In the Eye of the Sun
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
The great English novel about Egypt, which is also the great Egyptian novel about England.
This is a love story, a story about growing up, a story about what its like to be a woman (Eastern and Western), a story about the history of the post-imperial Middle East during the last 30 years or so, perplexed and bloody years, and a story about home.
In London in 1979, Asya reflects on events in Cairo more than a decade before. It's May, 1967: Asya's studying for university is interrupted by war between Israel and Egypt, a conflict that shapes Asya's coming of age as a woman in modern Egypt. For Asya, education, love, sexuality and marriage are bound up with, and touched by, the violent conflicts between Egypt and Israel -as well as the seductions, and disappointments, of Europe.
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'Ahdaf Soueif is one of the most extraordinary chroniclers of sexual politics now writing' EDWARD SAID, author of Orientialism
'A convincing and skilful writer' SUNDAY TIMES
'Highly unusual and richly impressive' GUARDIAN
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This densely detailed, richly textured novel impeccably recreates the milieus of Cairo, London and English university life as it recounts the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian who, by her own admission, ``feels more comfortable with art than with life.'' Soueif, a Londoner making her American debut, tells Asya's story cinematically, beginning in 1979 and going back to 1967, with chapters formally divided into scenes and a plethora of flashbacks, flash-forwards and different perspectives. During the course of those years, Asya, daughter of an intellectual Cairo family, falls in love with and marries Saif, a highly successful computer expert who indulges her with considerable luxuries. But the marriage is plagued by sexual problems; going to England to pursue a doctorate, Asya eventually takes up with Gerald, a pseudo-sensitive boor studying marketing. Finally, her marriage over, she returns to a very different and less hospitable Cairo than the one in which she grew up to begin a teaching career about which she is, at best, ambivalent. The author invests scenes of childhood with the burnished glow of fond memory; these are among the most poignant passages here. Her impressive and only slightly overlong novel, with its acutely observed vision of male-female relations as a series of complex power struggles, suggests the emergence of a major new talent.
