A Dog With No Tail: A Modern Arabic Novel Review

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A Dog With No Tail: A Modern Arabic Novel ReviewTo me, the sub-title of Hamdi Abu Golayyel's A Dog with No Tail, `A Modern Arabic Novel', was a misnomer of sorts. In essence, the book was more a series of vignettes focused on the life of a young Bedouin Egyptian. Each story covers some part of the young man's life, and through them the reader discovers that he is a writer who has had some small success, which he makes sure to boast about, and that he is aspiring to greater literary achievements. In the meantime, he supports himself by working as a labourer, while carefully ensuring that he lets everyone know that this is not his true destiny.
I enjoyed the concept quite a lot and the stories were, for the most part, very interesting. However, I had one major difficulty with this book in that it was very disjointed. Several of the incidences in the narrator's life were told in parts, covered in more than one of the stories. However, these stories didn't usually follow each other, and in some cases were separated by ones which didn't seem to relate to what went before, or to what came immediately afterward. It made it more difficult to get a feel for any one particular incident.
While I appreciate that this may well have been what the author was trying to achieve, using the writing style to mimic character's feeling and motives, it didn't really work for me. Instead, it felt as though I was fighting with the style at some points, in order to be able to understand the overall intent.
A Dog With No Tail: A Modern Arabic Novel OverviewIn a world with no meaning, meaning is an act...This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt's dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights.Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring novelist and construction laborer of the lowest order, leads us down a fractured path of reminiscence in his quest for purpose and identity in a world where the old orders and traditions are powerless to help.Bawdy and wistful, tragicomic and bitter, his stories loop and repeat, crackling with the frictive energy of colliding worlds and linguistic registers. These are the tales of Cairo's new Bedouin, men not settled by the state but permanently uprooted by it. Like their lives, their stories are dislocated and unplotted, mapping out their quest for meaning in the very act of placing brick on brick and word on word.

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