But it's too bad, because what was fresh and affecting about Taxi was exactly its lack of pretensions, its combination of genres, and its pitch-perfect rendering of 'unliterary' voices.'A writer should carry coal in the morning and write in his spare time.' That, says the Egyptian novelist Khaled Al Khamissi on his website, is broadly the attitude of the Arab world to 'work' and 'writing'. Given the cultural context in Egypt-the fraught divide between high and low culture, between literature and reportage, Formal and Colloquial-it's hardly surprising that Al Khamissi should become defensive about his commercial success and want to position himself as a 'true' artist. This seems to include retroactive re-interpretation of his work: Taxi clearly has a sociological goal, but Al Khamissi today insists it should be discussed 'from a literary point of view.' He also recently published a 'proper' novel- Safinet Noha ('Noah's Ark')- which however has not received the same attention and praise as his earlier work and he noted that his next novel will be written entirely in Classical Arabic. That's not quite how the book presents itself-the narrator, in the introduction, states that 'for years I've been a prize customer for taxis.I'm one of those people who likes to talk to taxi drivers.this book contains between its covers some of the things that happened while I was in their company between April 2005 and March 2006.' When I interviewed the author years back, he gave me the impression that his fictionalized dialogues were based on actual conversations-a fact supported by the specificity of the voices and situations he conjures.Īfter the success of Taxi, Al Khamissi has been at pains to present himself as a Writer, capital W. Al Khamissi was at pains to describe Taxi as a 'literary text,' one that was entirely his imaginative creation.

It was interesting to me to note, however, how the book's reception in Egypt-where a debate ensued over whether it was a work of literature proper, rather than of reportage or sociology-has been interiorized by its author. It's a lovely little book, and had a big success in Egypt and abroad (particularly in France). I reviewed Taxi back in 2008 here on the blog. Wright, after briefly considering using Cockney English, chose wisely not to replace Egyptian dialect with some form of English 'dialect.' Apparently, the Italian translator chose, for example, to use Italian dialect. The issue of how to translate the different registers of Arabic-Taxi is written in Egyptian Conversational Arabic-was also discussed.

Taxi by Khaled Al Khamissi