Pyramid Texts A Modern Arabic Novel

With its Sufistic parables of the human condition, rendered in a style redolent of both the austere meditations of Borges and the dark engorged ruminations of Arthur C. Clark, Pyramid Texts engages the mind and beguiles the imagination. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last-so that, like their subjects, they taper ultimately into nothingness-the author evokes the obsessions that have drawn men over the centuries to the brooding presence of mankind's most ancient and mysterious monuments. Among others in a procession of exotic characters, a Moroccan seeker after knowledge spends years contemplating the pyramids in the hope that one day he will understand the mysterious writing that fitfully appears on their sides. Another waits patiently for the moment when the shadow of one will diverge from its accustomed path and bestow immortality. A man celebrated for his record ascents and descents makes one final, dazzling, climb, and the Sphinx performs a celestial dance. Pyramid Texts leads us into a world of endless passages and mysterious sighing winds, a world whose claustrophobic and shadowy spaces may be illuminated by flashes of ecstasy leading to scintillating transfigurations and dizzying annihilations.

GAMAL AL-GHITANI was born in 1945. He has written thirteen novels, including Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004), and six collections of short stories. He is editor-in-chief of the literary review Akhbar al-adab.

HUMPHREY DAVIES is the translator of The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (AUC Press, 2004) and Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury, for which he was awarded the Banipal Prize for Literary Translation. He was awarded the 2010 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Yalo by Elias Khoury.