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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
3.5
"He was sick of always being on the side of the pursued. He had a crazy desire to be on the side of the pursuers, if only for one night, if only for this night. To sleep, to not be cold, to get rid of this heavy fatigue that he carried around like a burden. Yes, to be an abject policeman, but to be able to sleep."
The flowery language occasionally took me out of the narrative but I thoroughly enjoyed the humour as well as the scene the quote above is excerpted from, which complicated the novel's otherwise lighthearted portrayal of poverty.
"He was sick of always being on the side of the pursued. He had a crazy desire to be on the side of the pursuers, if only for one night, if only for this night. To sleep, to not be cold, to get rid of this heavy fatigue that he carried around like a burden. Yes, to be an abject policeman, but to be able to sleep."
The flowery language occasionally took me out of the narrative but I thoroughly enjoyed the humour as well as the scene the quote above is excerpted from, which complicated the novel's otherwise lighthearted portrayal of poverty.
Il mérite même pas son étoile, puis je l'ai pas encore fini mais wooow, ce bouquin..
Tellement haineux et haïssable O.o
J'aurais du me méfier quand les 3 personnages principaux étaient masculins. Puis quand chaque personnage secondaire féminin qui apparaissait était plaintif et désagréable. Je ne l'ai pas fait. J'ai pas fait attention, il y en a mille des auteurs écrit par des hommes, pour des hommes que j'ai aimé quand même (Coucou Steinbeck ! Je t'adore, mais pour l'instant il n'y a qu'un roman où tu n'as pas écrit que des rôles détestables aux femmes)(Bon, ça fait un, pas mille, mais je l'aime comme mille)
Là il a quand même osé écrire que son personnage principal (celui qui était philosophe, qui aime la magie de la drogue*, qui est tellement aimé de tous et qui est tellement intelligent et admirable) " était reconnaissant aux femmes, à cause de l'énorme somme de bêtise qu'elles apportaient dans les relations humaines" ou encore "cette scène de jalousie proclamait une indéniable vérité : la primauté du mâle".
Et ça c'est que les horreurs du dernier chapitre que j'ai lu, avant ya eu tout un chapitre sur les invertis qui sont quand même bien dégueulasses sauf celui qui n'est pas trop efféminé...
Bref, j'ai commencé le livre en trouvant que c'était un mauvais Hermann Hesse, finalement je trouve ça seulement mauvais. Déso Hermann de t'avoir comparé à cette ordure.
*parce que ça aussi, j'ai jamais lu un livre qui divinise autant la drogue même dans les moments de manque. C'est un peu le malaise.
Tellement haineux et haïssable O.o
J'aurais du me méfier quand les 3 personnages principaux étaient masculins. Puis quand chaque personnage secondaire féminin qui apparaissait était plaintif et désagréable. Je ne l'ai pas fait. J'ai pas fait attention, il y en a mille des auteurs écrit par des hommes, pour des hommes que j'ai aimé quand même (Coucou Steinbeck ! Je t'adore, mais pour l'instant il n'y a qu'un roman où tu n'as pas écrit que des rôles détestables aux femmes)(Bon, ça fait un, pas mille, mais je l'aime comme mille)
Là il a quand même osé écrire que son personnage principal (celui qui était philosophe, qui aime la magie de la drogue*, qui est tellement aimé de tous et qui est tellement intelligent et admirable) " était reconnaissant aux femmes, à cause de l'énorme somme de bêtise qu'elles apportaient dans les relations humaines" ou encore "cette scène de jalousie proclamait une indéniable vérité : la primauté du mâle".
Et ça c'est que les horreurs du dernier chapitre que j'ai lu, avant ya eu tout un chapitre sur les invertis qui sont quand même bien dégueulasses sauf celui qui n'est pas trop efféminé...
Bref, j'ai commencé le livre en trouvant que c'était un mauvais Hermann Hesse, finalement je trouve ça seulement mauvais. Déso Hermann de t'avoir comparé à cette ordure.
*parce que ça aussi, j'ai jamais lu un livre qui divinise autant la drogue même dans les moments de manque. C'est un peu le malaise.
Proud Beggars is an exquisite meditation on dignity, not just another Egyptian noir (though there isn't anything bad about that). Neither is this a tale of the Junkie Raskolnikov in the Medina, which is what the plot suggests initially. The narrative involves a trio of friends in a seedy district of Cairo, each singular in his trials and ambitions. A crime is committed and such alerts the presence of a conflicted police detective. What follows is remarkable. There a re a pair of scenes which explore humanity's capacity for contentment. I pause when I consider either of them.
Thanks to Jonathan Morton for his endorsement of Mr. Cossery.
Thanks to Jonathan Morton for his endorsement of Mr. Cossery.
There is (at least) linguistic and neuroscientific evidence that language influences a person's experiences of space and time. If this book is written by an Egyptian-born Syrian author who lived in France and wrote only in French (three-ish perspectives of space and time) and the book is translated into American English by an American English speaker who is fluent in french (two more perspectives), what is my entry point, as someone who can only draw from the American English perspective, in meeting the author and translator where they are to understand this story as it is fully intended? I followed at least one layer of meaning, but I have a sense I can't access all of them.
However, thinking of the characters who dropped all the way out of tightly structured modes of knowing, for better or worse ('To be illiterate! What an opportunity to survive in a world doomed to massacre!', drug use/withdrawal, etc) ... or others who remained entrenched in structured modes of knowing, but remain a mystery even to themselves, perhaps no clear entry into meaning (semiotic, temporal, the boundaries of class structure or gender, etc) or meaning as a structure to keep a person from psychically dissolving into a puddle, is part of the point.
However, thinking of the characters who dropped all the way out of tightly structured modes of knowing, for better or worse ('To be illiterate! What an opportunity to survive in a world doomed to massacre!', drug use/withdrawal, etc) ... or others who remained entrenched in structured modes of knowing, but remain a mystery even to themselves, perhaps no clear entry into meaning (semiotic, temporal, the boundaries of class structure or gender, etc) or meaning as a structure to keep a person from psychically dissolving into a puddle, is part of the point.
The more my life goes on, the more I am relieved to understand how little I do know or will ever know... but that is definitely not said with the same level confidence as those who copy/paste each other's description of the murder as motiveless. Did we read the same thing? Maybe lean into "knowing more".
The problem with forever pursuing that which one personally finds great in one's reading is, once one has found the book that extricates one from the box one hadn't known one was in, there's hell to pay when a succeeding book wants to force one back in. When it comes to a work such as this, I think about the diaspora of writers such as [a:Elias Khoury|26012|Elias Khoury|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1274837195p2/26012.jpg] and [a:Atiq Rahimi|107055|Atiq Rahimi|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1457940620p2/107055.jpg], the syntheses of life wrought by writers such as [a:Leslie Feinberg|80702|Leslie Feinberg|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1208029427p2/80702.jpg] and [a:Ayaan Hirsi Ali|46245|Ayaan Hirsi Ali|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615478827p2/46245.jpg], the proclamations of theorists such as [a:Frantz Fanon|37728|Frantz Fanon|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1258146314p2/37728.jpg] and [a:Octavio Paz|7469|Octavio Paz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1511722231p2/7469.jpg], and I consider the difference between those looking to provide life and those looking to, by any means, rise to the top. You see, the facts and introductions and contexts of Cossery lead one to believe that there's an uncontested authenticity to his stories, and if he chooses to always write in as simplified, vague, and noncommittal way as possible about a class he was never born into and a nation that he lived in for less than fifth of his life in a language that, by and large, is little more than a colonial power to both his homeland and whatever other 'Arab' nations he's concerned himself with, that doesn't imply anything about his authorial choices, especially the idea that this is an awfully convenient way to play the cultural representative without losing much in the way of face. Lord knows I'd rather that a read that I paid full price for after waiting around nearly a decade to come by through more passive means went better, especially with it being my first finished work of 2022, but it's the rating and the review that's going to stick around for a much longer time than did the initial reading, and I'm not in the business of putting out piss poor work for the sake a comfortable ending.
It's no longer the age that put out "La Traviata," "Carmen," or "La Bohème," and what with the advent of Instagram, smartphones, and camera apps, one could afford to be a tad hopeful that the gap between those who tell the stories and those who live it isn't as disgustingly vast as it once was. However, you still sometimes get works like this that disingenuously talk of "anarchy" and "poverty" in such a way that would make sex working squatters and antifascist anarchists shit their pants laughing, and yet accrue a bevy of positive sounding reviews for the sake of further marketing the works of indie press lines. If anything, this particular piece of Cossery's smacks more of the fetish for stories of suave serial killers and seduced law enforcers than any sort of castigation of systems of power or humanization of marginalized, where women are much derided but still intrinsically vital sources of narratological infrastructure and the setting could be any sort of "every-Arab" country that's ever dealt with drug users and police brutality. There's certainly solidarity in marginalized communities and alienation in bureaucratic systems to be found in the real world, but this work's point of the view is the sort of holier than thou neoliberal nihilism that views the whole thing as a joke that's too far away to every impact it personally, and the fact that the homophobia takes on a less stereotypical guise than usual doesn't make it praiseworthy. Folks can talk about the times, the times, the times, of course, but [a:Emma Goldman|15591|Emma Goldman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1303757350p2/15591.jpg] and the great movements she was a powerful part of were of those times as well, and the fact she hasn't been singled out to get a shiny NYRB Classics edition doesn't refute that.
I suppose, judging by how this is described as a "black comedy," that I was supposed to find this funny. It's not as if it couldn't have been funny had it take on any sort of the incongruous paradoxes that don't magically resolve themselves upon acknowledgement of a man being in possession of a working penis, but alas, when one knows that the murderous fools and the "Western" genius that the self satisfied male voices live and breathe by are one and the same, the only source of humor is the author's attempts to play the centuries old framing trope of the man behind the curtain. Sure, the story is absurd, but so is slicing off every bit and piece of history that could conceivably ground one in why the times and the systems and the powers that be are what they are, and without some sort of effort to take that into account in the midst of one's effort to entertain, it just comes out another "subversive" bedtime story for former colonial powers and self obfuscating settler states. The fact that Egypt continues to be squeezed between its plundered past and its savior complexed present when it comes to authorial representation certainly makes it hard to ignore any sort of publication that promises otherwise, but still. One can always do better if one actually cares.
It's no longer the age that put out "La Traviata," "Carmen," or "La Bohème," and what with the advent of Instagram, smartphones, and camera apps, one could afford to be a tad hopeful that the gap between those who tell the stories and those who live it isn't as disgustingly vast as it once was. However, you still sometimes get works like this that disingenuously talk of "anarchy" and "poverty" in such a way that would make sex working squatters and antifascist anarchists shit their pants laughing, and yet accrue a bevy of positive sounding reviews for the sake of further marketing the works of indie press lines. If anything, this particular piece of Cossery's smacks more of the fetish for stories of suave serial killers and seduced law enforcers than any sort of castigation of systems of power or humanization of marginalized, where women are much derided but still intrinsically vital sources of narratological infrastructure and the setting could be any sort of "every-Arab" country that's ever dealt with drug users and police brutality. There's certainly solidarity in marginalized communities and alienation in bureaucratic systems to be found in the real world, but this work's point of the view is the sort of holier than thou neoliberal nihilism that views the whole thing as a joke that's too far away to every impact it personally, and the fact that the homophobia takes on a less stereotypical guise than usual doesn't make it praiseworthy. Folks can talk about the times, the times, the times, of course, but [a:Emma Goldman|15591|Emma Goldman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1303757350p2/15591.jpg] and the great movements she was a powerful part of were of those times as well, and the fact she hasn't been singled out to get a shiny NYRB Classics edition doesn't refute that.
I suppose, judging by how this is described as a "black comedy," that I was supposed to find this funny. It's not as if it couldn't have been funny had it take on any sort of the incongruous paradoxes that don't magically resolve themselves upon acknowledgement of a man being in possession of a working penis, but alas, when one knows that the murderous fools and the "Western" genius that the self satisfied male voices live and breathe by are one and the same, the only source of humor is the author's attempts to play the centuries old framing trope of the man behind the curtain. Sure, the story is absurd, but so is slicing off every bit and piece of history that could conceivably ground one in why the times and the systems and the powers that be are what they are, and without some sort of effort to take that into account in the midst of one's effort to entertain, it just comes out another "subversive" bedtime story for former colonial powers and self obfuscating settler states. The fact that Egypt continues to be squeezed between its plundered past and its savior complexed present when it comes to authorial representation certainly makes it hard to ignore any sort of publication that promises otherwise, but still. One can always do better if one actually cares.
"But then, they're crazy!"
"Oh no! Don't allow them extenuating circumstances. They're not crazy. On the contrary, they're very lucid. That's what makes them so dangerous."
Boa reflexão sobre o desapego e a simplicidade brutal da vida. No entanto, profundamente machista. Todas as personagens mulheres neste livro são “histéricas” ou metem nojo por já terem mais de 60 anos.
Absolutely love it. The story and the drawings are beautiful. It is full of paradoxes and riddles. It puts you in a magical ambiance. Excellent representation if struggles and how people deal with them differently.
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes