Ice

In 1973, Shukri, an Egyptian historian, arrives in Moscow for a year of graduate study that does not lead to a degree. He expects to find the heart of the socialist utopia. What he sees instead is the stagnation of Brezhnev-era Soviet life: ethnic tensions between Soviet peoples, pensioners who cannot afford a tin of meat, three drunks sharing a bottle of vodka on the pavement, and a Kirgiz roommate who moves his Russian girlfriend into a four-person dormitory room. He also meets Arab embassy officials who trade on the black market, Russian women who are liberated yet insecure, and fellow Arab students arguing over the October 1973 War, which is happening far away. Shukri records all of it in a flat, factual voice familiar to readers of Sonallah Ibrahim's earlier novel That Smell. The few things that offer him any beauty are classical music records, the Russian words he is picking up, beautiful women and strong Georgian tea. The novel draws on Ibrahim's own time at the All-Russian Institute of Cinematography in Moscow from 1971 to 1973. It examines Arab confusion, Soviet dysfunction and the fragility of leftist revolutionary ideals. It was written in 2010 and first appeared in Arabic in 2011, and the English translation is by Margaret Litvin.