Review: What I Know About You by Éric Chacour

When she was pregnant with him, British novelist Patrick Gale’s mother happened to “tidy out” her husband’s desk. She found “a sheaf of letters” and one of them, addressed to Gale’s father, began with three words that broke not only her heart but also severed her marital life: “My darling Michael”.

This letter was written by a man. To label Michael gay would be to identify an affection that even he couldn’t name, but to English society at large and to Gale’s mother, it was definitely an affliction. The damage its knowledge brought was irreversible.

Most family secrets find a way to crawl out of their closets. Their agents and motivations may differ, but the effect they produce remains the same. One such secret, an affection two men were able to nurture in 20th century Cairo no longer remained one and shook the foundation of a privileged household, resulting in intergenerational silencing and the transmittance of trauma as inheritance.

The two men in question are Tarek and Ali in Canadian writer Éric Chacour’s spellbinding debut novel What I Know About You, which is on this year’s Giller Prize longlist. Masterfully translated from the original French by Pablo Strauss, this book begins in 1961 in Cairo. The narrator starts telling readers about a 12-year-old who hasn’t “yet learned to be wary of simple questions”. When his father asks him what he wants to become when he grows old, like a good but confused son, he says “Doctor, I guess …” after some thought. The answer has its desired effect on his father because, in a family like Tarek’s, disagreements were rarely encouraged as respectability and honour occupied an unshakeable place.

The political setting of the novel is clear. Egypt is at the cusp of transformation under President Nasser Hussein, and Tarek was undoubtedly going to be his land’s “leading physician”.

Divided into three parts — You, Me, and Us, the book shifts between time and place, as conflicts are explored and the revelation of secrets foreground and establish relationships. Chacour’s sharp sentences, pregnant with meaning, help readers traverse the life stories of this novel’s highly relatable characters.

When Tarek’s father dies, the narrator notes: “Fathers are born to disappear; your own died in his sleep one night. In his bed, like Nasser, just when everyone was beginning to think he was immortal.” On the surface, these two sentences blandly cover two events, but their meanings burst upon those attentive to the storytelling. They not only pit the personal against the political, they also allude to the secret that must be revealed. Subtle hints, which also reek of a complaint or a love that hasn’t been expressed in a long while, give it away. For example, “It was hard, under the circumstances, to imagine telling your mother you were heading out for a stroll. None of us is ever wholly what society expects us to be.” It’s here that this fact is cemented: the protagonist won’t be meeting any familial expectations, and disappointments must follow. What is to be witnessed is the scale of devastation to come.

With his charm, Tarek exercises an incontestable influence over his patients, who not only share with him their symptoms but also often drop by to chat. Coming from a family of refugees, who had fled the Damascus massacres of 1860, Tarek is yet another messiah for his family after his father’s demise. While everyone was leaving “for France or Lebanon, Australia or Canada”, he didn’t “abandon a country that had turned its back” on him. It was a good life. Work was like work, and his family was dealing with loss as anyone does: by revelling in the past. Tarek had his sister Nesrine to share that past with, but three more people had a prominent presence in it — his mother, their family servant Fatheya, and his wife, Mira. He will disappoint all of them.

With its controlled narration and well-chiselled characters, this is a confident debut. At times, the reader too is overwhelmed with grief. However, just as it appears that the novel is limiting itself to a setting, its strongest character, Ali, appears. He slips in as desire does, taking individuals off-guard and demanding to be paid heed to. Of course, it begins with a gaze, as all queer stories do.

Ali requests Tarek to see his mother, who suffers from Huntington’s disease. It could have been a one-day affair, but Tarek happens to visit their place, located near the city dump, every day. “While the precarious life here on display was no surprise, you had never before experienced it so intimately,” the narrator submits, centralising the class conflict that will rule this story.

Tarek shouldn’t be associating with Ali, a male prostitute, but the latter’s pull is gravitational; the freedom he signals is aspirational. Tarek is married, but he doesn’t pay enough attention to Mira, who submits to a melancholic and routine married life. She partly defies her circumstances by travelling only to find, on her return, that her husband is deeply in love with a much younger man. But Ali disappears and the ground beneath Tarek’s feet shifts. Now is the time for him to go looking for Ali and for himself too. He leaves Cairo and begins working afresh in Montreal. Then, one day, a journalist asks to interview him.

Taut, thrilling, and exquisite, this family saga — coupled with the political events that occur in Egypt over five decades — is a story that never gets old. Inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it is centred on a man’s quest to reunite with his lover who freed him and signalled life’s possibilities. Like photons that had “interacted at any point” with one another “in their existence”, they are to “stay connected forever”.

At its crux, though, What I Know About You is about the voice that discovers itself after aeons of being silenced. At the end, the reader is filled with hope, deep feeling for the characters and an absence of judgment. It is probably what Gale felt too while writing Man in an Orange Shirt (2017) for the screen, giving “voice to [his] father’s stifled passion and pain” alongside exhibiting an understanding of “the impossible burden [his] poor mother took on in marrying [his father]”. It is that binary of pride and shame that Chacour has also deftly employed in this worthy debut.

Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.