As had already been the case with the appearance of Warda only three years after that of Sharaf, the publication of Amrikanli in 2003 appeared to confirm two trends in Sonallah's output. The first was a reduction in the intervals between the publication dates of his major, full-length novels; the second was a continuing enthusiasm for longer works – Amrikanli, with its 480 or so pages, being a work of almost exactly the same length as Sharaf and Warda. Although the geographical setting represents a major (and at first sight, unlikely) innovation in the author's novelistic career, both the themes and the techniques of the novel clearly build on those of earlier works – though the fact that the novel is set not in the Middle East but rather in the USA, following a period of residence there, is presumably at least partly responsible for the fact that the author here takes what has seemed to me (though not necessarily to everyone) to be a slightly more measured approach to his criticism of globalisation and Western culture than in some previous works.

Publication and Translations

The full text of Amrikanli (Amri Kan Li) was first published in Cairo in 2003 by Sonallah Ibrahim's preferred publishing house, Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, which had already published al-Lajna, Bayrut, Bayrut, Dhat and Warda. A corrected edition was issued in 2004, and a French translation by Richard Jacquemond appeared in 2005 under the title Amrikanli: Un automne à San Francisco. To the best of my knowledge, there are to date no translations into other languages.

Background

Amrikanli took about two and a half years to write. Like several of the author's previous novels, though not an autobiography, it is based at least partly, and closely, on the author's own experience – in this case, his experience as a visiting associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies of the University of California at Berkeley in 1998/9.