An Egyptian poet's obsession with the life and death of another Arabic writer are at the center of Traces of Enayat, an exceptional hybrid of memoir and biography by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. In 1993, Mersal discovered Love and Silence, the only published book written by Enayat al-Zayyat. The novel, published in 1967, four years after Enayat's suicide in her 20s, is the author's "account of her depression and her meditations on the meaning of a life lived in the presence of death." The death was that of her brother, Hisham, in 1950. But many other factors contributed to Enayat's depression, among them the bad marriage for which she sought a divorce; the possibility of losing forever her son, Abbas, as a result; and a major publishing house's rejection of her novel.
In its quiet way, this book is, in part, a detective story. Mersal (The Threshold) travels back to Egypt from her current home in Canada to interview people who knew Enayat and learn why Love and Silence "remained entirely absent from every history of twentieth-century Egyptian and Arabic literature." This beautiful tribute is about multiple struggles for freedom, from writers who want to assert their individuality through their books to the sexism Egyptian women have faced in and outside of the publishing world. Mersal writes of Enayat's journals and her "moments when she doubts her existence will leave any trace at all." Mersal can do little about the tragedies Enayat endured but, with this radiant work, she has lessened the chances of Enayat being forgotten. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer