Chronicle of a Last Summer
A Novel of Egypt
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A young Egyptian woman recounts her personal and political coming of age in this brilliant debut novel.
Cairo, 1984. A blisteringly hot summer. A young girl in a sprawling family house. Her days pass quietly: listening to a mother’s phone conversations, looking at the Nile from a bedroom window, watching the three state-sanctioned TV stations with the volume off, daydreaming about other lives. Underlying this claustrophobic routine is mystery and loss. Relatives mutter darkly about the newly-appointed President Mubarak. Everyone talks with melancholy about the past. People disappear overnight. Her own father has left, too—why, or to where, no one will say.
We meet her across three decades, from youth to adulthood: As a six-year old absorbing the world around her, filled with questions she can’t ask; as a college student and aspiring filmmaker pre-occupied with love, language, and the repression that surrounds her; and then later, in the turbulent aftermath of Mubarak’s overthrow, as a writer exploring her own past. Reunited with her father, she wonders about the silences that have marked and shaped her life.
At once a mapping of a city in transformation and a story about the shifting realities and fates of a single Egyptian family, Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer traces the fine line between survival and complicity, exploring the conscience of a generation raised in silence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rashidi's nostalgic debut novel recounts three summers in Cairo. The book begins in the summer of 1984, shortly after Hosni Mubarak becomes President. The unnamed narrator is a young girl who lives with her mother and grandmother and attends an English school. Her Baba her father is away, in Geneva, she thinks. Her cousin Dido dotes on her and tries to engage her in more political talk. The second section of the book is set in 1998, when the narrator is now a university student and an aspiring filmmaker. Dido has grown even more political. The young people all yearn for change but what shakes them up is a massacre and a deep fear of terrorism. Finally, we meet the characters again in the summer of 2014, after the Arab Spring and Mubarak's ouster. The narrator is living with her mother once again and still awaiting news about her Baba. She is acutely aware of how difficult it is to affect any real change, and Dido prefers anarchy to the despotism of Mubarak. In many ways, the book illustrates how the personal is political: almost every facet of daily life has some political implication, and the narrator sees writing as a tool of change, too. El Rashidi's family saga twists and turns but ultimately suffers from too much meandering.
