Perhaps the best known cultural column in the history of Egyptian journalism is finally published in book form. Mohammed Shoair spoke to its author on his 71st birthday For over 40 years, in his column Assir Al-Kutub (Books' Nectar), novelist provided some of the deepest and most engaging insights into literary life. As he crosses the 70-year barrier, does not know how these years have passed; he does not feel he has accomplished enough. The author of Zahr Al-Laymoun (Lemon Flowers, 1978), one of the most remarkable novellas in the history of Arabic literature, El-Deeb has finally "decided to come out of the isolation of the last few years following five surgeries resulting from a medical blunder". He has decided to learn to use the computer and "It's as if I'm learning to read and write all over again." El-Deeb likes to see himself as the Eternal Traveller -- just like the heros of his novels, who are forever searching for quiet and secure moments in an atmosphere of defeat and general regress. Thus he turned his serene suburban house in Maadi into "an island", far from the madness of Cairo -- the one thing he inherited from his father. Isolation is "a means to salvation": the only way to avoid "the petty fights" to which his life would otherwise be subject. When asked which of his characters is closest to him, he says, "They are all me." Even despite the fact that they are all defeated and frustrated? He laughs: "I am the lover of losers. I hate those who claim victory the whole time." Simplicity and honesty that hurts: these are the principal features of El-Deeb's work and life. He speaks of the tiny table at the centre of his home office: "I have not changed it for 40 years, and I cannot write away from it." El-Deeb holds himself personally responsible for the 1967 defeat. He was a member of the tanzim tali'i, the political wing of the one-party regime, the Socialist Union, which was instituted by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the early 1960s. But he woke up one day to "find the dreams broken like glass". In his book Waqfah Qabla Al-Munhadar (A Stop Before the Fall, 1990), he recounts, "A dear young man who believes my words and contemplates them asked me, 'What did you do in '67? What did it do to you?' I said without thinking, 'It killed me. Since that day I have been dead.'" In his early youth, El-Deeb joined a range of political organisations, from the Muslim Brothers to socialist organisations, but he found himself, as he puts it, "at the core of the regime: I worked as a journalist and journalism was, as they deluded us into thinking at the time, 'the first battalion'. Then I joined the tanzim tali'i, which multiplied the size of the tragedy for me. I felt completely responsible for the defeat." Perhaps this is why every one of his novels revolves around that moment and its abiding consequences: "I was a believer in the great dreams they gave us good omens of before the defeat." The question El-Deeb always asks himself is how he believed this illusion, even though the regime provided plenty of reason to suggest that this would happen; there seemed to be no answer, ever. The only -- melodramatic -- statement he constantly made to himself in response was "That I died, that I was dead." At this time writing was a necessity for him, a means to resistance following years of futility and nihilism. He was not a "fighter", after all, just a middle- class person. He laughs again: "Even the socialists, for the duration of my association with them, classified me as 'an intellectual who just likes to talk'. It was difficult for me at this time, while I stepped towards my 35th year, to summon up a new face of struggle. Socialism at this time was already cracking." Everyone at this time had to make up their minds on whether or not to be coopted by the regime. "If you want them to give you your certificate of legitimacy, write to the authorities." But El-Deeb resisted such temptations, favouring a small corner of the magazine Sabah Al-Kher in which to present the core of what he had been reading and what had come out. He abandoned the arena to whoever would try his luck in it. "I think this is the most important thing I came out with," he says: "salvation." Thus was the start of Asir Al-Kutub, the new book published recently by Dar El-Shorouk. The book is a major document on the creative writing of a rich and interesting period in the history of this country, covering stretches of time and place through a selection of 111 books -- on the short story, the novel, poetry, politics, sociology and history. "It is not criticism, it is not publicity. Its principal ambition is to contribute to the general thinking. The choice [of book] is a question, and writing [about it] the attempt at an answer." Through this column, El-Deeb became -- according to novelist Ibrahim Aslan's introduction to the book -- one of four representatives "of the forces of good in an extremely rich and variable cultural sphere", the other three being Yahya Haqqi, Abdel-Fattah El-Gamal and Ragaa El-Naqqash: "They came and went under the spell of the drive to look for every genuine talent anywhere around them: consciences that were never lax, together with a good deal of self-denial, not to mention a sublime intellect and inspired taste. Value was the only standard, nothing else." El-Deeb's work as a journalist was not restricted to writing about books. He worked as a features writer in Sabah Al-Kher as well, and travelled all across Egypt to produce reportage in a language closer to poetry. These included a feature on a woman of the south who killed her son after he sold his dead father's land. She threw the corpse in a well, and sat by the well like a lump of blackness, unmoving. The language of the piece drew in the filmmaker Shadi Abdel-Salam, who had only just completed the screenplay of his landmark film The Night of Counting the Years and was still looking for someone to contribute the dialogue -- El-Deeb was like a find. "Shadi regularly visited his two friends at the magazine [Sabah Al-Kher]," El-Deeb recalls, "and so he read the series of features that I wrote. He had also seen a performance of Beckett's Endgame in my translation, in which I tried to adapt fusha [or standard Arabic] so that it would make room for sarcasm and the absurd. So I asked me if I would work with him on the dialogue of the film." Abdel-Salam was famously meticulous, as El-Deeb points out: with a total vision for his project, he paid attention to the smallest details. While working together, Abdel-Salam and El-Deeb would spend a whole day on one or at most two pages of dialogue -- written in accessible standard Arabic understandable to everyone, whose beauty matched the visual beauty of the film at the same time. El-Deeb never worked in cinema again. Once more, he laughs: "When I published the novel Zahr Al-Laymoun, [the filmmakers] Mohammed Khan and Dawoud Abdel-Sayed both said to me, 'Your works are cinematically tempting but they are no good at the moment. Maybe in another 25 years.'" Yet cinema and journalism were not the only positive experiences in the life of El-Deeb. He also translated into Arabic works by Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Peter Weiss, even Henry Kissinger -- working from English whether or not it was the original. But perhaps his best known contribution in this context is his version of the Tao te ching, a new version of which he is currently working on: "I am enjoying the attempt to draft it one more time. It is very important for this text to be as simple and easy as water. After I learned to use the computer," he adds, "I discovered 75 English translations of this book, in addition to seven Arabic translations. Pushing this book is a wondrous energy. Behind every word in it is a window onto the world. Even its title has more than one meaning: 'the road to virtue', 'the way of the water', for example. It was written by Lao Tzu. He was an advisor to the king but he decided to give up his position and depart the land. On the borders he was stopped by a peasant who refused to let him pass until he gave him the wisdom he acquired after years of working for the authorities. So he wrote 81 poems about how humans can live easily with nature and others and the world around them, without instructions, rewards and punishments as in the heavenly religions." This, then, is what seeks in translating the Tao te ching for the second time. "Creative writing has become very difficult," he says. For seven years now he has been working on a novel titled Sayd Al-Mala'ika (Hunting Angels), in which he attempts a definition of the word "pragmatism", "the basic building block of American civilisation, which is to blame for all the evil in the world". It reduced success to reaching a goal irrespective of values of good, truth and beauty, "so much so that the worst you can be called in America is 'loser'". The novel is the story of a man who has three friends he loses one after the other, because he insists on holding onto values and ideologies that have disintegrated and collapsed. Is this person El-Deeb? "Party me, partly my friends. But my characters have been soaked in a washing basin loaded with everyone I knew in my life, and then brought out again." Suddenly El-Deeb stops: "I'll tell you a story. A few years ago a Chinese critic went to visit my [octogenarian] friend the sculptor Adam Henein and said to him, 'Your sculptures are marvelous.' Henein said, 'But I grew very very tired to achieve this level.' The Chinese man said, 'The hardest part of sculpture are the first 70 years.' I say, 'The hardest part of writing are the first 70 years.'"
