Gazelle is a fascinating glimpse of the expatriate world in Cairo in the 1950s. Lizzie, a thirteen year-old American girl, her mother, and her father (an expert on war) have moved there because of the father’s Fulbright scholarship. The mother, a blonde Scandinavian, embarks on a series of affairs and moves out of their home after she’s discovered dancing in the nude with a strange man. Lizzie’s devastated father immerses himself in playing war games with his friend, Ramses Ragab, a gentle perfume maker, while neglecting his daughter. Lizzie’s love-hate relationship with the mother that abandoned her is written spot-on. Lizzie fantasizes about becoming Ram’s lover, developing her first crush on an older man, as she reads A Thousand and One Arabian Nights—the unexpurgated version. She and her father return to the States early, leaving the mother behind, after a betrayal of the worst kind.
This is a lovely, slightly erotic (yet nothing explicit), coming-of-age story steeped in the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of Cairo. The story is told by one narrator in two timelines, the past in the point of view of the teenaged Lizzie and the present in the voice of Lizzie years later when she’s returned to Cairo and works as a surgical anatomist specializing in mummies. The two voices wind around each other seamlessly as the older Lizzie realizes that the events of that summer altered the trajectory of her life immeasurably, tainting her relationships with the men in her life. Interestingly, the philandering mother is characterized as lion, but the gentle man, Ramses, is called a gazelle.
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Gazelle (Anchor, December 18, 2007) is available through:
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