Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian

Alan Thomas is an associate professor of English at the University of
Toronto.

To describe this playful story by an Egyptian writer, we might modify
the title of De Vigny’s novel of military life and call Elhadem the
author of Servitude et grandeur de la vie immigrante. His novella tells
of the hopes, anxieties, frustrations, and successes of an Egyptian who
struggles to get out of Egypt during the Nasser regime, and then
struggles again, once out, to accustom himself to Canada. Playful in its
self-consciousness as a narrative under construction, the story is told
with constant self-examination and questioning by the narrator, and with
frequent reconstituting of the action with new situations and
characters. The translator El-Gabalawy, a professor at the University of
Calgary, provides a critical introduction that places the work in the
modernist tradition. The text is also given in Arabic.