“THEY believe that she is your beloved, but nobody knows the truth except you and her. Nobody knows that she used to lay near you in bed naked every night, but you are always turning your back to her as if she is infected with a severe skin disease, but what is weird is that she never asked you why? She never said to you ‘please, go to the doctor' as if it is normal for the woman to give herself to a man who is sexually disordered.” These lines are taken from Dar el-Ghewaya (The House of Temptation), a novel recently published by Merit publishing house. It is a journey inside the narrator, who works as a journalist, revealing his secret relations with women. What is notable is the unique language and style of Amr Ashour, the writer, although the novel is his first. The protagonist, who works as a journalist, has many flashbacks during the novel. He remembers when he was a little child waiting with his mother to take a taxi to the Moustafa Mahmoud Mosque in the plush Cairo quarter of Mohandiseen. He recalls going into the women's toilet with his mother in order to wash before praying. As a child, he was ignorant and didn't know what to do, just following her. The child stuck to his mother like glue and didn't want to leave her when she was praying; he was sad when she told him to “go to the back with the children”. But he was alone when a girl shouted at him, “You don't know how to pray, you are idiot, your father is also an idiot.” She then hit him and his mother came to his help. His mother influenced him deeply. He remembers when he was at preparatory school, how he felt shy as his mother held and kissed him. At the time, he experienced a strange feeling, which made him, while sinking into her arms, say: “Mum, I love you.” She kissed him again and held him tight. “I like this work. The writer uses short, fast phrases without redundancy, as well as direct ideas,” Egyptian writer Ibrahim Abdel-Maguid says of the novel. In fact, the story is similar to El-Sarab (Mirage), a novel penned by the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and made into a film starring Nour el-Sherif and Magda. “He portrays the protagonist as a rich man. I believe that the writer should have read more about journalism before making his main character a journalist. “Because of this, I think his novel lacks credibility,” writer Khaled Ismail wrote in the local magazine Radio and TV. “I wanted him to write what he knows and has experienced, not what he doesn't know.” Although the main idea of the novel is oppression in every sense of the word, the writer cleverly weaves many other issues into the novel, which deals with sex and how it influences the mind. “Writing about a critical issue like sex is useless if the writer is lacking in knowledge of the world. But Ashour is very skillful, making this novel very interesting because of his wonderful narrative style and use of language,” Ismail added. “What is also good in Ashour's novel is the dialogue, which he uses to show the differences between the characters.”
