Hamdi Abu Golayyel je egyptský spisovatel, jehož dílo se často noří do života nomádských a venkovských komunit. Jeho próza vyniká syrovou autenticitou a pronikavým vhledem do mezilidských vztahů a sociálních tlaků. Prostřednictvím poutavých příběhů zkoumá složitost identity a střet tradice s modernitou. Jeho jedinečný styl zachycuje podstatu života na okraji společnosti a nabízí čtenářům neotřelou perspektivu.
This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt's dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights. Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring novelist and construction laborer of the lowest order, leads us down a fractured path of reminiscence in his quest for purpose and identity in a world where the old orders and traditions are powerless to help.
Abu Golayyel's gritty tale of two men's ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East and the cities of Europe is pure storytelling Two Bedouin men from Egypt's Western Desert seek to escape poverty through different routes. One--the intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdi--gets no further than southern Libya's fly-blown oasis of Sabha, while his cousin--the dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raider--makes it to the fleshpots of Milan. The backdrop of this darkly comic and unsentimental story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafi's rickety, rhetoric-propped Great State of the Masses, where "the Leader" fantasizes of welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin. Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is an unforgettable novel of two men and their fellow migrants and the extreme marginalization that drives them.
