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Vertigo: A Cairo Political Thriller by Ahmed Mourad

2012; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 86; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2012.0095

1945-8134

MaryLee Allen,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Imagine Africa Pirogue Collective Island Position The search for humanity through imagination is presented in this collection of essays, art, and poetry. Striving to showcase societies that have often been overlooked, this arrangement of African voices paints a diverse portrait of struggles, triumphs, and perseverance. The Good of the Novel Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan, ed. Continuum These thirteen essays take a critical approach to the modern novel by closely examining its techniques and styles. Each essay silhouettes a different novel and raises questions about the contemporary form and the role it has in today’s society while contemplating the universal truths presented in literature. Nota Bene by Brazilian twins Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá (see WLT, March 2007), Daytripper is organized around the life of an aspiring writer named Brás de Olivia Domingos, whose father is a revered novelist. Originally serialized in ten separate comic books, Daytripper achieves the almost impossible task of playing equally to the individual unit and the finished work by making each story an alternative version of the last day of Domingos’s life, marking that point at a variety of locations along his possible timeline . Adding to the layers of symbolism , Domingos languishes in his young adulthood in the shadow of his father’s legacy, working as an obituary writer. Each section bears the structure of an obituary and serves as a sometimes sobering and often life-affirming meditation on the weight of individual decisions and the balancing effect of fate. Moon and Bá’s visual approach is more suggestive than representative but manages just the right amount of detail and thoughtful coloring , supplied by Dave Stewart, to masterfully draw the reader into the lush social and physical backdrop of Domingos’s life and, more broadly, Brazil as a nation. With the attention paid to the single issue as a unit, each individual story is given room to breathe, with the powerful visual aspect of storytelling carrying the quiet sections that are interspersed between well-paced dialogue and captioning. This gives the big moment that defines each story the space to really produce an impact when it hits, and few, if any, of the endings arrive without implicitly reflecting back on the other possible endings for Domingos’s story. Most impressively, Daytripper, upon completion, cannot simply by reduced to being “about” this thing or that thing. In its careful examinations of births and deaths, the big and little moments that happen in between, and the interplay between possibilities, Daytripper reaches that elusive goal of being about life without disappearing down its own navel in the process. It is a marvelous feat that demands not just reading but study in its wake. Rob Vollmar University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma Ahmed Mourad. Vertigo: A Cairo Political Thriller. Robin Moger, tr. Doha, Qatar. Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation. 2011. isbn 9789992142660 The blurb on the back of Vertigo’s dust jacket was obviously not checked by a native speaker of English, and one opens this translation from the 2007 Arabic original with no high hopes. But it soon becomes apparent that Ahmed Mourad is a distinctive , indeed a unique voice, and that Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation and Robin Moger, its stylish translator, have done us a considerable favor in making that voice available to Western audiences. Ahmed Kamal is a young man making a modest living as a photographer in Cairo. Visiting a friend who works in the “rotating Bar Vertigo : Egypt’s most exclusive bar and its most famous,” he witnesses and, despite his terror, is able to repeatedly take pictures of a scene of professionally executed carnage that is described with cold brilliance. We learn from subsequent chapters that the orders to kill one powerful wheeler-dealer and to kneecap another have come from a very high level, perhaps the march–april 2012 | 69 70 | World Literature Today reviews highest of all. When Ahmed anonymously sends his pictures to a popular weekly that he naïvely thinks of as being genuinely antigovernment, he finds they are presented in such a way as to trivialize the event that has so horrified him. Aided by a selfless journalist and a computer-geek friend, Ahmed schemes to make public...