A review by Mamdouh Faraj Al-Nabi for Al arab, 6 July 2017
Few works aim at writing as a means in itself, and even rarer are works by women who engage deeply with the mechanics and craft of writing. In most of their output, women have tended to make the self their primary subject, often resulting in what can be described as novels of self-repetition; in some cases, they have sought to resist male patriarchy.
The significance of Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s novel Akhielet Al-Zill lies in its preoccupation with the act of writing itself, first and foremost. It is an experimental work belonging to what Alain Robbe-Grillet would call “writerly novels,” in which the reader is invited to participate as a collaborator. The narrator, who exchanges roles with the main characters—Camélia, Adam, and Olga—places us in a virtual game where the boundaries between imagination and reality dissolve.
Together with the characters, we are prompted to question: is our life merely a pre-drawn story? Or is our reality no different from an imagined tale, in which we move through roles set by unknown narrators? Why not, as writing, in its essence, is described by Camélia as “chasing a mirage, playing with it, even inventing it; turning reality into a deceptive mirage, and creating the illusion that the mirage is a tangible truth awaiting to be told in its splashing waters”?
Memory and Consciousness
The narrator begins the story, shifting positions with others, and we cannot discern the original storyteller: is it Camélia, Olga (the Russian writer), or an external narrator privy to the details? The reader is drawn into this virtual game, where the narrator asks us to “temporarily forget Kafka, his museum, the Vltava, and Prague; let Olga wander at her computer, Sandor gaze at his fingers, Rose imprisoned in a purple cell, Vladimir walking aimlessly; and let us imagine a man and a woman sitting on a wooden bench before a well.”
This recalls a narrative style present in older storytelling traditions, such as One Thousand and One Nights, with its interwoven and successive tales. Stories echo within the text: “Amidia,” written by Olga, tells of a girl who survived a massacre; “A Hermit in the Forest,” written by Adam and gifted to Camélia; and Camélia’s own story, “Low Clouds,” written in response to Adam’s. Camélia sits on a wooden bench “in the front yard of a house on the Vltava near Charles Bridge” in the intermediary space of Prague, where a woman from Cairo and a man from Seattle meet—united only by place, profession, and the flow of memory. The novel ends with them in the same place, on the same bench, but with different perspectives; everything “vanished before it even began.”
Through this narrative labyrinth, built on shifting perspectives and alternating settings between Cairo and Prague, we realize that Camélia is Olga’s invention, “like a daughter of her imagination and daydreams.” Memory and consciousness are the novel’s focal points, with all characters tracing back to their childhoods and recounting real crises. This reciprocal game among the narrators reveals painful and poignant stories, spatially and temporally separate yet united in sorrow. Camélia’s childhood intersects with Sandor’s, who, after being abandoned by his mother, becomes a lonely child; his world consists only of his father and companions. He collects diverse images of Maria Callas, the Greek opera singer, whom he wanted as a substitute for “the absent and shadowed woman in his world,” though she resembled his mother only in hair and eye color. Likewise, Camélia lacked a father, who in moments of anger would describe her as “slow to understand and move.”
Camélia’s relationships were tense, both with her father and mother, alleviated only by illness. She assumed the maternal role she had been deprived of, even risking the dream of motherhood when close to it, according to her doctor’s advice, but she disregarded it, fulfilling a role absent in her own mother. Interestingly, when she became pregnant, she terminated the pregnancy, a response to the harshness of motherhood imposed on her. Camélia, who existed on Olga’s computer, had “since childhood been enchanted by imagining other spaces, possibilities, and experiences her daydreams allowed.” She always wanted to be a writer, loving the company of imagined characters, and wove a complete story for Adam—his childhood, his struggle with fear in the cellar, and his teenage experiences, including his first sexual encounter with a nervous, impatient girl.
The Game of Writing
At its core, the novel is built on a literary game oscillating between the imaginary/virtual and the real. The game of intersections extends beyond virtuality and reality to include dreams and actuality. The author, during a visit to “one of her dream cities,” leads readers to break the barriers between consciousness and the unconscious, reality and dreams. The line between the imaginary/virtual and reality blurs through an external narrator, recounting events in third person, present with the story.
At times, the overlap comes from the characters themselves: Camélia declares, “I am not a woman of flesh and blood, but an idea that occurred to a writer, which she pursued without desire to deepen it or expand its writing.” She also acknowledges her role as a writer, weaving characters that blend herself with borrowed ones, even admitting, “my own life is borrowed.”
The real replaces the virtual when Camélia visits Adam’s house after hundreds of exchanged emails. There, she discovers Rose’s world and her hidden suffering in the “Vilet” room, which turns out to be her sister, and realizes that “all the stories and events Adam placed in her mind belong to his childhood, adolescence, and ancestors, not to the man who is now her companion.”
Yet the narrator’s fascination with substitution and replacement resurfaces. After establishing Camélia’s real-world life and revealing her mother Dola’s relationship with the artist Camélia, whom she names her daughter after, the second unit of the novel, entitled “Let Her Name Be Olga,” disrupts the reader’s assumption of Camélia’s reality: “Let us suppose the Russian writer Camélia dreamed of is named Olga.” Imagination becomes reality: Olga, whom Camélia dreamed of as a writer, becomes real, and Camélia becomes the daughter of Olga’s dreams. The interplay continues across virtuality, reality, dreams, and actuality.
The author guides readers through the intricacies of the writing process and surrounding rituals, including character creation. She explains how she creates Adam: “Let us assume he is the grandson of a Middle Eastern refugee who married a Greek sailor and moved from port to port until they settled in Sylt.” She repeatedly describes Vladimir, Olga’s husband, and her dilemmas in following her protagonists’ fates. Olga’s struggle while writing about Amidia, the girl who survived a massacre, shows her anxiety: “Olga raced with her imagination behind Amidia, from one place to another. She stopped suddenly, confused. What will her heroine do now? Or rather, what will she do with her heroine now? The confusion lasted for days, as she stared at the written words, empty like blank sketches, the meaning of each word lost, and the overall meaning of everything she had written fading.”
Ez-Eldin also depicts the creative droughts of writing professionals. She portrays Olga succumbing “to tension and frustration, drinking almost all day, unable to let anyone approach her; then, in a surprising development, cooking becomes her refuge when imagined characters evade her and slip through her fingers.” She emphasizes that inspiration always comes unplanned, as in the scene of Amidia on a narrow bed in the convent, “kneading dough with tiza.”
The narrator moves between locations: Cairo and its hidden garden, a refuge whenever she “felt constricted and wished to drown inside herself,” as well as restrictive spaces like shelters and the cellar in Adam’s and his grandmother’s story, and the convent where she spent five years. Transitional spaces serve as passages to and from. Yet Cairo and Prague remain distinct, vividly described through gardens, Kafka’s house, and Charles Bridge. These movements grant the narrative fluidity and flexibility to encompass transitions across past, present, and distant memory.
Ultimately, we are faced with a text meticulously woven in polished language, avoiding linguistic excess, with precise, evocative sentences that convey the weight of exile and loss, while giving the narrative structural cohesion through almost invisible threads.
