Review
"Certainly a must-read for anyone interested in Ghali's work and perhaps of wider interest."--Marcia Lynx Qualey, Arabic Literature (in English)
"Waguih Ghali's widely acclaimed novel "Beer in the Snooker Club" has become a classic of Arabic literature. Ghali, like other once marginalized authors and artists, has become an intellectual reference in and outside the Arab world for current attempts to re-articulate the terms of the debate on culture, nation, and the world in times of painful transition from an old order to something unknown. The publication of his diaries is an important contribution to this endeavor, for it enables us to learn more about the author and his context. Ghali was a non-conformist socialist, a political dissenter, an avant-garde figure, haunted by alienation, depression, nostalgia, and by being a little too fond of the good life, and by contradictions that still mark our times."--Georges Khalil, Forum Transregionale Studien
"The diaries give us a clearer picture of Ghali and the nature of his life in exile, and help to correct some misconceptions about him. They constitute an important document of confession in which we can trace and reflect on the difficulties of writing and the alienation of a writer who lost his home in his childhood and his country in his youth."--Iman Ali, al-Hayat
"Meticulously edited by May Hawas. . . . The diaries cover, and shed much light on, the last four years of Ghali's life as well as, through reminiscences, aspects of his youth."--Paul K Lyons, The Diary Review
"The author clearly imagines-or at least hopes-the diary will one day be published in book form. As he hopes it, he also worries that we, who will read his once-private thoughts, will laugh at him. 'This, to me, is one of the cruelest things I am experiencing.' He needn't have agonized over this. While a reader who admires "Beer in the Snooker Club" might be disappointed at the Diaries' very different tone, it would take a stone-hearted reader to laugh at the author's suffering."--Marcia Lynx Qualey, Qantara.de
"An account of a daily struggle to avoid 'sinking', to fight the 'cafard', not to succumb to 'the disease'--all the different names Ghali finds for his depression. His every romantic relationship (and there were many: he was attractive to women) is doomed by his terror of being humiliated and abandoned."--Ursula Lindsey, London Review of Books
"The diary is compulsive. It is (or seems to be) scathingly honest in his treatment of himself, and there are episodes that are almost too painful to read . . . . But against all the odds he is likeable, almost a little admirable, and brave in his contorted way."--Martin Rose, Mercurius Maghrebensis blog
"Reading Ghali's writings is a highly effective antidote to the dominant cultural polarization of our debates over the Arab world that all too often assert a supposedly monolithic Islamic culture and in which the tensions of the region are reduced to a binary between Islamists and authoritarian rulers. Ghali's work cheerfully turns the tables, lays open intermediate layers, and shatters stereotypes. It is high time to discover--or rediscover--this writer."--Michael Hack, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"Astonishingly frank"--Susannah Tarbush, The Tanjara
