A moving story of an all-changing encounter, an exile, an absence and a reconciliation, what i know about you, the first novel by Éric Chacour, tells with great sensitivity about a divided clan and a society in upheaval. It tells the story of a young Cairo-born doctor whose preordained life is turned upside down by an encounter that triggers a veritable tsunami in his life.
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In Cairo in the 1980s, Tarek followed the path that had been mapped out for him. A young doctor who doesn’t have much time to ask himself questions, he commutes between his practice at the prestigious practice inherited from his doctor father, his pharmacy and his new life as a married man.
One day he meets Ali, a free young man from a disadvantaged background. Bonds are woven between them, until a love affair and drama that jeopardizes his marriage and career, leaving him with no choice but exile.
Tarek left his heart and roots on the banks of the Nile, choosing Quebec as the land of welcome. In the heart of Montreal’s winters he wanders, he recalls. And meanwhile someone in Cairo is trying to mend the scraps of his story.
The Egypt of his parents
With powerful, luminous and emotionally charged prose, Éric Chacour tells the moving journey of this man, who one day sees his life going into a tailspin.
In an interview, he reveals that he has been carrying this story around with him for a long time. “I wanted to write this story and, above all, to put it in a context that I was discovering a little – 20th-century Egypt through the stories of my parents and their friends.”
Her father was born in Cairo and her mother in Alexandria. “They met in Montreal and I was born in Montreal where I grew up, then went to France quite young to take over my father’s job. I spent a large part of my life in France before returning five years ago.
The Egypt he tells about in the novel is really the Egypt of his parents. “My parents were not necessarily representative of the typical Egyptian because they belonged to the Syro-Lebanese community, that is, the Levantines. People whose origins came from Syria, from Lebanon, who were more Christian, more Western-minded.
It’s a bit of this Egypt that he wanted to tell. “The one that was served to me in all the stories that I could hear in my childhood and that is therefore very different from the Egypt that I find every time I go there. I’ve been to Egypt fifteen times, and the Egypt I describe in the novel hardly exists anymore.
What I know about you is not a historical novel or a social analysis, he adds. “It is above all the story of human situations that are universal. A love we never expected. An uprooting when you leave your country. The absence of a family member.