Being Abbas El Abd by Ahmed Alaidy

Being Abbas El Abd by Ahmed Alaidy (2003, translated 2006)
Read: September 2011

I read this book in a day probably about a two years after I bought it and a good year after Scott read it. I bought it because the Grauniad had run a story in their Review section about modern Arabic literature. Taxi was recommended in the article – and we loved that book – as was this and a few others, but this was the only one that they had at Adam bookshop in the Grand Mall (a great bookshop with modern, kids and coffee table books in English, Arabic and German).

This book was described as being “inspired by Chuck Palahniuk” and as such seemed to be the cutting edge of modern Arabic writing. What I found though was that this was almost more Irving Welsh with the language specific dialect being used. For me this book confused modern and contemporary with street/shock modern – it was as if the author had a point to prove that Arabic writing can be edgy and can compete with writers like Palahniuk and Welsh. All this for me though actually made it a difficult read and the story wasn’t all that great. It was as if the writer was trying too hard to be controversial and like his icons, that he didn’t develop the story or writing style enough.

The story was that of Abbas, who was an enigmatic character who would make arrangements on behalf of his friend, the narrator, and then shirk off into the background. It had suggestions of the split personality seen in Fight Club and was very psychological in the narrative. The text was littered with symbols (literally symbols, such as smilies and bloke/woman signs) and odd phrasing. I found the story interesting, but not particularly engaging or revealing (what I normally enjoy about reading Arabic translations is getting a bit of insight into the culture and region).

The most interesting part of the book was actually the translators note – a few pages at the end of the book. This revealed the difficulty the translator had had in adapting the book from Arabic to English and translating colloquialisms and slang into an English text. The translator also mentioned that some phrases in the book had been written in English already – to emphasise various points – and so he chose not to translate these back into Arabic, but to use French instead.

What this book taught me was that the title of the AUC series “modern arabic literature” is quite a clustering of styles and writings. Most of which are probably better described as “contemporary” – set in current times and about current issues. This book seems to have taken the definition of “modern” quite literally and tried to do something that is more ‘out there’. Maybe it has pushed some boundaries – shown that Arabic authors too can write in this way – it’s just that ‘this way’ is maybe not for me!