{"id":118617,"date":"2026-09-06T10:24:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T10:24:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/118617\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T10:24:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T10:24:47","slug":"hisham-matar-on-the-outsider-in-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/118617\/","title":{"rendered":"Hisham Matar on the Outsider in London"},"content":{"rendered":"

The narrator of \u201cNew Shoes<\/a>\u201d is a man who left his home in Cairo when he was eighteen, and, after four years living and working in various places in Italy and France, has been in London for eight years, where he now owns a string of small newsagent shops. Why did you choose London as the place he would settle?<\/p>\n

I was interested in a person who is living in two places at once: one real, and the other desired. I have lived in London for the majority of my life, a city that is and has long been, of course, a place of refuge for people like my protagonist, who, no matter how long they remain here, can feel themselves a \u201cguest,\u201d as Virginia Woolf calls Joseph Conrad in her obituary of the author (he had, by that stage, spent forty-six years in Britain). All this to say that London famously remains at once hospitable to the outsider and adept at keeping him or her on the surface.<\/p>\n

The narrator and his older brother initially thought that they would leave Cairo together, but the family could afford to pay for only one ticket. Would his life have been different had his brother been the one to leave and he to stay?<\/p>\n

I believe so. Many who are forced by circumstance to make a life in a new country\u2014supposedly the lucky ones\u2014feel at once fortunate to seek safety or opportunities elsewhere and cruelly excluded, not only from the people and places they love but also from the selves they might have become had they remained home.<\/p>\n

He and his brother talk often on the phone, but the tenor of their conversation has changed since his brother told the narrator that friends in Cairo believe they\u2019ve seen him in the city. How disconcerting are these reports for the narrator?<\/p>\n

Deeply. It is as if they awaken in him an inner dissonance. The two possibilities or versions of himself resonate against each other. The secret heart of the story is this man\u2019s attempt to endure these contradictions or the inner noise of such a life.<\/p>\n

The double, or doppelg\u00e4nger, is a recurring conceit in myth and literature. Were you inspired by any particular examples?<\/p>\n

Absolutely. Several works have accompanied me as I thought about my story. Ranging from the more obvious examples, such as \u201cThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Other<\/a>,\u201d by Jorge Luis Borges, and Joseph Conrad\u2019s \u201cThe Secret Sharer<\/a>,\u201d which I find myself rereading nearly every year, to less obvious examples, such as \u201cTristia<\/a>,\u201d that great exilic work by Ovid, V. S. Naipaul\u2019s \u201cThe Enigma of Arrival<\/a>,\u201d and what you might call the double lives of certain works of art\u2014such as Beethoven\u2019s \u201cKreutzer\u201d Sonata, which stirred Leo Tolstoy to write a novella by the same name, only for the two works to then inspire a harrowing string quartet by Leo\u0161 Jan\u00e1\u010dek, and for the three works to somehow find their way into a novel<\/a> by Margriet de Moor. Four \u201cKreutzer\u201d sonatas started by Beethoven and stretching some two hundred years. And some paintings have been on my mind, too, such as Caravaggio\u2019s \u201cNarcissus,\u201d Poussin\u2019s \u201cEcho and Narcissus,\u201d and Titian\u2019s \u201cVenus with a Mirror.\u201d But, even more specifically, the story is in dialogue with the British artist David Austen\u2019s minimal and piercing drawings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The narrator of \u201cNew Shoes\u201d is a man who left his home in Cairo when he was eighteen,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[48315,36308,28844,2447,29734,284,27],"class_list":["post-118617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-brothers","tag-cairo","tag-egypt","tag-family","tag-immigrants","tag-immigration","tag-london"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117223615481271175","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}