Muḥammad Bisāṭī

بساطي، محمد

قصص

ويأتي القطار

صخب البحيرة

Mohamed El BiStati

Forging documents in an Egyptian government office, a bureaucrat 'authorizes' a police department for a nonexistent city in Upper Egypt in order to siphon off its monthly payroll. But beyond simply embezzling funds, he sets about imagining in detail the fictional city he has created the wealthy new district with its villas and swimming pools, the restless inhabitants of the poverty-stricken old quarter, and the Nile bridge that links the two. Most of all, he pictures the cruelty and corruption of the city's chief of police. But the longer he spends envisioning this city and its inhabitants, the more the boundaries between the real world and his imagination dissolve. With its overlapping narratives, Over the Bridge is a subtle critique of governmental ineptness, economic and social injustice, and individual moral failings. In Mohamed El-Bisatie's hands, the human drive to create, and to control one's own and others' destinies, is invariably turned on its head, while attempts to do good frequently end up causing harm instead. Like Frankenstein's monster, the bureaucrat's elaborate illusion begins, gradually but relentlessly, to take on a reality and momentum of its own and, by the conclusion of the tale, reveals itself as having contained the seeds of its creator's demise. Intriguing and surprising, Over the Bridge is a compelling allegory about power and its abuse, the thin line between reality and make-believe, and the law of unintended consequences.

Over The Bridge

Denys Johnson-Davies

Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present. When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of history—his wife's sexual past, the war-torn lives of their families, and the personal allegiances of his friends and enemies. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mussad's wrath or to help Mussad track down and confront his nemesis. In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."

Houses Behind the Trees

Mohamed El-Bisatie

In a fictional Gulf country, with its gleaming glass towers and imported greenery, the routine of day-to-day life is suddenly interrupted when the national football team qualifies for the World Cup. The Emir issues an edict ordering all native Emiratis to travel to France to support the team, leaving the country to the care of its imported labor. How do they handle such newly found freedom? As though steered by a perverse blend between Dante and Scheherazade, we descend layer by layer beneath the façade of modernity: from the colorful multilingual throngs rejoicing for the Emirati team to the hierarchies that underpin them, from the luxurious gardens and swimming pools into the darker secrets of the bedroom, from the rigid and inhibiting strictures of the present to a remote age of innocence. Three narratives interweave to form a tight and thought-provoking examination of the psychology of control. Drumbeat received the Sawiris Foundation Award for Egyptian Literature.

Drumbeat

الكبار والصغار ؛ حديث من الطابق الثالث ؛ أحلام رجال قصار العمر ؛ هذا ما كان

Muḥammad Bisāṭī

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