewise, the author provides no psychological development of the characters, and the reader knows nothing of their inner life.
In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."
Denys Johnson-Davies, the translator of the book, has been described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time."
March 21, 2020
I greatly enjoyed reading El-Bisatie's "Clamor of the Lake", a novel in fact made up of interrelated short stories. Thus I expected something quite masterful from this collection of short stories, but ended up slightly disappointed. While there is no denying El-Bisatie's wonderful gift for conjuring in very few words a very particular atmosphere of rural Egyptian life filled with an eerie kind of suspense, a lot of the stories here felt rather too much as sketches. Now, I don't mind sketches at all, really, but the incredibly dense language in some of these stories or impressions made for a sometimes confusing and tiring read, especially in those stories in which El-Bisatie didn't really go beyond description. Not sure if this is the translator's fault, as it seemed to fluctuate from story to story: some being a relatively easy read, others so dense as to be near incomprehensible to me without having to read them several times. The highlights of the collection are fantastic, though. I particularly enjoyed "The Condemned Man", "A Conversation from the Third Floor", "Hagg Abd Rabbuh" and "War Widows".
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews