What Is Past Is Dead by Mohammed Massoud Morsi My rating: 4 of 5 stars   The title What Is Past Is Dead (“El Faat, Maat” or “illei faat maat”) seems to mean that one should bury one’s dead, or one’s past, and get on with living. This is an apparently common Egyptian saying, which was chosen for its irony, I believe. For the main character in this first-person narrative, the past is the only thing still alive, and it is palpable. This book is about hard choices and hopeless lives — lives ground down by poverty, violence, war, and desperate measures taken which end badly. Mostly, though, it is a reflection on trauma and the eviscerating grief incurred when one remains alive in…

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