M. Suzanne Terry

“…if he were still alive and I told him now that I wish I could preserve the older memories, erase what they have been replaced by, he would tell me that to be a witness to history is a burden for the chosen.” Yasmine El  Rashidi‘s novel, Chronicle of a Last Summer, is a different sort of coming of age novel. It’s less the coming of age of the narrator and more the coming of age of a country. El Rashidi takes us through three different summers – 1984, 1998, and 2014 – of the narrator’s life growing up in Cairo.

The narrator is a little younger than I am, and it was interesting to see how much the state of the world, even across an ocean, tempered our worldview in very similar ways. Even as small children, we were given quite a bit of responsibility and freedom to explore while the grown ups talked about grown-up things – things we were intentionally kept from knowing. Our childhood was a swirl of independence and oblivion.

In the beginning, I wished I knew more about Egyptian history and politics. I know some of the basics, but I felt like the 6-year-old narrator, left out of the adult conversation. This was one of my favorite aspects of the novel, because it shows how well the author portrayed the mind of the child, drawing the reader into her world and cloaking what was going on around her in exactly the same way she was experiencing.

This first sections was where some of the most beautiful moments with the characters happened. As the novel progressed and the narrator grew older and more aware of what was going on around her, we lost some of the elements that one typically associates with deep characterization. Instead of moments that revealed strengths or weaknesses, personality quirks or depths, these things were replaced with caricatures of each character’s political stance (or lack thereof). This choice stripped the characters of some of their humanity but gave us such musings as “Is the silence of objectivity and being an observer, witness, the same as complicity?” and their subsequent development. While it allowed the richness and complexity of Egypt to shine through, it made it harder for me to maintain interest in the characters themselves.

Overall, I enjoyed the novel, and it has sparked my interest in hearing more of her perspective on her country, which you can hear in this reading here and also in her nonfiction work, The Battle for Egypt, which chronicles the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.