Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture Page

Arbitrary Traps

Reviewed by Mahmoud El-Wardani

It is not to detract from the merit of Muntassir El-Qafash's collection of short stories Shakhs Ghayr Maqsoud (The Wrong Person) to say that the best way to read it is backwards, starting with the last story and going back to the first. But before elaborating on this method, some words on El-Qafash's position in the literary scene.

He has published two previous collections of short stories, Nasig Al-Asma' (The Web of Names, 1989) and Al-Sara'ir (Inner Selves, 1993), together with a novel, Tasrih Bil-Ghiyab (Leave of Absence, 1996). One is reluctant to label him a member of a ready-made 'generation' -- whether of the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties -- since that would be to assume that at the turn of every decade a new literary generation is born. So while some critics are happy to label El-Qafash an 'eighties writer', to my mind for no very good reason, I propose instead that he be seen as a prominent practitioner of the 'New Writing'. This is a more capacious term, and writers of different ages, but similar aesthetics, can belong to it.

El-Qafash's new collection should be read backwards because the opening stories, Al-Qatil (The Murderer), 'Ain Wahida (One Eye) and Kayfa Bada'at Al-Hikaya (How the Story Began), are unappetising, and they may well cause the reader to set the book aside. However that would be a pity, for though these stories have little substance, and the writer's attempt to twist what little they have into shape is not successful, if one starts to read the collection from the other end, then one will be pleasantly surprised. The final pieces are substantial expressions of the style and thematic of the New Writing.

One of the collection's most distinctive features is the presence of very short short-stories, some of which are just a few lines in length. Abi (My Father), for example, says little more than that the narrator's father loved conversation and had a knack for getting people to talk, but that he fell asleep and did not wake up. The narrator concludes, "As for me, who joined him on many hunting expeditions, I can see that he's gone off with another friend and left me with a promise that I'll join him on a future trip."

Brevity, economy and the whittling away of anything extraneous distinguish this collection. Rhetoric and stylistic flourishes are totally absent; adjectives are sparsely used; one gets the impression of bare prose. Sama' (Sky), for example, contains a description of an old cage thrown in a corner with a broken wire-grill. Only in the story's final line does the narrator comment, "And he stands by, guarding it, together with the birds". An important character in the story is thus brought in to watch the cage and its long-dead birds. One had felt the cage must have had some meaning.

Many of the stories pay as much, if not more, attention to objects as they do to people. The tone is bland, if not bored, and events seem drained of significance. Nothing can happen now, the writing seems to tell us, nothing will take us out of the listless, grey place in which we find ourselves. The title story of the collection, Shakhas Ghayr Maqsoud, which, literally translated, means 'the unintended person', clinches this sense of arbitrariness and the meaninglessness of things, a kind of absence of volition. There is much sadness here, for the stories depict lonely figures, who walk into the small traps that have been laid for them, but who never take their plight too seriously.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875