Las huellas de Enayat

Cairo, 1963: The suicide of the young Enayat al-Zayyat became synonymous with tragically cut-short talent, while Love and Silence, her only novel, languished unpublished. Four years after al-Zayyat's death, the novel was finally published, adapted for film and radio, praised, and then quickly forgotten. For the next three decades, it was as if al-Zayyat had never existed. Yet when the poet Iman Mersal stumbled upon Love and Silence in the 1990s, she was immediately captivated. Who was Enayat? Was it really the rejection of her novel that drove her to suicide? Where did that astonishing voice come from? And why did Love and Silence vanish from literary history? To answer these questions, Mersal traces Enayat's life, interviewing family and friends, reconstructing the author's posthumous media presence, and locating the apartments, schools, archaeological institutes, and sanatoriums where Enayat divided her time. Tackling topics as diverse as dubious antidepressants, domestic violence, and divorce law, from the garbage-strewn shacks of the necropolis to the glamour of Egyptian cinema's golden age, this sweeping and unclassifiable masterpiece offers an extraordinary portrait of a female artist struggling to live on her own terms.