with Mastura, she turns her face to the wall'; outside the broken door, the ground floor neighbours fight and insult each other. The style has a harsh matter-of-factness, endowing -- for example -- an account of a gang rape at the local police station with the banality of an everyday event: 'Mastura came back at midday, depressed and exhausted. I tried to make her tell me what had happened, but she said nothing. I left her to sleep, and when she woke up I took her in my arms. She started to cry, and told me . . .' There is no attempt to dramatize oppressive relations, as if some other outcome could be possible; simply a recording -- 'depressed and exhausted' -- of their intolerable existence. The use of multiple narrators, repetition -- key sentences recurring -- and a circular structure establishes a narrative hall of mirrors. The same action will be perceived in three different timeframes: anticipated by a narrator, imagined by another character, or as related at the moment of its occurrence. The effect is to create a powerful sense of inescapability. Predictably enough, The Hawker came under attack from one of Al-Ahram 's leading columnists, Fahmi Huwaydi, who denounced it as 'satanic, nihilist writing which ruins everything that is religious -- be it Islamic or Christian -- and all moral values', and called for the novel to be banned. The publisher, the General Egyptian Book Organization, withdrew the book, and Ali fled to France. [8] His