Traces of Enayat

When Mersal, a young Egyptian literary scholar, encountered the novel Love and Silence by chance at a Cairo bookshop, she was drawn to the book's beauty and strangeness, but also to the author, the nearly anonymous Enayat al-Zayyat, who had killed herself at age 27, thinking her only novel would never be published. Mersal's years-long search for answers about her life, a kind of Egyptian Quest for Corvo, ends up as much a portrait of a time as of its still-elusive subject: the revolutionary era of Nasser, the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema, and a woman struggling against traditional culture and artistic isolation, who still can speak through pages she never knew would be published.