Sonallah Ibrahim, Egyptian Novelist of Irony and Dissent, Dies at 88

New York Times

2 hours ago

Sonallah Ibrahim, an Egyptian novelist who chronicled with deadpan irony his country's submission to dictatorship and materialism in an influential career spanning nearly six decades, died on Aug. 13 in Cairo. He was 88.
The Egyptian culture minister, Ahmed Fouad Hanno, announced his death, in a hospital. The state newspaper Al-Ahram said the cause was pneumonia.
Mr. Ibrahim shocked the Arab literary world with his short, singeing debut novel, 'That Smell,' published in 1966. Many other books followed, but the tone was set by the first — it was censored, banned, circulated underground and not definitively published in complete, open form until 20 years later.
The stripped-down style of 'That Smell' and its harsh depiction of a present without perspective were at odds with the ornate main currents of Arabic literature, as well as the self-confidence of the official Egyptian narrative, which was firm until the country's shattering defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967. Through one individual's disabused journey across Cairo, Mr. Ibrahim portrayed the malaise of an entire society, a literary experiment that earned him a lasting place in his country's cultural landscape.
'That Smell' portrays the anomie of a young man just released from prison, like Mr. Ibrahim himself, who had spent five years in the harsh jails of the nationalist dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser after he rounded up the country's Communists on New Year's Day 1959, even though he was supported by many of them, including Mr. Ibrahim himself. Mr. Ibrahim was released, along with other Communists, only as a good-will gesture to the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who had come to inspect the Kremlin-financed Aswan High Dam in 1964.
The narrator of 'That Smell' tries to readjust to a mid-1960s Cairo he hasn't seen in years. It doesn't go well.
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