Damien Aubel, February 2023, for Transfuge
Mansoura Ezeldin’s novel has the intensity and mystery of a marvelous gem. It illuminates this winter’s publications.
Here is a book which delights the reader in exactly the same proportion as it condemns the critic to embarrassment.
A book that prevents any analytical intent, and causes a thousand rare pleasures. A small prowess in which the qualities apparently least likely to agree come together with the most perfect naturalness. A malleable alloy where are mixed together the highest erudition — the intellectual effervescence of the Basra of the 8th century –; the flow, both tumultuous and …