I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing

by Brian Kiteley

Overview

From the author of Still Life with Insects comes a contemporary tale of an unlikely connection between an American historian and an Armenian theater critic on the streets of Cairo.

While in Cairo, Ib, an American historian and translator crosses paths with an Armenian-born theater critic and drama teacher, Gamal-Leon. Gamal-Leon begins to trace Ib’s every step, playing practical jokes on him in an effort to challenge Ib’s easygoing view on life.

Examining the balance between contemporary Egypt and western culture, Kiteley shares a tale of two strangers roaming through the night as he takes readers on an entrancing trip of forgiveness as Ib learns to swim against the tide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743237598
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/01/2002
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Brian Kiteley is the author of three novels and two collections of fictions exercises. He teaches at the University of Denver in the Creative Writing Ph.D. program.

Editorial Reviews

Again demonstrating the facility he showed in his well-received debut, Still Life with Insects, Kitely here offers another entrancing miniature, which pairs two dissimilar outcasts in contemporary Cairo. Ib, an expatriate American historian and translator of the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, finds his easygoing lifestyle disrupted by Gamal-Leon, an Armenian-born theater critic and drama teacher raised in Cairo. Gamal spies on the rattled American, follows him everywhere and plays practical jokes intended to challenge Ib's preconceptions of Egyptians and the Middle East. Their friendship is a duet of mutual cultural misunderstandings played out during the last weeks of Ramadan, the month-long Muslim holy period of daytime fasting and nighttime feasting. Kitely compellingly evokes the tensions of contemporary Egypt: its jarring juxtapositions of antiquity and Western pop culture; the million homeless refugees who camp out on the streets and in the parks of Cairo; the ubiquitous police informers who record ordinary citizens' conversations. His polyglot characters are complex. Ib is anguished at the recent death of his Dutch stepfather, whom Ib's mother divorced so that she could remarry Ib's father. Ib feuds with his sisters, who are jealous because he received his stepfather's entire inheritance. (Ib is a Danish name akin to Jacob, the biblical twin who persuaded his brother, Esau, to part with his inheritance.) Meanwhile, Gamal, an Armenian Christian, wrestles with his unhappy marriage to a Coptic Egyptian whose sister, a convert to Islam, married a Muslim terrorist now in jail. Kitely's motley circle of expatriates lends a cosmopolitan flavor to an exquisitely wrought mosaic. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A combination of a Kafka novel, Robert Altman movie, and psychedelic record album, this strange, dreamy little novel from the author of the well-regarded Still Life with Insects (Graywolf, 1993) takes on themes of inversion, foreignness, and communications breakdown. Set in Cairo during Ramadan (the Muslim festival during which participants fast during the day and feast by night), the tale unfolds as an American known only as Ib is joined more or less purposefully by an Armenian named Gamal-Leon (who eventually deconstructs his own name: a "quick-change artist, a slippery tongued mimic who does not know his own voice or face") to visit playhouses, executive office parties, a prison. All these activities are overcast with a significance not totally apparent. Kiteley offers an elusive, hypnotic, even hallucinogenic novel about being as well as the mysteries of being. Highly recommended for literature collections serving sophisticated readers.-Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.

Library Journal