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Reviews of I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, published in 1996:

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....

Kiteley depicts the shadowy streets, the genial diffidence of the people, but what sets his prose apart is the purchase it affords the reader on Ib’s perceptions.  In spare, economic language, he establishes Ib’s uneasy mixture of familiarity and bemusement, his affection for—and frustration with—his world.  We come to intuit the sense of hesitant isolation afflicting his life; he is at once home and not-home.  Despite his years as a resident, he is forever a foreigner in a city of inscrutable mystery.

The author chooses to demonstrate this in a way which seems, at first, rather counter-intuitive—by doling out the expository stuff in an almost miserly fashion.  We see lb only at a great distance, through the scrim of his confusion and his (quite considerable) memory lapses; even at novel’s end, we know very little about him, and what little we have come to know derives almost exclusively from his dealings with others.  So, for example, when he meets Gamal, an Egyptian actor who teases him by playing various practical jokes over the course of the night, assuming different disguises and spreading rumors about Ib’s past, the reader gets the un mistakable impression that lb is also creating a character—himself—with every word he speaks.  The fact that this doesn’t matter, that we implicitly give ourselves over to lb long before we know very much about him, is testament to Kiteley’s deft, humane characterization...

The triumph of this novel [is] that these characters manage to brush up against some pretty large abstractions like foreignness and narrative truth without compromising their roundedness and vitality.  This is not, luckily for the reader, merely a novel of ideas.  Kiteley’s people are simply too well wrought, too expertly achieved, to let themselves sit passively by, mouthing stories and theories and thought experiments.  And that’s important, because Ib’s Cairo is, after all, a dire, intriguing place.  Trusted guides vanish, only to reappear with different names.  Strangers accuse each other of dark crimes.  Personal histories come into doubt, truth is mutable.  Thankfully, I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing has at its wise heart a cadre of strong, believable characters who remain compelling against even so exotic, and wondrous, a setting.

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.  Their friendship is a duet of mutual cultural misunderstandings played out during the last weeks of Ramadan, the month-long Muslim holy period of daytime fasting and nighttime feasting.  Kiteley compellingly evokes the tensions of contemporary Egypt: its jarring juxtapositions of antiquity and Western pop culture; the million homeless refugees who camp out on the streets and in the parks of Cairo; the ubiquitous police informers who record ordinary citizens' conversations.  His polyglot characters are complex.  Ib is anguished at the recent death of his Dutch stepfather, whom Ib's mother divorced so that she could remarry Ib's father. Ib feuds with his sisters, who are jealous because he received his stepfather's entire inheritance.  (Ib is a Danish name akin to Jacob, the biblical twin who persuaded his brother, Esau, to part with his inheritance.)  Meanwhile, Gamal, an Armenian Christian, wrestles with his unhappy marriage to a Coptic Egyptian whose sister, a convert to Islam, married a Muslim terrorist now in jail.  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 hyper-energetic 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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