The Rainbow Dance

Violet, blue, indigo, green, yellow, orange, red... Thus unfold the colors of the spectrum when refracted through a prism in the laboratory-just as they do across the pages of this remarkable novel, the latest creation of the physician-writer Dr. Sherif Meleka in his North American exile.

The rainbow serves as the novel's central poetic metaphor, binding these diverse lives into a single orbit. At the heart of the narrative is a masquerade ball (consider Bakhtin's insights on the carnival), held on American Independence Day, an event reminiscent of the party thrown by Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf's novel. Here, the characters don historical and literary masks that reflect their inner psyches and intellectual inclinations: the narrator, Murad Sabry, transforms into Hercule Poirot; Salwa becomes Marie Antoinette; Emile, Napoleon; Laila, Shajarat al-Durr; Labib, a pirate; Tarek, Elton John; and Maya, Cleopatra.

Within these pages, the reader will find searing examinations of jealousy, repressed love, same-sex desire, incest, child predation, and religious fundamentalism. The characters are rendered with striking depth and precision-note, in particular, the author's masterful portrayal of the musician Labib Sorour. The novel is further enriched by intertextual echoes of Kawabata, the Bible, the Quran, the Complaints of the Eloquent Peasant, and the Papyrus of Ani. Its title is drawn from a painting by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, a close friend of the Symbolist poet Mallarm?.

The novel unfolds through multiple perspectives, each section titled after one of the seven colors of the spectrum, culminating in the final, blood-tinged chapter-Red-interwoven with chilling excerpts from the Book of Revelation. This technique, familiar from works such as Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Fathi Ghanem's the Man Who Lost His Shadow, Naguib Mahfouz's Miramar, Suleiman Fayyad's Voices, and Mohamed Gibril's Confessions of Secrets, takes on new dimensions here, shedding light on the cultural conflicts and convergences among the characters. The novel's structure evokes a crossroads, where diverging paths lead its protagonists in opposite directions.