​Éric Chacour’s What I Know About You

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Coach House Books, 2024)

Éric Chacour’s What I Know About You opens in 1961 Cairo, closes in 2001 Boston and, in between, headers identify shifts in time and space; but most important are the shifts in perspective, which reveal “[h]ow to listen for not just a heartbeat but also its reasons for beating.”

Slightly more than half the book is titled “You”, although the narrator’s identity remains slightly unfocused. When readers encounter the “Me” perspective, the desire to assign a specific, distinct character to each of the novel’s parts intensifies. Characters and readers, together, long for resolution as unanswered questions percolate beneath the novel’s framework.

Meanwhile, readers locate stability elsewhere. In Cairo, for instance—with its Levantine community described as “still very much a city within a city.” This is the kind of community that would “knit tight in times of joy and grief, would keenly feel the death of one of its eminent physicians.”

There, that eminent physician is the father of “You”—his death significant for his patients and his children. A fractured father-son relationship is at the heart of this narrative, even when the story develops in other directions. As the focus shifts from the son’s study of medicine into his role of community practitioner, readers recognize the complexity that emerges alongside other, new roles and relationships—but absence is everything.

Concrete details provide a kind of rootedness: “Cumin, dust (already), coriander, benzine, donkeys and their excrement, sand, dust (again), sweat, cardamom, burning fuel, fried onions, burnt garbage, hot beans, jasmine, dust (ever and always), asphalt growing soft under the unchecked reign of the sun.”

They are what remains when perspectives shift, when the elements of “Cairo’s heady olfactory aura go unnoticed until the day we leave the city and return to encounter them afresh.” They are constant when lies are revealed. But there are new aspects of life to encounter even within the city.

When the son’s medical practice expands to include regular work in a poor neighbourhood, this fundamentally alters both his perspective and Chacour’s scope. The clinic work broadens the novel’s landscape literally and figuratively, as issues of class and privilege emerge.

Readers are intended to notice extremes as the story unfolds: “The unrelenting racket of Cairo could be heard in the distance. Here was silence, there was noise; there life, here afterlife.” Readers learn that inhabiting one state of being need not obliterate the opposite state—it might highlight it, even enhance it.

Chacour’s style is consistently spare but increasingly illustrative in this translation by Pablo Strauss. Central observations, like how someone can care deeply for their child but also conceal “a truth known to everyone else”, are experienced before they are expressed.

Families can love and they can wound, and being apart from one’s family—in another neighbourhood, in another country—can recast events: leaving can afford the opportunity to return and revision the events of the past, “encounter them afresh”, like familiar scents.

Readers remain adjacent to the events, keen to unravel uncertainty but, ultimately, powerless: “How old were you when you finally figured out that every vehicle had white headlights and red taillights, so the colour indicated only the direction of traffic from your vantage point?” Readers are aware of the mechanisms at work, aware of the telling-ness that simultaneously reveals and obscures: “What makes our minds latch onto details like these?”

Once the setting moves to Montreal, “You” observes that Quebecers inhabit both a different space and a different time, and notices they “all carried detailed memories of the last five or six winters and could recall the finer points of each.” It’s as though all these winters reside in the same neighbourhood of memory: “There was the one when the snow didn’t finally stick until Christmas, the one when the road salt was no match for the freezing rain, the one when, in their expert opinion, the big wet snowflakes were still falling in April.” But—not for “You.” He has other memories of “the one.” Contradictory memories that are blurred and distinct, of a life in Cairo that is ever-present and faraway. Memories are understood differently when the colours of the lights change.

This extended act of assembly bears some similarity to Noor Naga’s fractured narrative If an Egyptian Could Talk, which is also divided into parts in dialogue with one another. Questions around homelands and hyphenated senses of belonging circle, as they do in Kaie Kellough’s stories in Dominoes at the Crossroads, against a backdrop of below-street-level existence. Damage caused at the intersection of familial religious values and individual bodily autonomy is similarly key in Farzana Doctor’s Seven. And layers of loss and identity and desire accumulate recognizably in Dmitri Nasrallah’s Hotline—also set in Montreal, with connections to family in Lebanon seeming to steadily erode.

In What I Know About You, “You” and “Me” and readers are part of an effort to “piece together your life”, to “keep the parts that ring true” against a backdrop of what-might-have-beens. But what of that initial promise, that readers will hear the reasons for which a heart beats?

It’s an ordinary answer: the heart “went on beating only to see what the coming hours held in store,” just as readers carry on reading Chacour only to see what the coming pages hold.
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What is extraordinary? Chacour’s deft balancing and bridging: between ambiguity and clarity, between understanding and revisioning. In her memoir Fault Lines, the writer Meena Alexander—who was born in India, and raised in India and Sudan before immigrating to the United States in the later ‘70s—observes that the “literal is always discrepant, a sharp otherness to what the imagination conjures up as it blends time, emotions, heartbeats.” Chacour’s What I Know About You issues the powerful reminder that even what we cannot see—and what we can barely imagine—can either stop or start a heart beating.

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.