Novel set around the building of the Empire State Building, MANHATTAN
Diary of a Country Prosecutor
Location(s): Egypt
Genre(s): Historical, Fiction, In Translation
Era(s): 1920s
Who shot Kamar al-Dawla Alwan? Was it a crime of passion? What was the role of the beautiful peasant girl called Rim? Is the mysterious Sheikh Asfur as crazy as he seems? First published in 1937, Tawfik al-Hakim’s partly autobiographical novel is written as the journal of a young, stress-ridden prosecutor deployed by Cairo to investigate a number of serious crimes in a rural village. Imbued with the ideals of a European education, he encounters a world of poverty and disarray, where an imported legal system is both alien and incomprehensible. Both a comedy of errors and a trenchant social satire, Diary of a Country Prosecutor takes aim at wily peasants, clueless bureaucrats, a self-interested ruling class and, of course, our hapless public servant. Hilarious, wry and true, this classic of Egyptian literature has lost none of its bite.
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