The Book of Khalid

“The novel’s set-up is a classic modernist trick. The unnamed narrator of the book comes across a manuscript in a library in Cairo, written by someone called Khalid, telling his life story. The narrator, using some other sources, weaves this into a fuller narrative telling the story of Khalid traveling to America in the early 20th century…The whole book is written in the most unusual way – it’s unlike anything I have ever read before. It’s a proto-modernist story of movement and Arab displacement and the attempt to reconcile East with West. It is also, at times, quite difficult to read. Sometimes, you feel you could be reading some lost masterpiece by James Joyce; at others, it feels like an overly literal translation of a classical Arabic poem; at others, it is more like a religious treatise written by a madman.” Read more...

The Best 20th-Century Arab Novels

Raphael Cormack, Literary Scholar