The End of Sleep

By Rowan Somerville

Book Overview

In this exuberant, transformative tale of modern-day Cairo, a drunken Irish journalist named Fin seeks a story. His friend Farouk, mercurial teller of tales, has tantalized him with news of the wily Skinhead Said, who may or may not have discovered a cache of priceless antiquities. But the truth remains elusive--not until they both travel to proverbial hell and back, courtesy of a thuggish kebab-shop tycoon and his brutal retinue. Once Fin finds a way to save his friend's life, and baba ghanoush is properly made, and other necessities of life are observed, then stories may be spun and secrets reluctantly revealed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393346099
• ISBN13: 9780393346091
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"Fin is flying, flying through the night"

Cairo's outer limit, Mara village around the Pyramids, and its teeming inner density both find Fin, an ex-pat Irish journalist, getting not much shut-eye during his adventures. Told in a rather appealingly old-fashioned register, yet one that pulses with contemporary menace and even hints of American geopolitical relevance, this novel by a London-born, Edinburgh-educated, Irish resident shows lots of promise. The scenes in which Fin must try to rescue his friend Farouk from the clutches of Omar, the evil dwarf kebab king, blend terror and humor with vim and vigor. The omniscient voice controls Fin's take on the manic events that envelop him after he seeks a resolution to the shaggy-dog tale Farouk begins about a neighboring rogue, Skinhead Said. Fin's so eager to find out more he nearly dies in the attempt. His inability to go with the flow of the Middle East, his Western impatience, serves to entangle him within events even at the novel's closing we don't fully comprehend. Early on, Fin wants a different narrative for himself: "His life should be a pacy linear narrative, with obvious and satisfying climaxes." (28) Yet, "Farouk was not one to be led along linear narrative lines, or led at all. He would reveal details randomly, the way fragments of antiquity might appear over time, scattered over a vast area, tantalising generations of archaeologists. Fin was intrigued by the story, attracted to it in a way he did not understand, any more than a jackdaw understands the call of shining metal or a moth the fire." (30) Later on, after an assault by Omar's thug, Fin realizes that "his life was still without direction, without even the story he had decided would save him." (86) Part of this can be his frustration at not knowing Skinhead Said's story, but part can be attributed to his own feckless tendencies, which spur him towards acts of kindness towards a mangy cur, a girl in a hospital ward, or a rescuer in the form of a garbage collector. They also lure him into danger, and threaten his companion's life. Much of this novel's appeal lies in the setting. I found the passages about the desert less affecting than those of the city, but both share, as Somerville describes well, the same foundation. Is it a half-built house or a antiquarian ruin? Walking around Cairo, Fin reflects: "It was the chorus of deterioration. Rubble everywhere, modern dwellings leaning upon ancient monuments like card houses, tower blocks riddled with cracks or collapsed, listing minarets and mosque walls severed by vertical canyons of subsidence. Age stood whispering impermanence, calling to Fin that, flawed as he was, insignificant as he was, history was woven out of tiny threads of life like him but that he too would decay and crumble." (98-99) This story mixes philosophical leisure with breakneck flight. The smells of the fetid Nile mingle with skewered lamb spiced perfectly. Life and death collide suddenly. There's a shock of recognition of mortality. Fin in one splend

"This great city, dirty and incessant, but also good-natured and tolerant."

A washed up and drunken Irish ex-journalist and once a senior reporter for the Cairo Herald, Fin has been living a hardscrabble life in Cairo, his only recent claim to journalistic fame an article on the best kebab shops in the heart of the city. Ironically though it is the sense of chaos and the harsh grit of this vast metropolis that makes Fin feel so at home and prepares him for may of the challenges he faces throughout this story. Fin has a bit of an ego and fancies himself as a rebel, granting himself martial skill or at the very least the heroic stoicism of a journalist defending the truth. Yet when we first meet him, he's hung-over, recovering from a bar room brawl with an American who holds some kind of dubious office at the US embassy. Battling to overcome the urge for self-pity, it is a phone call to his Egyptian friend Farouk who ultimately shows Fin that Cairo is indeed an exotic plate of possibilities with deliverance perhaps waiting just around the corner and having lost his job, he's only too willing to cast about for something else or somebody onto whom he could project his dreams. When Waled, Farouk's friendly taxi driver arrives at Fin's door, providing an invitation to partake in mint tea at his home in Mena Village - a chaotic row of houses and stables that circles the Giza Sphinx and the pyramid complex - Fin jumps at the chance, especially when Farouk offers to tell him a story which piques Fin journalistic nature. As they sit at a sidewalk café sipping mint tea, this exotic friend tells Fin of his friend Skinhead Said and how his cellar once collapsed. But even as a black cloud suddenly passes across the sun shading the day, Fin remains desperate to hear what Skinhead had actually found: "it didn't seem much to ask and it didn't have to be a burning bush of truth, just an impression of wise direction." Even when people start looking at Farouk's shiny new car in a bad way, Fin still wants his story. But when Omar Balesh, local a thug, attacks suddenly attacks Farouk, Fin is frozen in a deluge of outrage and terror. Both men are abducted and assaulted by an unlikely and possibly insane person with a cavalier attitude to violence and a seething hatred of Farouk, accusing him of running over his baby daughter and breaking her leg. A fast-paced and complex morality tale, author Rowan Somverville's intense and poetic writing style is full of kaleidoscopic images of Cairo and its surrounds. On the surface this is a city of filth of chaos and ruins, but in fact, teems with people, ebullient, enveloped in the past, yet built on the fragments and wreckage, and on the debris of other worlds, other religions and other dreams where "everything is either half built or half demolished." When Fin eventually finds himself thrown into the Nile, surfacing wet and filthy, slipping around in debris and waste, his clothes suffused in a Nile slime of decomposed rubbish and polluted mud, he seems so far away from the teeming entropy of Ca

Cairo as a hallucinatory experience

Fin is an Irish journalist living in Cairo who has lost his moorings in life, along with his job. Within a day's time, he is beaten up a few times and resumes his friendship with Farouk, a resident in a historic tourist-trap village near the pyramids. Farouk, it seems, may have the secrets that Fin wants to hear in order to find new meaning in life. Fin will do anything, including being thrown in the polluted Nile, to hear the story of Skinhead Saïd. Rowan Somerville has his finger on the pulse of Cairo, and its perpetual energy. His descriptions of the city are spot on. Even if his transliteration and usage of Arabic words is not perfect, it brings color to his portrayal of a expat's day in the city. This book is some crazy "halwasa," to add another colloquialism to the description.