What happens when a writer, to his utter horror, begins to suspect that one of his most idiosyncratic characters from a recent novel resembles a real person he has never met? Top Sudanese author Amir Tag Elsir delves into this bizarre mystery in his compelling psychological thriller Telepathy.
Fortunately for literature lovers in Doha, Elsir himself will be present at the Qatar National Library’s (QNL) book discussion of Telepathy on Wednesday from 7pm to 8.30pm at TV Lounge, HBKU Student Center, Education City. The book discussion will be conducted in English.
Elsir, who is regarded as a giant among Arab fiction writers, has published 16 books, including novels, biographies and poetry. 
In his latest book Telepathy, the author grapples to make sense of a seemingly unusual situation. As the author condemned this character to an untimely death in the novel, he asks himself a question – should he save this character from death?
“Set in both sides of Khartoum the bustling capital city and the neglected, poverty–stricken underbelly, this novel takes the readers to the worlds of insane asylums, and the suspicious relationship between imagination and reality,” says a note by the QNL. 
In Telepathy, the writer learns that the novel he had recently published is based on a real person who happens to live in the same city of Khartoum. The novel titled Hunger’s Hopes turns out 'to be a biography, a literary work based on real-life events, which he presumes were telepathically conveyed by Nishan Hamza Nishan – who turns out to be the name of his novel's protagonist.
“Since his protagonist in Hunger’s Hopes has cancer with ‘no hope of a cure’, the narrator feels responsible in equipping the real-life Nishan – schizophrenic, poor and loveless – with ‘a better destiny than the one (the narrator) had granted him in the text.’ The novel takes up the line of inquiry: to what extent are authors accountable for their body of work after it is published? Are they responsible for its social impact? 
The narrator spends the rest of the novel trying both to evade and save his real-life protagonist and discover the details of how this story was conveyed to him by a man he had never met,” explains Nahrain al-Mousawi in her review of the book for Qantara.de. 
In fact, the narrator is torn between focusing on his writing, caring for Nishan and pursuing the thread of a myriad of strange events that blur the boundaries between reality and imagination, al-Mousawi points out. “The two men – the author and the authored – come from different worlds: the narrator is highly educated, safely lodged in the middle class and comfortably ensconced in a fashionable part of town. Nishan learned how to read and write at an advanced age and lives in a marginal, poor section of the city. Yet slum-dwelling Nishan, with brown teeth and traditional djellaba and turban, appears to be attuned to the self-consciously cultured narrator’s stream of consciousness.”
Born in 1960, Elsir studied medicine in Egypt and at the British Royal College of Medicine. Some of his most important works are: The Dowry of Cries (2004), The Crawling of the Ants (2008), The Copt’s Worries (2009) and The French Perfume (2009). His novel The Grub Hunter (2010) was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2011 and translated into English and Italian. 
The Grub Hunter is a satirical novel which tells the story of a former secret service agent who tries to write a novel and finds himself the subject of scrutiny by the bureau for which he used to work.
Jane Housham wrote in The Guardian, last June, in her review of Elsir’s Ebola ’76, “In this bleak “comedy”, translated by Chris Bredin and Emily Danby, about the first outbreak of Ebola in Sudan in 1976, he perhaps demonstrates the capacity of doctors to protect themselves from the harsher aspects of the job by resorting to humour. Empathy isn’t the only possible approach to such horror, but it’s the natural response for many readers and we may feel uncomfortable without it.”
When asked about where he begins when writing, the Sudanese writer-doctor said, “Usually I start out from a specific event or sudden idea. Then I search for an appropriate beginning and when I find it, the text moves forward without obstacles. As for those novels inspired by history, they are usually a re-working of a particular historical period or an imagined history in which I place characters I have known in my life.”