Autobiographical, the story is Al Kharrats recollections as a teenage boy in 1940's Egypt, recalling the changing society and customs that were soon to die out and the authors rites of passage into adulthood.I don't doubt the preface which tells of the work that went into this translation (Arabic is notoriously difficult and uses different literary devices) but despite this something gets lost in translation. The stories are very fragmented-I often had to recap-over wordy and Al Kharrats poetic musings just seem to futher fog things up.Only 145 pages long, this is a labourious read. The translation probably suits the purist ethos, but surely a translators job is to make the work accessable to its intended readers.As it is, only scraps of its potential beauty come accross.