The final works by the late Egyptian author Mohamed El-Bosaty require one to ponder on a few themes that jump out.
Firstly, is the deep effect left by his upbringing next to Manzala Lake in the Egyptian Delta. This was most apparent in his unique contribution, The Noise of the Lake, first published in 1994 and republished in 2012 by Family Library Project.
Also, the reader will experience an "ah" moment if they know the author worked for years as a financial auditor at the Egyptian Prison Authority. Point in case is his novel, Khaledeya, which is based on a con whereby an auditor invents a fictitious village on paper, establishing a police station and other institutions through which state money flowed into his pocket.
Those two themes alone add a genuine richness to the late writer's work over his last years, which is based on a unique talent, well deserving of his title as the "poet of short stories."
The range of his latest works, including Hunger, Walls, Rooms for Rent, Green Bed, Small Windows and Little Butterflies, reveal his excitement to play alongside reality. He has his own creative take on reality whereby he turns it into pure fantasy. Absent are all the extra effects, leaving the reader with light language, free of heavy ideology, but without his human biases in an absolute format.
This is exemplified by comparing Ferdous, inspired by the Egyptian rural village life, to In Praise of the Aunt, by Mario Vargas Llosa. Both are rooted in the Greek myth of Vedra. Similarly, one can trace the links between Hunger, by El-Bosaty and Hunger by the Norwegian author, Knut Hamsun. Both rose from the same tragedy; the difference being that El-Bosaty wasn't fond of melodrama, preferring to keep his reader on the verge of tears.
El-Bosaty applied artistic touches to his solid world. He wrote about the unspoken in village life and its margins. He also closely watched the prison world and its questions about freedom and what the walls mean for the souls – news of which sparingly leaks out.
The author depicted two lifestyles: those living in very small spaces only allowing a peak at their suppressed needs, and of the middle class intellectuals, writers and artists.
Interestingly, although the writer spent nearly 40 years in Cairo, he didn't write except two pieces of work on the city, Other Nights and Green Bed. He preferred to go back to his early years, staying honest to the world he kept drawing bit by bit. The continuous building of this world wasn't repetitive, but rather was simply broken into smaller and denser units, reaching the complete distillation of feelings, presenting them like pure pearls.
In this attempt, the writer was fond of capturing the brief moments, listening in awe to women's stories and whispers of the passerby, turning the soft utter of desire into screams of the soul laden with burdens, using soft, indicative language rather than direct language that opens wounds. His language was particularly poetic, relying on his writing tools in conjunction with his passion for classical music; treating his writing the way a maestro would treat a musical piece, capturing the rhythm and controlling the inner movements of the text.
Creating his own daily language was a must for El-Bosaty to control his world. And it wasn't just one language, but rather a result of a number of layers of languages in one text. Until his last days he insisted on writing with a dictionary next to him, coaxing out his perfect word to bear his heroes' burdens. The result is a colloquial Egyptian base that isn't lacking formality – a lesson he learnt from his late master, Abdel-Fattah El-Gamal. El-Gamal was the first to introduce him to readers in the early 1960s during his years as the culture section editor of Al-Masaa daily newspaper. The editor was able, through his job, to craft a language that is solid and unbiased, yet with a poetic touch after his brief experience with poetry.
Strongly featured in El-Bosaty's latest works is the cultural regression throughout the region and his strong conviction that Arab women have been, historically, unjustly treated.
El-Bosaty's novels reveal a unique Arab woman that was present until his very last written words, who is fighting in her own way - not in the feminist modernist approach, but based on a legacy of trickery. The village woman, who he wrote about obsessively, is the bearer of stories and manages to control with feminine softness and cunning.
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