Traces of Enayat

by Iman Mersal Narrated by Jeed Saddy

Overview

"A subtle and universal exploration of identity." -Aida Alami, the New York Times



Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age twenty-seven. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all.



Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.



In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies-from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past-a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms. With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Traces of Enayat:

"A subtle and universal exploration of identity."—Aida Alami, The New York Times

"Literary obsession and detective work merge in this biography of Enayat al-Zayyat...whose remnants [Mersal] embroiders with photographs, speculation, and personal reflections, leaving behind a seductive mystery."—The New Yorker

"This is what Mersal does: she exposes herself in a way that leads you to bare something of yourself in turn; you look up from the page and lock eyes with your life."—Ursula Lindsey, The Point

"The prose shines and the central literary mystery will keep readers turning pages. This beguiling volume captivates." —Publishers Weekly

"A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing." —Kirkus Reviews 

“Thorough and empathetic…Traces of Enayat frees its subject from the rote interpretation of her life through the lens of her suicide, placing her in conversation with other women who felt similarly trapped and dreamed of new horizons.”—Edmée Lepercq, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A haunting biography that rescues a compelling legacy from a fragmented story of loss."—Foreword Reviews

"A slow, idiosyncratic journey through a layered, changing Cairo and through Mersal's mind."—Lily Meyer, NPR

“A consuming read, layered and complex as the best hybrid memoirs are, with a sadness at its heart I wasn’t prepared for…Like with any life that ends much too soon, Mersal lets us look back on Enayat’s with a mix of hope and loss: understanding that this was perhaps what her life was meant to be, yet still imagining how much different it could have been.”—Kevin Dean, The Common 

"Traces of Enayat [is] a creative nonfiction text that defies categorization, in which [Mersal] continues her investigation of the untold histories of women’s mental health at the intersection of middle-class morality and cultural canon-making. The archive, its gendered composition, and its silences, are for Mersal a constant point of departure and return." —Vina A. Ramadan, BOMB

Praise for Iman Mersal:

"The first new poems I've liked for years . . .Unpredictable, savage, chaotic. There is something of Zbigniew Herbert in them, clever, abstract, musing stuff, but they are this year's model, an 'upgrade,' as we would say, with terrifying bleakness in place of his periodic geniality." —Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement

"Mersal doesn’t offer herself as a representative of her country, culture, or religion, and her feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love. Her voice is so inviting, so familiar, so confiding that it’s even easy to forget that these are translations: Creswell renders her as a perfect contemporary . . . To read The Threshold is to be heartened by poem after poem that exhibits the whole woman—heart and mind, candor and cunning." —Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books

[Mersal's poetry] is bracing, clever, and terse, but slippery too. The self is not her subject so much as an impediment that she writes around; there’s deceit, disloyalty, duplicity, misdirection . . . There is an almost joyful sense of privacy in Mersal’s poems: She obscures as much as she discloses." —Amir-Hussein Radjy, The Nation

"This selection, drawn from [Mersal's] first four books and nimbly translated from the Arabic, showcases the sweet, tough verve of her voice." —The New York Times Book Review

"Mersal's poems are many things—sensuous, cerebral, intimate, angry and disorientating. They provide food for thought and elicit laughter in the dark . . . [The Threshold is] a perfect entry point for readers new to her work." —Malcolm Forbes, The National

"Ravishing . . . Mersal’s poems read like short stories; they are spare but resonant, full of charming misfits, and governed by chance." —Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 4Columns

"Traces of Enayat asks what it means to write a biography as opposed to following the traces of a person’s existence."—Rebecca Hussey, Full Stop

Kirkus Reviews

2024-01-13
One woman’s search to uncover the story of Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-1963), a figure in Egyptian literature who nearly disappeared from the canon.

In 1963, al-Zayyat killed herself just days after hearing publishers were not interested in her novel Love and Silence. Mersal describes the novel’s steadfast contemporary relevance, its “feminist ‘consciousness,’” and how “you sense the ponderous influence of contemporary romance novels, but elsewhere it is modern, strange, limpid, and beyond categorization.” Yet the novel is “entirely absent from every history of twentieth century Egyptian and Arabic literature.” In this sharp investigation, Mersal fights against al-Zayyat’s erasure, piecing together the author’s short life and illuminating Egypt’s literary scene and the many societal difficulties faced by a young creative woman in the 1960s. Mersal writes like a detective who lets their case get personal: She calls al-Zayyat’s tragedy “seductive” and recognizes the obsession in her own research. “It had begun to dawn on me that I wasn’t fully in control of myself,” she acknowledges. “I was writing these long emails and sending them out the way some people put a message in a bottle and cast it into the sea: not because they want it to be found, but because they will do anything they can to sleep.” The author traces her leads back as far as she can, and her exhaustive research often sidelines her storytelling. For example, the discovery of a renamed street sparks a sluice of records from the city-planning and surveying offices, and Mersal introduces an investigation of al-Zayyat’s kindergarten with the story of a wartime freighter docking in Alexandria. Excessively thorough, Mersal eventually reveals secrets about her subject’s depression and unhappy marriage, reframing the book into a profound work that is more about al-Zayyat’s mental health than about her being simply a curiosity of world literature.

A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193524359
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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