THE COUNTRY DOCTOR'S TALE

In Qandil’s historical novel, a doctor operating a clinic in rural Egypt struggles with difficult cases.

In 1970s Egypt, an unnamed doctor arrives at a health clinic in a small village. The doctor has spent some time in prison for protesting the government and suffers from related PTSD; he’s come to the village to start over. The clinic is in terrible shape, having been abandoned after the previous doctor vanished months earlier. The doctor develops feelings for a nurse named Farah (“I lowered my gaze, to resist the urge to touch her”), but he feels a sense of constant danger, especially after hours—the community can be violent and close-minded. The doctor’s cases include those of a young man suffering from a scorpion sting, a wealthy woman seeking an abortion, a local ruler’s wife who wants poison to kill her abusive husband, and a school in which every child has worms. The doctor takes time off to go to Cairo, where the prison that held him has been turned into a museum. He has such a terrible time in Cairo that coming home to the village is a relief, but he’s immediately confronted with a patient near death. This is an episodic narrative with a lot of medical detail, focused primarily on the doctor’s cases and the people he encounters in the village. Some of the community’s traditions are foreign to the doctor, but he adapts quickly; he confronts roadblocks constantly—such as medicine that goes missing, diseases he doesn’t have the tools to treat, skepticism from his patients regarding modern medicine, and a bus out of town that doesn’t run very often—and he gets unwittingly pulled into local politics. In addition to the activities at the clinic, the novel’s other throughline is the doctor’s relationship with Farah, which becomes complicated. The tale is straightforwardly told, and the language is often frank, though the book also has some moral ambiguity. Many of the episodes are engaging, especially as the novel goes on, and the doctor doesn’t always act heroically.

The compelling tale of an under-resourced physician.