Hamdi Abu Golayyel

To me, the sub-title of Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s A Dog with No Tail, ‘A Modern Arabic Novel’, was a misnomer of sorts. In essence, the book was more a series of vignettes focused on the life of a young Bedouin Egyptian. Each story covers some part of the young man’s life, and through them the reader discovers that he is a writer who has had some small success, which he makes sure to boast about, and that he is aspiring to greater literary achievements. In the meantime, he supports himself by working as a labourer, while carefully ensuring that he lets everyone know that this is not his true destiny.

I enjoyed the concept quite a lot and the stories were, for the most part, very interesting. However, I had one major difficulty with this book in that it was very disjointed. Several of the incidences in the narrator’s life were told in parts, covered in more than one of the stories. However, these stories didn’t usually follow each other, and in some cases were separated by ones which didn’t seem to relate to what went before, or to what came immediately afterward. It made it more difficult to get a feel for any one particular incident.

While I appreciate that this may well have been what the author was trying to achieve, using the writing style to mimic character’s feeling and motives, it didn’t really work for me. Instead, it felt as though I was fighting with the style at some points, in order to be able to understand the overall intent.… (meer)

A Dog with No Tail is subtitled "A Modern Arabic Novel," but as a novel it is essentially plotless, rather a series of vignettes from the life of an Egyptian/Bedouin aspiring writer from the Fayoum who supports himself as a construction day-laborer in Cairo. It is, however, a fascinating look into a side of contemporary Egyptian life that I've never encountered before. The narrator, Hamdi, weaves tales of his family, his construction crew, fellow laborers and residents of the buildings and neighborhoods in which he works into what the book's blurb calls an "anti-Arabian Nights.

Most of Hamdi's construction work consists of tearing down and restoring buildings. He is often hauling loads of loads of sand or cement up many flights of stairs. The acts of destruction and reconstruction suggest the daily life of ordinary citizens in Egypt as well as evoke the far distant echoes of ancient Egypt. Hamdi is a respectful Muslim, but seems rather bemused by the fanatic devoutness of "the Brothers." I'd recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a low-key, undramatic, but multi-faceted insider's view of Egypt today.… (meer)

This is a book I so wanted to enjoy more than I did. There is a lot of promise in the ideas here and it did win a prestigious literary award, however it fell very flat for me and I'm not entirely sure that this is wholly related to the trials of translation or the cultural differences.

I was annoyed straight away after the first few pages because of four little words on the cover: A Modern Arabic Novel. This is no novel. It barely scrapes through as a coherent piece of writing at times but a plotline with character development in the traditional sense of the definition it isn't.

The book begins slightly confused as each short tale jumps about to a different time and place in the life of our main character. Once you get used to the style, it is quite enjoyable and different and I was halfway through and reading and having great expectations of where it was all going, unfortunately I was disappointed. The second half seems to deteriorate somewhat into the musings of a petulant teenager, and the cultural differences get more and more pronounced towards the end of the book.

If I could rename this book it would be something like: A Modern Egyptian Slacker Tale, as this is essentially what we're reading. A group of Bedouin men do occasional labouring work and our author is the main protaganist. Rather than upskill and focus on better paid positions such as plumbing and plastering, this group of men embrace their low positions as a matter of misguided macho pride. At first I thought this was a major cultural difference that I didn't understand but I now think it is just a symptom of growing up poor in a male dominated society:

"And every one of them, educated and unlettered alike, worked as manual laborers .. yet they were ashamed to work as doormen, loaders, and drivers' mates, or even as craftsmen in the construction gangs. He'd carry dirt but he wouldn't work, that was the boast."

It appears that to work as a labourer was 'the' rite of passage for men of this area of Egypt but after boasting to your friends, it was quite another thing back in your home village as our author would go to great pains to portray an educated and successful man to family and village left behind when he returned. These men appeared to embrace the two-faced nature of their way of life with gusto, another element of confusion for an already confused book.

The one exception is the character named 'the doctor' who seems to have a very short attention span so ends up trying nearly every employment position mentioned. His adventures are intriguing but just another diversion in an already disjointed tale and I couldn't help wishing that the author would focus on his own story more. The time he spent in jail for example was one of the better passages and solely written about him and his journey through life.

I do understand that the circular directionless way of life for these men is one of the themes the author wanted to portray, 'dislocated and unplotted'. In this he is quite successful but as a memoir to investigate where his own sense of purpose and identity comes from, I think it is less effectual. We never learn why and when he finished his life of a labourer and focused on his writing, just that he has the opportunity to write in an empty house they were fixing as one of his building jobs.

The writing style is so simplistic and emotionless and as already stated, quite immature at times. The book tries to be too many different things, tries to be too clever for its own good, and tries to say more then it actually does. If the author has focused on his own memories, limited the jumps along the time-line, and gave us more honest facts of his life leading up to and then after his time as a labourer, then I believe this book would have been an incredibly great tale.

However this is all just my opinion and I have to keep reminding myself that I was reading the winner of the Naguib Mahfouz medal for literature. I would just really love to know their judging criteria.… (meer)

Any time I approach a work translated into English, the first thing I want to do is thank the translator. This is especially true with regard to some of the "difficult to learn" (for English speakers) languages, such as Arabic. Robin Moger brought A Dog With No Tail: A Modern Arabic Novel to English readers and allowed us to meet the author, Hamdi Abu Golayyel. He is young, edgy, and conveys to us something of the mindset of frustration and cultural complexity of family and class distinctions in Cairo.

Though a self-declared "novel," A Dog With No Tail reads more like a series of vignettes which make a circle, the beginning is the ending. Such is the metaphor for the Laborer's existence, for his mental anxieties and desires to become a writer while facing the grim, filthy reality of his daily existence.

This gritty storytelling doesn't concern itself with presenting a tidy, easily understood cultural experience but rather unsettles and provokes. Though brief at 152 pages, I found great satisfaction in going back to read it through again.… (meer)