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Carregando... Ice (The Arab List)de Ṣunʻ Allāh Ibrāhīm
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The year is 1973. An Egyptian historian, Dr. Shukri, pursues a year of non-degree graduate studies in Moscow, the presumed heart of the socialist utopia. Through his eyes, the reader receives a guided tour of the sordid stagnation of Brezhnev-era Soviet life: intra-Soviet ethnic tensions; Russian retirees unable to afford a tin of meat; a trio of drunks splitting a bottle of vodka on the sidewalk; a Kirgiz roommate who brings his Russian girlfriend to live in his four-person dormitory room; black-marketeering Arab embassy officials; liberated but insecure Russian women; and Arab students' debates about the geographically distant October 1973 War. Shukri records all this in the same numbly factual style familiar to fans of Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell, punctuating it with the only redeeming sources of beauty available: classical music LPs, newly acquired Russian vocabulary, achingly beautiful women, and strong Georgian tea. Based on Ibrahim's own experience studying at the All-Russian Institute of Cinematography in Moscow from 1971 to 1973, Ice offers a powerful exploration of Arab confusion, Soviet dysfunction, and the fragility of leftist revolutionary ideals. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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It's one of those books where all the things the narrator is not telling you seem to matter more than the smokescreen of detail: we learn nothing of Shukri's past, his reasons for being in Moscow, the work he is doing at the Institute, his plans, his reactions to what he hears on the news (amongst other things, that his country is at war with Israel), or his real feelings about the women he's chasing or the other students he spends time with in the student hostel. And that nothing is clearly key, in some way. All he ever tells us about are objective facts and his own physical sensations (cold, pain, nausea, arousal, tiredness, etc.).
We have to spend a lot of time decoding and reading between the lines, and we can't be sure that we're guessing right. It seems, though, that Shukri has been damaged in some way by his previous life, and that it's that experience that is blocking him from achieving a meaningful connection either with the reader or with the people around him. Of course, if we bring in knowledge from outside the frame of the novel, in particular that the author spent five years as a political prisoner in Nasser's Egypt, that might give us a clue, and — amongst other things — explain Shukri's curious interest in the pile of old Egyptian newspapers he's obtained from a diplomat-friend.
An odd novel, which probably needs a bit more context from Ibrahim's earlier works and Egyptian literature generally to make sense of it properly, but an interesting and unusual point of view anyway. ( )