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Reviews of I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster:
Dan Cryer, Newsday, January 29, 1996:
As [Gamal and Ib] wander from coffeehouse to marketplace to prison (to interview a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an anti-government group), Gamal is forever telling stories while Ib transcribes them. Some are autobiographical, others allegorical. All of them suggest we are defined (inspired or imprisoned) by the stories we tell ourselves. Something is always gained in the translation, as well as lost; so notes Kiteley's prisoner, paraphrasing Salman Rushdie. This much is true for Ib, busy translating himself across national and cultural boundaries. Lost for the time being, he's surely hard on the trail of finding himself. Filled with quirky juxtapositions and odd changes of key, this is a novel that indeed sings—quietly, if assuredly.
Glen Weldon, The Iowa Review, 1997:
Despite its slim size, Brian Kiteley's second novel finds time to let its characters sit in cafes and think—nay, muse—about foreignness, about mistranslation and misapprehension, about writing and storytelling and subjective truth, for God's sake. It is Ramadan in Cairo; the faithful fast all day, feast all night, and shamble distractedly through the wreckage of their sleep cycles. Kiteley captures this place and time in all its logy chaos, its pervasive and fitful fuzziness of mind, with prose that is rigorously lucid, wondrously clear. He creates a Cairo at once vividly available to the senses and steadfastly elusive to reason.
Judith Caesar, North Dakota Review, 1997:
At first I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing seems like an exotic, surreal, picaresque account of an American's night in a foreign city. The plot pulls the reader forward; we want to find out who these people are and how to place them. We want to know why they are acting as they are, and how they know what they know. But what follows is a novel of ideas that explores the multiplicity of identity and reality. The setting is not merely exotic because the novel concerns the the difficulties of understanding other cultures, other values, other realities. The events that seem mysterious and magical have a plausible explanation within these other realities. And yet Kiteley also explores the limits of human understanding, specifically one's ability to understand what is outside one's own direct experience. In its sheer density and complexity, I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing resembles that classic post-modern novella, The Crying of Lot 49. And yet Kiteley's themes are all his own.
Pablo Conrad, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, March 1996:
Kiteley is not writing about enchantment. For all its frustrating disjunctions and apparent illogic, this novel is strangely concrete. His Cairo blossoms, not least in the heightened perceptions of food as the day's fast draws to a close: "two boys fly by shouldering hot metal pans of bubbling eggplant casserole... The smell that lingers in their path briefly blurs the scenery." Gamal engages [the narrator] Ib in a game of story-telling—joined later by others—narrating incidents and dreams that Ib copies down afterward. The longest is a quietly frightening account of the accidental poisoning of Gamal's four-year-old daughter Annahid, and shares the novel's title. Such intimacies draw Ib further and further into Gamal's circle; and at the novel's close they all gather outside the city, exhausted, just before sunrise. The gentleness and elements of love in their stories echoes Kiteley's evident concern with small details of relationships and personal interaction. However disconcerting at first, the effect is finally compelling. In the acknowledgments to this slim volume, the author notes he "wrote this book in part on postcards to dozens of friends and family members," adding, "I appreciated everyone's forbearance." This strange, rewarding novel is steeped in that sort of intimacy.
Publishers Weekly, November 27, 1995:
Again demonstrating the facility he showed in his well-received debut, Still Life With Insects, Kiteley here offers another entrancing miniature, which pairs two dissimilar outcasts in contemporary Cairo. Ib, an expatriate American historian and translator finds his easygoing lifestyle disrupted by Gamal-Leon, an Armenian theater critic and drama teacher raised in Cairo. Gamal spies on the rattled American, follows him everywhere, and plays practical jokes intended to challenge Ib's preconceptions of Egyptians and the Middle East... Kiteley's motley circle of expatriates lends a cosmopolitan flavor to an exquisitely wrought mosaic.
From Library Journal:
A combination of a Kafka novel, Robert Altman movie, and psychedelic record album, this strange, dreamy little novel from the author of the well-regarded Still Life with Insects (Graywolf, 1993) takes on themes of inversion, foreignness, and communications breakdown. Set in Cairo during Ramadan (the Muslim festival during which participants fast during the day and feast by night), the tale unfolds as an American known only as Ib is joined more or less purposefully by an Armenian named Gamal-Leon (who eventually deconstructs his own name: a "quick-change artist, a slippery tongued mimic who does not know his own voice or face") to visit playhouses, executive office parties, a prison. All these activities are overcast with a significance not totally apparent. Kiteley offers an elusive, hypnotic, even hallucinogenic novel about being as well as the mysteries of being. Highly recommended for literature collections serving sophisticated readers (Robert E. Brown).
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1995:
Things begin as Ib (a Danish derivation, one learns, of Jacob) returns to Cairo from Massachusetts and his stepfather's funeral. It's the last week of Ramadan, when daylong fasting produces giddiness and a touch of the surreal—perfectly suited to Kiteley's narrative, where things often feel half true, are mentioned but then forgotten, or start and seem never to conclude. Ib gets latched onto at the outset by a hyperenergetic actor and writer named Gamal, of Armenian background, who remains Ib's companion from first page to last—rushing through unknown streets, from one cafe to another, to a theater for rehearsal, to visit Gamal's parents-in-law, to a prison for an ''interview'' with a jailed fundamentalist, and finally to a country house on desert's edge, where, at dawn, the story ends, with symbols, incidents, and words fluttering down slowly in a pitch-perfect, exquisite close. For some, patience may be needed in getting to that end through the interwoven uncertainties of this poetic and oriental tale, but to be enjoyed along the way are the amusing Tory, Charles Mattimore; the beautiful Safeyya and Ruqayyah, wife and sister-in-law of Gamal; Annahid, Gamal's four-year-old daughter, who eats a poison plant but lives to tell the tale; and, not least, the perfectly toned non-stories told throughout (as per title), mainly by Gamal, and written down by Ib, an activity appropriate to '''the holiest night of Ramadan, when the archangel Gabriel first whispered the word of God to Mohammad.''' Not as surefooted at the start as toward the end: but, in all, a rare and lovely treasure of feelings and words from a writer who's very far from the ordinary indeed.
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