Khaled Al Khamissi

Taxi is a collection of over 50 descriptions of fictional encounters with taxi drivers in Cairo. It was published originally in Arabic in 2006 and was a bestseller in Egypt. Imagine the kinds of conversations you might have with a taxi driver, here in Canada. Depending on the news and sports cycles, you might be chatting about an upcoming election and how all the candidates are about the same anyway, or perhaps you might discuss how the price of gas is always going up just before the long weekend. The Cairo taxi drivers' conversations are also about those things that are affecting their everyday lives. Their complaints and frustrations with the corruption and poverty give us a glimpse of the foundations of this year's 'Arab Spring'. Fascinating.… (mehr)

This is a novel I REALLY enjoyed, 'm still shocked that this author is the one who wrote "Taxi".. didn't see this coming.. thought it would be a typical story, thought that ElKhamisy would try so hard 2 keep up w/ Taxi's huge success that he'll write something similar, but he didn't, he wrote a novel, very well structured novel..

What I loved abt this novel is how he went from story to another very smoothly,loved the idea itself, the idea that the world is really so small, many coincidences of ppl knowing ppl who knows the other ppl who knows the 1st ppl :D:D:D.. coincidences r usually weak in novels or movies, but I totally bought it in Khaled's novel, especially that the plot wasn't built upon these coincidences...

it's not really a novel, u can say it's a book of different stories of various kinds of ppl.. poor rich old young educated ignorant businessmen unemployed.. all have different kinds of problems but they all share the same thing, the same feeling of wanting 2 catch "safinet noo7" and leave this shit hole aka Egypt, just save themselves be4 it's too late...

You'd think @ 1st that it's all abt Egyptians trying 2 run away, but we have 2 British ppl who amazingly u'd realize that they r also looking 4 their "safinet noo7" which will take them to a safe place, to the shore...

Maybe after all it's not just us who r struggling, but yet our struggle is wat breaks ma heart, and Khaled mastered the art of telling the small details of struggling Egyptians, the poor ones trying 2 escape to a foreign country by a sinking boat or by sneaking to these countries through Morocco or Mexico or wherever... or the struggling Egyptians who we know NOTHING abt like ppl in Damanhour,or the struggling Nubians in Aswan who feel like strangers in their land, the land of Nuba.. or the struggling professor in the university .. or or or...

ElKhamisy just kept presenting different kinds of struggling ppl, and u just sympathize w/ them all, I even sympathized 4 the 1st time in ma life w/ the businessmen who fled the country & lived rich abroad, he made a good point in his novel, it was very hard to fully understand the complicated terms and actions the government took 4 no apparent reason bas enaha 7okoma wes7'a -ran out of terms to describe them-.. all I understood was the actions they've took to make Ahmed Ezz richer than ever.. which made businessmen in Egypt struggle as well -how ironic-

I really admire Khaled for obviously doing extensive research in everything, I mean the many small details he wrote, God how did he know all of this? u gotta read it to understand, even if the novel is bad- and it's not- those small details would have still made this novel gr8, hats off to Khaled...

One of ma favorite parts -& not the only one- was his description of Aswan, I was reading how beautiful it's and it just hit me that I really wanna visit Aswan, instead of saving 4 traveling abroad why not explore Egypt's beauty 1st, the beautiful things we don't get to see cause we r so absorbed in our struggles, which doesn't change the fact that Egypt is really full of crap anyway...

Bottom line, it's a MUST read novel, highly recommended, love it and looking forward 2 Khaled's next book ;)… (mehr)

Taxi is a collection of over 50 descriptions of fictional encounters with taxi drivers in Cairo. It was published originally in Arabic in 2006 and was a bestseller in Egypt. Imagine the kinds of conversations you might have with a taxi driver, here in Canada. Depending on the news and sports cycles, you might be chatting about an upcoming election and how all the candidates are about the same anyway, or perhaps you might discuss how the price of gas is always going up just before the long weekend. The Cairo taxi drivers' conversations are also about those things that are affecting their everyday lives. Their complaints and frustrations with the corruption and poverty give us a glimpse of the foundations of this year's 'Arab Spring'. Fascinating.… (mehr)