I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing

In Cairo, an American named Ib encounters an Armenian named Gamal-Leon, who begins to follow Ib as a joke one evening toward the end of Ramadan, the period when Muslims fast by day and feast by night. As the two strangers roam the night, the readers swim with Ib against a tide of mistranslation and rumor thst submerges them in an almost hallucinatory experience of foreignness.