The narrator of this novel is Shukri, an Egyptian historian doing postgraduate work at an Institute in Moscow. The action takes us through the year 1973 with a wealth of trivial detail about being a foreign student in Moscow: shopping, Brezhnev-era queues and shortages, cold weather, student parties, news reports, excursions, and the endlessly repeated pursuit of women.

It's one of those books where all the things the narrator is not telling you seem to matter more than the smokescreen of detail: we learn nothing of Shukri's past, his reasons for being in Moscow, the work he is doing at the Institute, his plans, his reactions to what he hears on the news (amongst other things, that his country is at war with Israel), or his real feelings about the women he's chasing or the other students he spends time with in the student hostel. And that nothing is clearly key, in some way. All he ever tells us about are objective facts and his own physical sensations (cold, pain, nausea, arousal, tiredness, etc.).

We have to spend a lot of time decoding and reading between the lines, and we can't be sure that we're guessing right. It seems, though, that Shukri has been damaged in some way by his previous life, and that it's that experience that is blocking him from achieving a meaningful connection either with the reader or with the people around him. Of course, if we bring in knowledge from outside the frame of the novel, in particular that the author spent five years as a political prisoner in Nasser's Egypt, that might give us a clue, and — amongst other things — explain Shukri's curious interest in the pile of old Egyptian newspapers he's obtained from a diplomat-friend.

An odd novel, which probably needs a bit more context from Ibrahim's earlier works and Egyptian literature generally to make sense of it properly, but an interesting and unusual point of view anyway. ( )