A NEW EGYPTIAN: The Autobiography of a Young Arab

by Sayed Hegab ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1971

Remote, if not necessarily alien, and rarely compelling, if objectively interesting. Hegab unconvincingly writes of himself in the abstract as though to mask impassioned introspection with case-historical diffidence; more than half of the chronicle is cast in the third person, and Sayed, mostly called ""the boy,"" is precocious in retrospect. ""Was it his early reading that made him lose the spontaneity of childhood?"" he reflects psychoanalytically, ostensibly still a child; there is embarrassment, even apology, between the dense, stilted lines, and it all sometimes seems to be autotherapeutic. The gamut of Hegab's growing pains is nevertheless ineluctably universal, although the shape of his conflicts is endemic to his heritage and particular to his personal environment: religious orthodoxy, superstition, the political shadow lengthened by his grandfather's commitment to British evacuation; organized politics as a forum for his own self-assertion -- the Moslem Brotherhood and also the Young Egypt socialists invited him to read his poetry from their platforms. His poems were a source of guilt (""Every time his body was filled with burning desires, his religious mind trembled with remorse. In his heart he mixed up God and love""), and a world he could share with his father: ""Sayed remembered a proverb. . . . 'When your son grows up, turn him into your brother.'"" In Part Two, however, he recounts his parting from his father-brother, his decision to live his own life -- as a people's poet, not as a mining engineer; sexual stirrings ripen into a jaded search for genuine love which, by the age of 24, he's found only among his friends. As an anguished Portrait of the Artist in his formative years, this doesn't quite measure up: it's fragmented, fraught with awkward locutions, and self-conscious, ultimately solipsistic; yet it's textured with incidentals indigenous to Egypt and immediate to adolescence that make it hard to dismiss and a little easier to read. For perspective.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Praeger

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION