Illustration by Gérard DuBois

My earliest memory of books is not of reading but of being read to. I spent hours listening, watching the face of the person reading aloud to me. Sometimes I rested my head on the chest or the stomach of the reader and could feel the resonance of each vowel and consonant. I encountered many books this way: “One Thousand and One Nights”; the mischievous and brilliant writings of al-Jahiz; the poetry of Ahmed Shawqi and his peers from the period of al-Nahda, the Arabic literary renaissance that took place at the turn of the twentieth century; several books on the lives of the Sahabah; and the works of a long line of historians who tried to explain how and why a war or an epoch had started or ended. It never occurred to me then to question why there were hardly any books for children in the house; none that I can remember, anyway.

It is strange to me, now that I am in my mid-forties, after a lifetime of passionate affairs with books—some, I later realized, undeserving of my youthful fervor, a few that I encountered at the wrong moment, and plenty of others that still light up rooms inside me—in two tremendous languages, Arabic and English, that the book that has affected me most is one I came across when I was ten or eleven years old and about which I know almost nothing. I haven’t read it. And, notwithstanding the many attempts I have made to find it, I have failed to learn so much as its title or the name of its author.

It was one of those afternoons when our house in Cairo was full of exiled Libyan political dissidents, as it often was in those days, and so there was no nap after lunch. Instead, we gathered in a large cluster in the living room and rounds of fruit, tea, and coffee punctuated the lazy conversation. Time seemed endless. The book was on the coffee table, amid all the plates and cups and ashtrays. I remember that it had a plain white cover, with no illustration.

The guest who had brought the book as a gift for my father had clearly forgotten that my father had recommended it to him some time before. And Father, not wanting to disappoint his guest, did not let on that he had already read it. It’s funny to me now that I should remember this social nicety. Perhaps it was the quality of my father’s silence, which, of course, made the guest all the more eager to communicate his appreciation for the book. He picked it up and started reading aloud. I felt the effect of the words reverberate around the room, making even the furniture, it seemed, stir with inner life. My father is not here for me to ask him about that afternoon. So perhaps I am mistaken, perhaps Father did not know the book at all, and his silence had nothing to do with politeness but, rather, was his response to the text.

I don’t remember what the passages read aloud were about, exactly. What I do remember is that they relayed the intimate thoughts of a man, one suffering from an unkind or shameful emotion, such as fear or jealousy or cowardice, feelings that are complicated to admit to, particularly for a man. But the honesty of the writing, its ability to capture such fluid and vague adjustments, was in itself brave and generous, the opposite of the emotion being described. I also remember being filled with wonder at the way words could be so precise and patient, illustrating, as they progressed, what even the boy I was then somehow knew: that there exists at once a tragic and marvellous distance between consciousness and reality.

Given the books that had been read to me, this couldn’t have been the first time that I encountered such writing, but, for some reason, on this occasion I registered its full impact on me. What struck me, too, was the new silence that the passages left in their wake. They created, at least temporarily, among these political men, who seemed to me to function under the solid weight of certainty, a resonant moment of doubt. I felt excited, joyful, and melancholy all at once.

This is perhaps why that mysterious book, according to the logic of my memory, has fathered every other book I have read since. Even the great books that I return to, as one does to a favorite landscape, seem indebted, no matter how fugitively, to that unknown and unknowable book. Every word I have written has been propelled by an enthusiasm rooted in that afternoon so long ago, when I was a boy and didn’t yet know that I needed books at all. Perhaps the book has been more useful to me lost than found. ♦