The taste of sleep

In "Taste of Sleep," Tariq Imam presents his most ambitious text, with a historical novel that reads contemporary Egyptian history over the course of about fifty years, arriving at the questions of the current moment. "The Taste of Sleep" intersects with "The Sleeping Beauties" by Kawabata and "Memory of My Sad Whores" by Márquez together, to present a narrative opposition that takes inspiration from "One Thousand and One Nights" narratively. But this time, "Imam" reverses the game of the previous two novels, starting from the exact opposite point of view, which is "novelistically" silent about. This time, it is the sleeping girl who is writing her novel, reviewing the intersection of personal history with the history of a homeland and the wounding of individual memory with the pain of collective memory, in honor of an anxious city, Alexandria, which is faltering in the question of its identity, and which brings here a real hero and not just a stage for the event. It is the novel of all the women who never spoke: a novel of love and crime, history and contemplation, in which reality is mixed with fiction, and narrated by the hand of poetry.