Stealth

Can you be nostalgic for a past that's not yours? Stealth is saturated with the sensations and physical details of Cairo in the 1940s, in the lower-middle-class apartments and streets through which the young narrator and his widowed father make their way. There's a story to be found there (often by looking through keyholes), but this novel—by an author best-known for his political writing (he was jailed for years by General Nasser)—is mainly an archive of memory, like Joe Brainard's I Remember or Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900. It's an affecting, enlightening book; its strongest political statement might just be to say, "We were here, and in this time we lived in this way, which should not be forgotten."