Synopsis:
Back in the dog days of the early twenty-first century a pair of lovebirds fleeing a murder charge in Cairo pull in to Alexandria's main train station. Fugitives, friendless, their young lives blighted at the root, Ali and Injy set about rebuilding, and from the coastal city's arid soil forge a legend, a kingdom of crime, a revolution: Karantina.Through three generations of Grand Guignol insanity, Nael Eltoukhy's sly psychopomp of a narrator is our guide not only to the teeming cast of pimps, dealers, psychotics, and half-wits and the increasingly baroque chronicles of their exploits, but also to the moral of his tale. Defiant, revolutionary, and patriotic, are the rapists and thieves of Alexandria's crime families deluded maniacs or is their myth of Karantina-their Alexandria reimagined as the once and future capital-what they believe it to be: the revolutionary dream made brick and mortar, flesh and bone?Subversive and hilarious, deft and scalpel-sharp, Eltoukhy's sprawling epic is a masterpiece of modern Egyptian literature. Mahfouz shaken by the tail, a lunatic dream, a future history that is the sanest thing yet written on Egypt's current woes.
Review:
Longlisted for FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Award 2015
"A new twist in the evolution of the form of the Egyptian novel itself"
Ahram Online
"Women of Karantina makes fun of you and your love for books, of your naivety and your appetite for manufactured illusion. The novel grabs you with a self-consciously epic opening scene set in some undefined point in the future."
Mada Masr
"It's a gritty piece, but it's also surprisingly funny throughout. Dare I say that it's delightful in its subversiveness? I guess I just did. . . . As we sit here drinking our tea, pondering the nature of inner peace, we've quite suddenly arrived at the realization that the reviewer believes this to be one of the best books he's read all year. He believes it would have been one of the best books he read last year, and perhaps even the year before, if he had read it during either of those years."
Typographical Era
"With an epic tone that laughs at everything, an unusual lightness of spirit, and a surprisingly fresh treatment of old motifs, such as violence or succession, Eltoukhy creates something unprecedented in the history of the Arabic novel."
Arabic Literature (in English) Blog
"Through irony and exaggeration, Nael Eltoukhy builds and furnishes his novel Women of Karantina."
al-Watan Online
"There is no doubt that you will encounter much hilarity here, in Nael Eltoukhy's Karantina it is as enjoyable as a cold drink when thirsty . . . [and uses] humor that is critical, sarcastic, and extremely clever."
al-Tahrir
"Karantina is a totally different experience. Although a lot of its dialogue and details draw on Egyptian life in recent decades, it is ruled by a logic entirely of its own that coherently pulls the reader into its world."
al-Mudun
"It is not easy to read a novel of 350 pages and find not one of them boring or full of stuffing . . . but to find a writer capable of taking you from one pleasure to the next until you find yourself in a state of continuous enjoyment."
Apollo Site
"Eltoukhy's novel has many antecedents: It's part slapstick Egyptian film, part social criticism, and part great Mahfouzian Novel, resembling a funnier version of Mahfouz's Children of Gabalawi." --
al-Araby
"Eltoukhy maps a bloody, seedy Alexandria, set apart from the city of Alexander the Great, Greek civilization and its cosmopolitan past featured in the work of Durrell and Cavafy... This is a side of Alexandria that is hardly glimpsed, let alone explored with Eltoukhy's brand of incisive humor." --
Nahrain Al-Mousawi, Chicago Tribune
"Women of Karantina is a sprawling family epic, and what makes it work is Eltoukhy s willingness to push the boundaries of both what is considered acceptable, and what is expected, from modern Arabic literature." --
Aaron Westerman, Typographicalera
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