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Summary
Summary
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"Extraordinary...Sensitive and perceptive, Mr. Hessler is a superb literary archaeologist, one who handles what he sees with a bit of wonder that he gets to watch the history of this grand city unfold, one day at a time." -- Wall Street Journal
From the acclaimed author of River Town and Oracle Bones , an intimate excavation of life in one of the world's oldest civilizations at a time of convulsive change
Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker , friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.
In the midst of the revolution, Hessler often traveled to digs at Amarna and Abydos, where locals live beside the tombs of kings and courtiers, a landscape that they call simply al-Madfuna : "the Buried." He and his wife set out to master Arabic, striking up a friendship with their instructor, a cynical political sophisticate. They also befriended Peter's translator, a gay man struggling to find happiness in Egypt's homophobic culture. A different kind of friendship was formed with the neighborhood garbage collector, an illiterate but highly perceptive man named Sayyid, whose access to the trash of Cairo would be its own kind of archaeological excavation. Hessler also met a family of Chinese small-business owners in the lingerie trade; their view of the country proved a bracing counterpoint to the West's conventional wisdom.
Through the lives of these and other ordinary people in a time of tragedy and heartache, and through connections between contemporary Egypt and its ancient past, Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and its people. What emerges is a book of uncompromising intelligence and humanity--the story of a land in which a weak state has collapsed but its underlying society remains in many ways painfully the same. A worthy successor to works like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines , The Buried bids fair to be recognized as one of the great books of our time.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
New Yorker foreign correspondent Hessler (Oracle Bones) lived in Egypt during the months and years following the 2011 ouster of president Hosni Mubarak, and his account of learning Arabic, befriending a diverse array of characters, and gingerly probing the sore spots of Egyptian society is at once engrossing and illuminating. While Hessler lives in Cairo and much of the early action centers there, he ventures more widely than most foreigners in the country, and his reporting from sleepy upper Egyptian villages and remote Chinese development projects add complexity. Most of Hessler's contacts get roughed up and imprisoned by the security services at one point or another, often for inscrutable reasons: "There was no point to the brutality-it served no larger purpose." He returns frequently to the theme of internal tension and contradiction-that Egyptians "combined rigid tradition with ideas that could be surprisingly open-minded or nonconformist"-to contrast the brittle institutions of the state, such as courts, with the deep-seated social patterns and relationships that provide structure when the state is dysfunctional or ineffectual. Adroitly combining the color and pacing of travel writing and investigative journalism with the tools and insight of anthropological fieldwork and political theory, this stakes a strong claim to being the definitive book to emerge from the Egyptian revolution. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Archaeology is the science of interpreting a distant past without being misled by one's familiar present. Hessler (Strange Stones, 2013) conveys the near-impossibility of this challenge as he recounts his five years of reporting on the crisis of Egypt's Arab Spring while studying the mysteries of the land's ancient ruins. Hessler's inability to transcend his cultural biases and his condescending reduction of Egyptians in amusing anecdotes is grating, yet he has the self-awareness to recognize the West's childlike romanticization of Egypt in himself and his Western colleagues. The similarity between archaeology and politics, both involving a series of revelations and obfuscations, is made clear by Hessler's juxtaposition of seemingly disparate events. After the ousting of Mubarak and the ascension of Morsi, a portrait of the former leader disappears and is replaced by one of the new leader. Nothing else seems to change. Likewise, an American archaeological team excavates a tomb, then reburies it for the sake of preservation, leaving no trace. Whether in modern Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood or the ancient Egypt of the pharaohs, all is cyclical.--Lesley Williams Copyright 2019 Booklist