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Albert Cossery "Voltaire of the Nile" dies at 94
"Albert Cossery, an Egyptian writer who, in his adopted Paris, wrote with humour about the life of common people in his native Cairo, died Sunday in Paris at the age of 94 [...]
"Cossery, whose eight books were translated into 15-odd languages, passed away in the modest streetcorner hotel that was his home for more than 60 years on the Left Bank, the literary heart of the French capital. [...]
"His books -- which blended humour, sarcasm and Oriental wisdom -- included 'Proud Beggars,' 'A Room In Cairo,' 'Men God Forgot,' and his last novel, 'The Colours of Infamy,' published in French in 1999 and made into a comic book.
"Fans nicknamed him 'the Voltaire of the Nile' and his stories were peopled with humble folk and misfits -- streetsweepers, thieves, prostitutes -- who mocked authority.
"'He writes in a French that belongs entirely to him about a Cairo that exists in his memory and imagination -- he left Egypt decades ago,' said scholar and translator Alyson Waters in New York magazine, which last year named 'Infamy' one of the world's best novels not yet published in English.
"Born on November 3, 1913, the son of a newspaper-reading Cairo landlord father and an illiterate "mother, Cossery's early writings first appeared in French-language periodicals in Egypt in the 1930s. His childhood was spent at a time when French was the lingua franca of the middle classes in Cairo.
"He went to sea with the Egyptian merchant marine during World War II, then turned up in Paris in the late 1940s to write and live alongside a galaxy of literary friends that included Lawrence Durrell, Jean Genet and Albert Camus. 'I love this language,' he once said of French, although he added that he 'thought in Arabic'. [...]"
Source: Egypt News (Egypt), June 22, 2008
Posted at: 2008-06-26
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