After the publication of his latest book, Hugratan wa Salah: Mutataliya Manziliyya (Two Rooms and a Hall: A Household Sequence), the veteran fiction writer reached his 75th year. Scheduled for commercial release any time now is a new film named Assafir Al-Nil (Nile Sparrows), based on his eponymous novel and directed by Magdi Ahmad Ali. To celebrate all three occasions, Aslan spoke to Mohammad Shoair this week is a skilled fisherman -- in more than one sense. In his childhood in the Nile-side neighbourhood that came to be associated with his name, Kitkat, he would construct the fishing line by himself, winding a sakrouta (cheap silk) around a found a rod and tying a piece of rubber to it, to find out what kind of fish he would end up with. And every time he fished, he would catch something. The river never let him down. Writing, for Aslan, is like fishing or, to borrow the title of one of his books, "something of this sort". The way fishing requires patience and the ability to pinch skillfully at the right moment, so does writing require patience and the ability to identify those transient moments that are hard to pin down and fish them out of the river of life. In every event or action there is an essential moment, a moment that includes, in Aslan's own words, "all that has gone and will come, the whole world". At the age of 75, Aslan has written three novels, three collections of short stories, and two collections of narrative essays. He also has numerous deferred dreams. The new "household sequence" is harder to classify; Aslan does not object to the critics labelling it a novel. Asked whether he has any literary regrets, Aslan says, "I think I was a little too afraid of writing." He should have been bolder, he explains, and made better use of his time. Throughout his life he was a perfectionist, concerned with nothing but quality of writing, even during those periods when he was not writing. "Perhaps it was this," he says, "that instilled the fear in me." That is why when, on a visit to Europe, he saw with delight the originals of works of art of which he had seen only reproductions, he was glad above all else with the works of Alberto Giacometti: "He is an artist whose work depends on exclusion. Little remains of his structures." This is precisely how Aslan himself produces his own work, writing as he puts it "with the eraser". He takes out more than he leaves in, in other words. Like Giacometti, he keeps out all that is unnecessary -- and perhaps a little more to boot. The idea is that Aslan feels he must never think for his reader, or offer that reader ready answers. What is written, he believes, is never important in itself; its importance resides, rather, in its ability to communicate all that must ultimately remain unwritten (because what is worth writing about can never in the end be written). The transition to the word processer has thus facilitated Aslan's work -- not so much the writing itself as the trashing the process tends to involve. The backspace button was his greatest discovery. In Hugratan wa Salah the approach is similar, but the form poses different questions. The book is not a novel like Malik Al-Hazin (Heron), nor a collection of stories like Buhairat Al-Massaa (Evening Pond, 1992), nor a collection of essays like Khulwat Al-Ghalban (2003), in which Aslan narrates episodes from his own experience. It is made up rather of texts each of which can stand alone, much like a short story, which nonetheless have a common thread running through them. The protagonist in all of them is the same: Ustaz Khalil, retired and with much time on his hands after his children, all married by the time the book opens, have left the house; by the middle of the book Ustaz Khalil's wife dies too, and he begins to confront life alone. Aslan wrote these texts in response to an ambiguous state, "a state seeking its own existence -- I go along with such a state, and I write it as a way of giving it that existence". But why did he classify it so idiosyncratically? "At the beginning I set out a general vision for writing a book. This book has its own clear and independent character. It is not important what you will call it, classification is not important. Some might see it as more of a novel, others as more of a short story collection. But in all of my books I gather that daily debris to which no one pays attention. Consequently each book takes a different direction, until the reader and I reach a point of intersection. To my mind this is an ideal way of avoiding the notion of missionary literature, as it were, literature that wants to communicate to readers a predetermined message. I don't see this as the job of literature." Between Buhairat Al-Massaa and the present book, however, what has remained fixed and what has varied? "It is hard to stand outside my work and answer such questions," Aslan says. "But there is one thing I have been aware of since I started writing -- and that is my complete repulsion from encouraging the reader not to think. A true work of art is a work that does not think for anyone, or imagine for anyone, but instead presents the only true, aesthetically viable opportunity for others to think and imagine for themselves," he winds down. Despite belonging to the more or less politicised literary Generation of the Sixties, when Aslan started writing, he had no illusions about changing the world. He is among the few who never joined political organizations, whether legal or underground -- something that was reflected in his writing -- even if it is difficult to say that such writing is entirely devoid of politics in the most general sense of the word. "Even though I was never an activist, I grew up among the Egyptian Left. My positions are wholly identical to theirs. But at the organic level I was unable to be a member of an orchestra that only played one tune. Perhaps it is the way I am formed that prevents me from functioning under a higher command, whatever it is and however important." What about the greater issues? "The greater issues are greater because of the impact they make on the nature of human relations -- the underground reservoir of society, as it were. My view is that the greater issues should be dealt with at the theoretical level. This is more beneficial. It is more direct and reaches out to people more effectively. But my feeling is that a work of art is richer than this. A work of art goes under the underground reservoir in order to express the nature of human relations. This makes it richer and allows it to be read at multiple levels. Readers as much as sociologists and philosophers will find something in it for them."
