In the Eye of the Sun

"Of all the books on the list, this is probably the most personally important to me. I read it when I was living and working in Cairo in the mid-nineties, and it was one of the first novels I read by an Arab woman writing in English. There’s a sense of movement between the Arab world and Britain, to this dull, cold, north of England university town—and I’d been to Durham University, so I could get all of that, and I could get the Cairo scenes too. It’s a large book, at almost 800 pages. But I remember living with it, walking around with it, and rushing back from work to continue reading it. The title is the name of a song by The Doors , and there are contemporary music tracks running along in the background. It has been compared to George Eliot’s Middlemarch by Edward Said, probably because of its breadth, and how it covers the whole of the Arab world at a particular period in time. You’ve got the background of the 1967 war, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism, you’ve got famous Arab musicians like Umm Kulthum, all against the story of a girl growing up and marrying the man she loves. It seems like a wonderful love story. He seems the perfect choice for her. There’s a great sense of love, but somehow the sexual element of that love just never manifests itself. I thought it was important to include a section from this novel in my anthology, because it shows how a relationship can really go wrong like that—if love and lust don’t collide. Also because of concepts of shame, you don’t have the ability to vocalise those difficulties. They’re glamorous, good-looking, but there’s a tragic flaw in this marriage, and they just can’t get past it. It wrenches them apart to the extent that she ends up taking an English lover, who she doesn’t have the same connection with. There’s a cruelty in how sexual desire can sometimes land on a completely inappropriate person. I think that’s universal. “Something changed with the Arab Spring and the introduction of social media” What I really respect about a lot of these women writers, and Soueif is a key example of that, is how they often have two or three things going on in their lives; they often have a demanding day job—they’re doctors, psychiatrists, lecturers or whatever—and they have a writing career, and then on top of that they’ve got their role as political activists. Souief is particularly skilled at that, she wrote clear, incisive commentary during the uprising in Egypt in 2011 for the Guardian , which she then turned into a book about Cairo ( Cairo: My City, Our Revolution ). She is somebody very personally impacted by the changes of the regime. Her nephew, Alaa Abdel-Fatteh is currently in prison in Egypt. She went to protest to have him released at the beginning of lockdown, and the authorities arrested her . She’s the founder of PalFest , the Palestinian festival of literature. I travelled with her to Gaza, and I just find her such an incredibly impressive woman, political thinker, mother and writer. I should also say that she writes about sex very well, in terms of being able to get all the little calibrations of thought which go alongside the act. She’s not schmaltzy. It’s very difficult to write about sex well. The pornographic, the titillating, can be easy—but she instead gets the mood swings that go with it. She can convey not just how beautiful it can be but also how complex and problematic. That’s true. On Chesil Beach… I hadn’t caught that connection, but there’s a definite connection. This is from a female perspective. It’s more nuanced, closer and yet more political and descriptive of the societal landscape than Chesil Beach ."