Tales of Yusuf Tadrus by Adel Esmat

Abstract

Books in Review Adel Esmat Tales of Yusuf Tadrus Trans. Mandy McClure. Cairo. American University in Cairo Press. 2018. 216 pages. It’s no accident that the epigraph to this novel is from Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco: “I said to the almond tree, ‘Speak to me of God.’” Kazantzakis’s book is a spiritual autobiography, which is short on facts but focuses on ideas, referring to the spiritual teachings of Christ and Buddha, Lenin and Odysseus. Tales of Yusuf Tadrus is a bildungsroman, although the artistnarrator , Yusuf Tadrus, reveals the secrets of his entire life, not just as a young man. Like Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Tadrus resembles Odysseus on a journey of profound self-discovery. However , Adel Esmat uses Christian mythology, not Greek allusions, to tell Yusuf Tadrus’s story, a Coptic man from a humble family, living in the provincial town of Tanta as a child in the 1960s. Yusuf is a bit of a vagabond and a rogue, and we have the feeling that everything he tells us might not be strictly true. He exaggerates to give the tale flavor. Esmat draws on the Egyptian tradition of oral storytelling . Rather than plot, the driving force of his novel is Yusuf’s voice, which makes the narrative compelling: “Listen, the human being is a web of threads. I often reflect on my life. I arrived bound to a boy drowned in the Nile years before my birth; to a father who felt inferior to those who read and write, took pride in himself, and locked up his feelings in his heart; to a mother who wanted to dedicate herself to the Lord. All of these unseen threads came together to form your brother Yusuf Tadrus.” Each chapter is a thematic vignette, which begins with his brush with death at seven years old. Mandy McClure has rendered the strength of this novel into fluid, idiomatic English, as if someone were telling a story in a café. Yusuf’s strange dream, poetic yet immediate, draws the reader in. From an early age, Yusuf has an attraction to light, color, and a passion for art. Much of the novel revolves around universal questions: What is the authentic life? Who am I? While he dreams of studying art in Paris, Yusuf settles for an art school in Alexandria, which awakens his thirst for learning. Reyna Grande A Dream Called Home New York. Atria Books. 2018. 336 pages. REYNA GRANDE shares her experiences as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who, at age nine, accompanied by young siblings and a coyote, succeeded on her third attempt to cross the border near Tijuana. Her life story is a fascinating one, not only because of her willingness to be absolutely frank about her feelings and perceptions but for the impact the immigration experience has had on generations of families and the family structure. When Grande was barely a year old, her father crossed the border to “El Otro Lado” (The other side) to find a way to earn money to send back to his family in desperately impoverished Iguala, Guerrero . Later, when Grande was five, her mother also left to join her husband in California. Feeling abandoned in Iguala, Reyna was left in the care of relatives who were often cruel. When she was nine, her father was able to send money for the passage to “El Otro Lado.” A Dream Called Home is a chronicle of public milestones and private sorrows. Grande’s overall experience of immigration is an overwhelmingly positive one, where sheer force of will and hard work have enabled her to achieve the watershed moments of high-school graduation, college graduation, a job as a schoolteacher, the purchase of a house, motherhood, and marriage. But there is pain. A closer look reveals the toll the immigrant experience takes. Long separations, uncertainty, feelings of extreme insecurity and of being considered a permanent outsider result in deep-seated anxiety, shame, and a clouded sense of identity. Hard work and achievable goals help Grande overcome them, but she reveals the life-long scars that the family fragmentations created. None of her family members are unscathed. The...