Nabil Shawkat on Beyond Paradise

By: Nabil Shawkat

The National, March 2, 2010

Mansoura Ez Eldin knows her way around the land of dreams. In her short novel Beyond Paradise (Wara al-Firdaws), she packs enough imagery for a three-volume work. Her power of imagination is such that sometimes, while reading her novel, I wished that she would drop some of the subplots and forget about some of the side characters. But even as the thought went through my mind, I enjoyed every sketch and every little dream. In a detailed, compact and colourful style, she tells the story of two friends, Salma and Gamila, living in the Egyptian countryside in the 1980s. Gamila, the poorer one, rises from poverty to become a respectable academic, while Salma, the more affluent one, finds herself in an unsuccessful marriage and decides to seek salvation through writing. This is perhaps a reference to Ez Eldin's own life, for she used to sit near the bed of her dying mother and pretend to write simply because her mother took pride in her daughter's career. Born in 1976 in a small village on the Nile in the Delta, Ez Eldin got a job with the prestigious Akhbar al-Adab (Literature News) upon her graduation from the Mass Communication College at Cairo University in 1998. Her first book was a collection of stories called Daw' Mohtazz (Flickering Light) that came out in 2001. Her first novel, Matahat Maryam (Maryam's Maze), won her wide recognition and has been translated into English. "Even when I am too busy at the paper, I write down notes, ideas, and sketches for whenever the time allows, and I work on those later," she said in response to written questions. "I write in my room on a laptop. I cannot work in coffeehouses. "I wrote a major part of my first novel, Maryam's Maze, holding my baby in my left hand while I typed with my right. Sometimes I put her in her crib to play while I wrote, and when she cried I stopped. "I use mythology and dreams for purely aesthetic reasons. Our literary tradition is rich with artistry. Take, for example, The Interpretation of Dreams (Tafsir al-Ahlam) by Ibn Sirin, a work that I greatly admire. It is full of poetic interpretations of dreams. Also, our oral history is stunningly beautiful."