Description: "It is 1950s Cairo and 16-year-old Amina is engaged to a much older man. Despite all the excitement of the wedding preparations, Amina is not looking forward to her nuptials. And it is not because of the age gap or because of the fact that she does not love, or even really know, her fiancâe. No, it is because she is involved with another man. This other man is Dr Hashim Abdel-Latif, and while he is Amina's first love, she is certainly not his. Also many years her senior, Hashim is well-known in polite circles for his adventures with women. A Nose and Three Eyes tells the story of Amina's love affair with Hashim, and also of two other young women: Nagwa and Rahhab. Three Eyes is a story of female desire and sexual awakening, and quietly critiques the strictures put upon women by conservative social norms and expectations. As such, it was both deeply controversial and wildly popular when first published in the 1960s. Still a household name, this novel, and of course its author, have stood the test of time, and remain relevant and highly readable today."--
Brief description:
Jonathan Smolin is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College in the US. He is the translator of several works of Arabic fiction, including Whitefly by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me by Youssef Fadel, and I Do Not Sleep and A Nose and Three Eyes by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and the author of The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser (forthcoming Stanford University Press). He lives in Hanover, NH.
Review Quotes:
"Breaking bourgeois taboos. . . . The Cairo of the 1950s and '60s described in A Nose and Three Eyes is much different from the Cairo of 2024, but this novel is still relevant. It provides psychological insights into the struggles Egyptian women face in the discovery of their sexuality in Cairo society, which still maintains more traditional norms than the West." --World Literature Today
"The novel is filled with the yearning and poor choices of young love under oppressive social expectations, where the risks taken by men are paid for by the women in their lives. The translation by Jonathon Smolin is propulsive and flowing. Spanning the personal and the political, moving from Cairo to Suez to Beirut, this is an epic and enthralling romantic novel."--The Irish Times
"Noteworthy"--Daily Kos
PRAISE FOR I DO NOT SLEEP:
PRAISE FOR IHSAN ABDEL KOUDDOUS: "He is like Stephen King, Anna Wintour, Lorne Michaels, J. K. Rowling, Alfred Hitchcock and Ta-Nehisi Coates loaded into one person."--Mikey Muhanna, Ehkili: Books & Literature from the Arab World, afikra "Ihsan Abdel Kouddous was a great novelist, a pioneer journalist, and a progressive activist who long fought for women's rights and secular democratic values."--Alaa Al Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building
"Kouddous . . .wrote fiction about the Arab world way ahead of its time, pared down and powerful."--LitHub "Abdel Kouddous enriched Egyptian literature and cinema with everlasting works"--Egypt Today "Ihsan is an artist"--Tawfik al-Hakim, author of Return of the Spirit