The appearance of al-Talassus in 2007 represented something of a shift in direction in Sonallah Ibrahim's sequence of novels. Generally regarded as one of the least political and most personal of the author's novels, it is set not in post-revolutionary Egypt, as most of its predecessors had been, but in the dying days of the Egyptian monarchy, towards the end of the 1940s – a time when Sonallah Ibrahim himself was some ten or eleven years old.

Publication and Translations

The text of al-Talassus was published in Cairo in 2003 by Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, the house that had published the majority of the author's novels first released in Cairo, with the exception of Sharaf. An English translation by Hosam Aboul-Ela entitled Stealth (a somewhat controversial rendering of the title, for a discussion of which see below) was published in London by Aflame in 2010, but the company went bankrupt in 2012; the English translation was subsequently republished in the USA by New Directions in 2014. A French translation by Richard Jacquemond under the title Le Petit Voyeur was published by Actes Sud in 2008. To my knowledge, there are to date no translations into other languages.

Background

In terms of the author's relation to the events described, the background to al-Talassus needs little elaboration: we are clearly faced with an attempt to recreate, at both a personal and a national/societal level, a period of the past through which the author lived. The work is labelled riwāya (‘novel’) on the cover, but like many of the author's previous novels, though not an autobiography in the strict sense of the word, it is clearly closely based on the author's own experience.

The relationship between the work itself and the author's own life has been made quite explicit in interviews by the author himself, who in 2013, for example, noted that ‘Stealth is not a memoir, it is fiction based on some facts’. As an example of the way in which fact has been transformed into fiction, he explains that: