“We say that we cry for the ones who have left us. But the truth is that we only ever weep for our own powerlessness,” writes Éric Chacour in his debut novel What I Know About You, translated from the French by Pablo Strauss.
Powerless against time’s relentless march, we are unable to halt, rewind, or alter our actions. Each step, whether deliberate or impulsive, shapes our destiny and affects those around us. To what extent are we the architects of our own fate? How do our choices shape our lives and the lives of the ones we love? And how much are we willing to risk for true love? Spanning four decades and two continents, What I Know About You, explores these questions through a story of a taboo attraction between two men and its repercussions. From the bustling streets of Cairo to the quiet solitude of Montreal, What I Know About You is a sweeping saga of family secrets, cultural clashes, and the sacrifices made in the name of love.
In the heart of a traditional Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek’s life is carefully mapped out. He follows in his father’s footsteps, living under the watchful gaze of his family’s matriarchs. But when Ali, the son of a patient from the impoverished outskirts of Mokattam, enters his life, everything changes. Their forbidden relationship sets off a chain of events as tumultuous as the political upheavals unfolding around them, setting off a cascade of consequences that will affect generations. Tarek and Ali’s illicit desires challenge prevailing social and religious norms, placing them in direct conflict with proscribed conventions.
Underlying the narrative is the suggestion that fate, not free will, is behind the entirety of the human experience. In Chacour’s fictional world, predetermined destinies are an accepted part of life. As a boy growing up, Tarek lives in a traditional gendered family in which he is expected to simply fulfill his duties. Meanwhile, his sister Nesrine is stifled by a lack of expectation: “All these years, you’d never imagined that your sister might be jealous of something you experienced only as a burden.”
This meticulously crafted novel stuns with thought-provoking social commentary, philosophical, and religious musings like this, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. So before the beginning was nothing, nothing but God. Almost nothing. To relive the divine boredom that must have reached back long before the beginning, God created humankind in its own image, an idea that came to him after days of continual fulguration […] Then, prey to a fleeting bout of self-satisfaction, God deemed all this creation good. But humankind took a liking to its new job. Perhaps fearing it might be challenged, it said about making its status irrefutable. And so humanity, in turn, created God. In its own image.”
From the narrative voice that sets the tone, commenting on the unfolding events, to the characters’ own preoccupation with the unseen forces shaping their lives, Chacour imbues the world of his novel with a sense of impending doom. Tarek’s fear for his forbidden attraction masks a desperate hope to defy fate. In a rare moment of vulnerability, he seeks solace in science, attempting to rationalize the emotions that overwhelm him: “Photons are tiny little particles … Apparently, once two photons have interacted at any point in their existence, they stay connected forever […] Who knows, maybe you and I are like two entangled photons. [I]f we were separated one day, we’d go on feeling the same things, at the same times.”
Like Romeo and Juliet, this novel scrutinizes the calamitous circumstance of contested love and its consequences. Chacour hints at the connection between love and violence early on during Tarek’s courtship with future wife Mira against the backdrop of the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt in 1967: “Over ten thousand Egyptian soldiers did not return from battle to tell the tale of your nation’s defeat, while at home you were living out the final hours of an illusionary victory. The euphoria in the city streets was the outward reflection of the ardour inside you.”
Later the physical expressions of Tarek’s star-crossed love for Ali carry darker connotations. Their first kiss is dismissed as a “joke, a Western perversion.” Chacour challenges romantic ideals, portraying love as an intense, all-consuming force leading to clashes between the lovers: “Can anyone truly know what causes storms to rage? Ali exploded with a violence that drew his muscles taut,” and violence within the community, “Rumour. Invisible as the wind in the palm trees, it spreads, sullying whatever it cannot understand. Your office windows had been broken from outside. Condemning whatever it cannot understand.” By examining love’s complexities across time and social strata, the novel reveals the power of this emotion and its potential for both destruction and transformation.
Tarek’s and Ali’s passion is painted with the same intoxicating brush as Shakespeare’s most ardent romances. Their amour ignites a “feverish heat” that numbs all fear and dread. Later, amidst a funeral gathering, Tarek yearns for life instead of dwelling on death. These passages showcase the intensity of their connection, a love that transcends societal expectations and even mortality itself: “More than enough people were gathered to celebrate death; you would rather find a way back to life.” Throughout the narrative, Tarek acknowledges — and makes ill-fated attempts to resist — the invisible forces guiding his life: “Unlike you, [Ali] had no past to bind him and no future to constrain him.”
In The Emotional Craft of Fiction, Donald Maass states, “the sense of movement in a story comes mostly from inside. It’s a tidal pull, an emotional tug.” The emotional tug in Chacour’s novel is undeniable with powerful public and personal stakes at play. The stakes are largely personal, confined to the family, until the threat of exposure looms, causing Tarek to take drastic action to spare his family’s humiliation. By switching back and forth in time, Chacour creates tension steadily elevating personal and public stakes. Similar to Tennessee Williams in The Mysteries of the Joy Rio, Chacour further hightens the stakes of life and death as Tarek bears witness to his parents mortality.
Chacour uses the recurring appearance of an heirloom pocket watch to suggest that this is a story about love lost in time. Yet, there is also the permanence of love that defies the passing of seasons — a permanence that Tarek is only admitting to himself, painfully aware of the public stakes at play: “Ali had taken a place in the system. There were so many things you pretended not to see: that he was an intruder with one foot in the house, straddling the threshold of a family accessible only through birth or marriage. That he remained ever an impostor to a community separated from him by religion and social status. That the sense of freedom with which he lived life was seen as a threat to the morals of his nation.”
Through the shuffling of time, Chacour unravels and reshapes the reader’s ideas of Tarek’s journey, employing a multi-faceted narrative in three parts titled, “You,” “Me” and “Us.” Told through varying points of view, the narrative swirls like a funnel, primarily through second-person narration, with subtle glimpses of the narrator’s “I” emerging a third of the way in, linked to the novel’s title. The narrator’s reflective voice is alluring, and the reader is drawn into a quest to uncover the narrator’s identity.
The novel’s sonics captivated me, prompting me to reach out to both Chacour and translator Pablo Strauss. I was curious about the rhythmic interplay between the original French and English translation. Strauss explained that Chacour’s French prose is measured with “symmetrical sentence structures whose parts tend to be in perfect balance.” To maintain the musicality of the original, he carefully considered rhythm, syllable count, and vowel sounds.
He shared the following example from the opening in Chapter 24: “Les semaines se succédaient, chacune se voulant la réplique, à peine plus morne et désœuvrée, de celle qui l’avait précédée,” and explained that “it has a wonderful flow and balance to it,” adding, “the last two clauses are metrically identical, and they rhyme with each other and with the first adjective: succédaient / désœuvrée / précédée.” Strauss’ translation reads: “Weeks passed, each one a slightly bleaker and more idle simulacrum of the last.” He commented, “While structurally not identical, I think my version has a similar balanced quality, and a rhyme.” In this case, beyond a literal translation, Strauss had to find a natural English flow that echoed Chacour’s tone.
The refrain of “Mira, Mira …” stood out as well. In the original French, Mira’s multiple nicknames, “Mira-Antigone, Mira-Conquête-Spatiale,” serve as a window into Tarek’s wife’s complex, often hidden personality. Strauss admitted that he considered omitting it from the English translation fearing it would lose its potent effect in translation when Chacour revealed that the name “Mira” was a subtle nod to “Mary.” Editor Alana Wilcox added, “Like Mother Mary full of grace.” The rhythm sparked a nursery rhyme motif, morphing “Mira-Mauvaise foi,” into “Mira Mira quite contrary.”
“This was among the best examples I’ve ever experienced of the collaborative nature of translation,” Strauss said. “It was the hardest problem to solve in the novel. Only by working together and asking each other hard questions were we able to come up with something that was better than any solution I could have found on my own.”
At its core, What I Know About You is a profoundly human story — a tale of love, loss, and the enduring human spirit. Every emotion is earned and resonates deeply, a testament to Chacour’s skillful storytelling. While the narrative leaves the reader pondering life’s “what ifs,” it ultimately offers a glimmer of hope, a chance for homecoming. As the narrator reflects, “There’s no way to stay outside your own story. Everything that came before — the things that you missed, the things that formed you” — a poignant reminder that our past shapes our present and future.
[Published by Coach House Books on September 24, 2024, 224 pages, $18.95US/$23.95CDN]