A new Egyptian

Remote, if not necessarily alien, and rarely compelling, if objectively interesting. Hegab unconvincingly writes of himself in the abstract as though to mask impassioned introspection with case-historical diffidence; more than half of the chronicle is cast in the third person, and Sayed, mostly called ""the boy,"" is precocious in retrospect. ""Was it his early reading that made him lose the spontaneity of childhood?"" he reflects psychoanalytically, ostensibly still a child; there is embarrassment, even apology, between the dense, stilted lines, and it all sometimes seems to be autotherapeutic. The gamut of Hegab's growing pains is nevertheless ineluctably universal, although the shape of his conflicts is endemic to his heritage and particular to his personal environment: religious orthodoxy, superstition, the political shadow lengthened by his grandfather's commitment to British evacuation; organized politics as a forum for his own self-assertion -- the Moslem Brotherhood and also the Young Egypt socialists invited him to read his poetry from their platforms.