El futuro no es nuestro

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^^ H of art. In fact, virtually all the novel's main characters are involved with art in some way?producing it, commis sioning it, or selling it?and always critiquing it. There are even arts of the metaphorical variety, such as the art of love and that of the con man. In this novel, the omnipresent Carey theme of art's possibilities is inflected by being sited in an incipi ent democracy, America in the early nineteenth century, confronting rum blings about slavery, President Jack son's calculated deracination of the Indians, rampant materialism, and the beginnings of assault on the envi ronment. As on almost all other sub jects, Parrot and Olivier have oppos ing views about the young nation's capacity for art. While Parrot sees art as an engine of democracy, and incidentally of profit, Olivier despairs that art "produced to suit the tastes of the market," the only art possible without a static hierarchy, will always be negligible. Carey himself seems not to have decided, suggesting an ambivalence which, like that of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America Carey cites as the germ of the novel, extends to other aspects of the land where the author has lived for the past twenty years. Peter Carey is of course best known for writing about Australia. But here, Australia makes only a passing appearance as an acciden tal interlude in the life of young Parrot. Perhaps Carey is finding it necessary to come to terms with the country and culture that seems to have claimed him. In any case, we readers are much the richer for his explorations. Carolyn Bliss University of Utah Mohamed El-Bisatie. Drumbeat. Peter Daniel, tr. Cairo. American University in Cairo Press. 2010.123 pages. $18.95. isbn 978-977-416-339-5 Mohamed El-Bisatie is a novelist associated with powerful, poetic prose and an obsession with village life in Egypt. His Houses Behind the Trees (1993) is a classic of Egyptian literature, and his Clamor of the Lake (1994) was selected by the Arab Writ ers7 Union as one of the one hundred best books in Arabic. El-Bisatie?who has, in recent years, been accused of repetition in his themes and characters?ven tured to do something very differ ent with Drumbeat. The novel has a distinctly nonvillage premise: our Egyptian narrator is working as a laborer in a wealthy Persian Gulf nation when natives of the unnamed emirate are ordered to leave their country. Their footballers have quali fied for the World Cup, and all citi zens must travel to Paris to cheer on the team. The Egyptian narrator's out look is narrow and flat, a seeming result of the years of restrictions and privations abroad. Nevertheless, at the story's beginning, he has one great leap of imagination. He sup poses that all these laborers?many of whom work under slavelike con ditions?might, in their masters' absence, seize power. He recalls a story from a neighboring emirate: a fifty-year-old prince despaired of ever ruling. Then, when his father was abroad for medical treatment, the prince seized control and went on television, begging his father not to return. The narrator says: I had the opportunity to watch this speech. His chubby face quivered and a tear formed in his right eye and glistened in the light of the cameras. Just as it was on the verge of falling, he wiped it away with a finger. The visual energy in that tear? and the possibility of poor laborers seizing power?is one of Drumbeat's highest points. But the novel doesn't seem to know where to go from here. The master-less laborers march in slightly surrealist parades, but surre alism never conquers the book's real istic core. Throughout, the laborers wrestle with a loss of sexual desire. This struggle with impotence could be interesting territory, an echo of Gamal al-Ghitani's The Zafarani Files (1976), wherein the men of Zafarani Alley see sexual impotence grow and spread to other areas of their lives. But here, sexual impotence never takes on larger metaphoric fore?;;. When we hear the titular

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