That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential novels written in Arabic since WWII. Composed after a five-year term in prison, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city. Living under house arrest, he tries to write of his tortuous experience, but instead smokes, spies on the neighbors, visits old lovers, and marvels at Egypt’s new consumer culture. Published in 1966, That Smell was immediately banned and the print-run confiscated. The original, uncensored version did not appear in Egypt for another twenty years.
For this edition, translator Robyn Creswell has also included an annotated selection of the author’s Notes from Prison, Ibrahim’s prison diaries—a personal archive comprising hundreds of handwritten notes copied onto Bafra-brand cigarette papers and smuggled out of jail. These stark, intense writings shed unexpected light on the sources and motives of Ibrahim’s groundbreaking novel. Also included in this edition is Ibrahim’s celebrated essay about the writing and reception of That Smell.
That Smell is not just a story, it is a revolution, the beginning of which is the artist’s rebellion against himself.
— Yusuf Idris, author of City of Love and Ashes
Since the 1960s, Sonallah Ibrahim has been Egypt’s literary voice of political conscience.
— Jadaliyya
One of the Arab world’s most distinguished novelist… an intellectual who thoroughly understands the price and value of freedom.
— Sarnia Mehrez, Al-Ahram
Breathtakingly subversive.
— Yasmine El Rashidi, New York Review of Books
Superbly austere… a comédie humaine of Nasserist Egypt in just fifty pages.
— Robyn Creswell, The New Yorker
Bold, uncompromising writing.
— Frederick Deknatel, The Daily Beast
A controlled howl of fury.
— Jeremy Lybarger, Los Angeles Review of Books
Creswell’s new translation of That Smell finally allows English language readers to appreciate these qualities.
— Yasmine El Rashidi, New York Review of Books
Robyn Creswell’s translation of Ibrahim’s exhilaratingly bleak novel gives English readers a new classic of mid-century existentialism and, at the same time, a window onto an Egypt too few of us have glimpsed in literature or elsewhere.
— Benjamin Kunkel
The pervasive moral corruption of Nasser’s Egypt seeps up between the lines of Ibrahim’s seemingly affectless prose. A landmark in Egyptian literature.