Mark’s and Rose’s stories poignantly underscore the disorientation of having various components of yourself dispersed throughout the world. Rather it is the cutting analysis of how utterly exhausting it is for any one individual to try to contain multitudes. So begins the slow dissolution of the sisters’ intimacy, as each is pulled into the whirl of her own city, her own secrets, her own convictions.īut the most distressing element of Hassib’s novel is not the forbidden relationships, the knotty family dynamics or even the revenge-streaked story of the young suicide bomber who took Gameela with him.
We learn that years earlier Gameela, then experimenting with a religious asceticism, was shocked and disappointed by her sister’s engagement, chiding Rose for running away to America to study her own heritage. The narrative takes us back through the personal recollections of the three main characters, while in the present Rose, unconvinced that her sister’s murder was “the result of being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” searches for answers. She imagines that by collecting Gameela’s things she will put her sister together again.” She returns to New York with a box of her findings. “Rose sees herself as both Seth and Isis, killer and redeemer. Late one night, she ventures into Gameela’s childhood bedroom and attempts to excavate it, collecting whatever material contours of the 28-year-old’s existence she can find, as any good archaeologist would. Consumed by guilt over the state of her relationship with Gameela before her death, she tiptoes around the subject without yet trying to unseat her own grief. Rose, an Egyptologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is back home in Cairo to mourn with her parents. Rajia Hassib’s new novel, “A Pure Heart,” opens in post-Arab Spring Egypt, where Rose’s younger sister, Gameela, has died in a suicide bombing near Cairo. If the scales balanced - if the individual possessed a morally excellent, pure heart - then he or she was permitted to pass peacefully onward into the afterlife, unburdened by the weight of sin, light as a feather.
Resurrected as the gatekeeper of the underworld Osiris determined the fates of the deceased by weighing their hearts on a scale against a long white feather. When the Egyptian god Osiris was smashed to death by his brother Seth, his wife, Isis, traveled across the kingdom to retrieve all 14 pieces of him, and stitched him back together.
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