Fanatics view women as objects – of pleasure, temptation and sin – and use strictness toward them as an easy form of religious struggle. La suite ici.

      BOOK EVENTS

      SATURDAY

      Book Signing- Mostly Books  6208 E. Speedway Tucson, Terri McGee will sign her book, DREAM INVADER.  1-2 p.m. Aug. 8.   Free  571-0110

      Plant Raffle and Author Event – Mostly Books  6208 Speedway  Greg Star will sign his book, COOL PLANTS FOR HOT GARDENS: 200 WATER SMART CHOICES FOR THE SOUTHWEST, followed by a plant raffle.  1-2 p.m. Aug. 8.  Free 571-0110

      SUNDAY

      Living Your Best life Book Group – Antigone Books, 411 N. Fourth Ave.  THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  Noon Aug. 9  Free  792-3715.

      Radical Faith and the Future of Christianity – Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bloom Education Center, 2331 E. Adams Street.  Discussing THE GREAT EMERGENCE: HOW CHRISTANITY IS CHANGING AND WHY by Phyllis Tickle.  9- 9:45 a.m.  Aug. 9.  327-6857

       Second Sunday Book Group- Antigone Books, 411 N. Fourth Ave.  THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING by Alaa Al Aswany.  2 p.m. Aug. 9 Free 792-3715

      TUESDAY

      Book Discussion Group – Dewhirst- Catalina Library  15631 N. Oracle Road, Catalina.  THE WOMEN by T.C. Boyle.  10:30 a.m.- noon Aug. 11, Free 594-5240

      Book Discussion – Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bloom Education Center.  2331 E. Adams Street.  ALWAYS OPEN: BEING AN ANGLICAN TODAY by Richard Giles.  7 p.m.  Aug. 11.  Free  327-6857

      NEXT FRIDAY 

      Other Voices Women’s Reading Series- Antigone Books, 411 N. Fourth Ave.  Feature readers Roz Spafford and Shawn Finn, Open microphone.  7-9 p.m.  Aug 14.  Free 792-3715

      Urban Yarns at the Library- Joel D. Valdez Main Library, 101 N. Stone Ave.  Bring your hooks, needles and lunches to discuss the latest fiber-themed books.  Noon-1 p.m.  Aug. 14.  Free. 791-4010

      UPCOMING

      LibroRaices- Himmel Park Library, 1035 N. Treat Ave.  LibroRaices is dedicated to exploring the Hispanic culture and lifestyle.  11 a.m- 1 p.m. Aug. 15.  Free. 594-5305

      Merrill LeRay – Mostly Books, 6208 E. Speedwaty.  Author will sign his two books, THE KIDNAPPING  and THE HOUSE OF THE LADY CHASE.  2-3 p.m.  Aug. 15  Free.  571-0110.

      THE ROAD TO MOUNT LEMMON: A FATHER, A FAMILY AND THE MAKING OF SUMMERHAVEN by Mary Ellen Barns- Western National Parks Association, 12880 N. Vistoso Village Drive, Oro Valley.  Barns will speak on the history of the Mount Lemmon community.  Noon and 2 p.m.  Aug 15.  Free 622-6014

       Find more listings at dailystarcalendar.com

Alaa Al Aswany nasceu em 1957 no Egito, além de escritor é também dentista. Formou-se em Chicago e durante alguns anos o seu consultório foi no próprio Edifício Yacubian, localizado no Cairo, o qual dá nome ao seu segundo livro. Edifício Yacubian foi  publicado em vários países e deu origem ao filme de mesmo nome, sendo o filme com o maior orçamento de todos os tempos realizado no Egito em 2006. Edifício Yacubian é seu segundo livro e depois desse já publicou Chicago, relatos sobre sua época de estudante nos EUA, dessa forma se tornando o escritor mais vendido do mundo árabe

Me interessei e simpatizei muitíssimo pela história do nosso colega. Comprei o livro ontem, apesar do pouco tempo estou lendo. E vou em busca do filme. Assim que concluir a história volto para contar minhas impressões.

Tá certo que gosto muito da odontologia, mas se escrevesse algo desse nível, dificilmente voltaria a atender [risos].

Aswany no momento dentista

E como escritor

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I just finished reading the new novel Chicago by Egyptian novelist (and dentist!) Alaa Al-Aswany. The novel is set in contemporary Chicago, a city that Al-Aswany introduces by telling the story of the Great Chicago fire, started in 1182 by Mrs. O’ Leary’s cow who knocked over an oil lamp in a wooden barn. 

The story is swiftly drawn, sometimes the characters feel more like fascinating archetypes than actual people. It is perhaps because he is a writer of such broad political vision that he chooses to give us a representative sample of some of the characters who inhabit a modern research university in the heart of Chicago. Though the novel is written in a realistic style, his prose sometimes veers towards the poetic. He deserves praise for coming up with sentences like this: 

” He has a large head and very thick glasses, their bluish lenses reflecting his sly eyes in many intersecting circles that often disorient his interlocutors.” (45) 

!! Anyone who can use disorienting and interlocutors in one sentence, in this case referring to an Egyptian pharmacy professor,  deserves accolades in my book. 

Some of the characters, like the PhD student masquerading as a government official (Ahmed Danana) illustrate how we bring aspects of our cultures with us to a new home, while others like Dr. Rafat choose to mock their own race spitefully while completely embracing America.

Al-Aswany spares nothing in his critique of both contemporary American and Egyptian society. His characters are flawed and complex, perhaps slightly skewed towards the lascivious. 

NYTimes article on ‘Alaa Al-Aswany:

Al Aswany claims that the “dynamic” postcolonial culture created by the secular left in Egypt survived until the mid-70s, when Anwar Sadat, overturning Nasser’s pro-Soviet socialist policies, began to liberalize the economy and move closer to the United States. “When I went to Cairo University in 1976, the left was very powerful,” he told me. “That’s why Sadat encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood against us. He banned all the political groups, except the M.B. at the university. This is something that people in America don’t understand — the way the dictatorships use the Islamists against liberals and social democrats. Today we have Mr. Mubarak using the fear of the Muslim Brotherhood to fool the Americans and liberals and maintain himself in power.”

…

The West is obsessed with terrorism, but if it supported democracy here, there would be no terrorism. They say, ‘We want democracy in the Middle East,’ and then get scared when Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood wins. They don’t understand that even if people in a democracy vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, they have the chance to see that these people in power are no good and then can vote them out. But if you have only dictatorship, there will be more terrorism.”

I reminded him that this was the justification the Bush administration used for the invasion of Iraq. “Ah, no,” he retorted, “that was what we call ‘moral cover.’ In 1882 the British never said, ‘We are going to occupy Egypt and take its resources.’ They said, ‘We are here to protect the minorities.’ You must cover your imperialism with something beautiful. No, what we want is to be left alone to build our own democracy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27aswany-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=magazine

In Sunday’s New York Times, Egyptian novelist Alaa al Aswany writes that by failing to speak up on the situation in Gaza is causing attrition to President Obama’s political capital in the Middle East.

While the Western media–and perhaps this venue included–were labeling Obama’s bold intiative in reaching out to Arabs and Muslims by speaking with Al Arabiya, Aswany says the reaction in Cairo was… well, muted at best:

But while most of my Egyptian friends knew about the interview, by then they were so frustrated by Mr. Obama’s silence that they weren’t particularly interested in watching it. I didn’t see it myself, but I went back and read the transcript. Again, his elegant words did not challenge America’s support of Israel, right or wrong, or its alliances with Arab dictators in the interest of pragmatism.

Aswany says all is not lost, but he points to a central problem in American policy in the Middle East. No matter how much more “pro-Palestine” an American president may be, it’s hard to see any president since perhaps Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 as really taking a hard line against any Israeli action–including Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. While your view on whether that’s right, or good for American interests, will vary according to political beliefs, it becomes more and more apparent that we’re unlikely to see an American leader who will really bring the sort of different perspective that many Arabs would see as a true leveling of the playinf field.

In other business, Aswany makes an offhand comment that illuminates the way young Egyptians are taking advantage of the blogosphere to express their views in a society that often doesn’t provide a good forum for public discourse:

I then enlisted the help of my two teenage daughters, May and Nada, to guide me through the world of Egyptian blogs, where young Egyptian men and women can express themselves with relative freedom.

–David Graham, Trinity ‘09 and editor

A horrendously busy first week back at work after the holidays has meant something of a delay in my getting around to this first posting of 2009, but here it is.

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of The Yacoubian Building, knowing nothing of Alaa Al Aswany, but wanting to read more non-Western literature. Chicago is a worthy successor to that novel and concerns the trials and tribulations of members of the ex-pat Egyptian community based at the University of Illinois Medical Center. It is, of course, a post 9/11 novel, exploring the frictions where cultures meet (amongst many other things), but it is not a novel that privileges one culture over another, but celebrates the triumphs and absurdities of both. It is a book that is not short on its tragedies, both the personal tragedies of the characters and the national tragedies of Egypt and the U.S.A., but it is also a very funny book in places and I was left feeling that this is essentially a work that is full of optimism.

It may be a coincidence, but is certainly a timely one, that the book was published in English only a couple of months before the extraordinary scenes in Chicago following Obama’s victory in the American elections (it was originally published in Arabic in 2007) and its relevance was not lost on me as I sat reading it a couple of weeks before his inauguration. This is a book that made me feel a bit better about things, all the more so because it is the work of an Arabic writer. In a review in The Times, Alaa Al Aswany was declared ‘a world writer’ (my emphasis). I couldn’t agree more and we are in need of writers like this.

The New York Times has a mixed review of Alaa Al Aswany’s new book. The reviewer doesn’t like it quite as much as the The Yacoubian Building. The book, which takes place in the US, does sound a little off and not as interesting as The Yacoubian Building.

Al Aswany writes about his Egyptian characters with charm, gentle humor and genuine conviction. It’s his depiction of Americans in their natural habitat that baffles. A beautiful young black woman is fired from her job at a shopping mall, supposedly because of her race; unable to find work, she succumbs to the indignity of posing as an “adult lingerie” model — for $1,000 an hour. A middle-aged woman, shunned by her husband, ventures into a sex shop to buy a vibrator and is treated to a lecture on the G spot and its role in female emancipation (“A woman is no longer a tool for man’s pleasure or his physical subordinate”), complete with bibliographic citations (Gräfenburg, Perry and Whipple).

Just got this in my inbox from a student in Tunisia who – Google map it, I had to – who wanted to get her hands on one of my favorite books, “The Yacoubian Building” from Alaa Al Aswany. I can’t seem to find the earlier post on it.

Dear Slav,

I read your message two days ago and I didn’t reply (Sorry) because I was waiting for another reply. In fact, I found a Tunisian immigrant who lives in France and promised me to bring me a copy from there( I have just recieved his message). Before saying good bye, let me Sir Thank you so much and address all my respect to you and by the way, Happy new year 2009.

Best regards.

Jag såg Kulturnyheterna  igår och blev väldigt nyfiken på en författare och en bok som jag aldrig hört talas om förut. “Yacoubians hus” av den egyptiske författaren Alaa al-Aswany verkar riktigt intressant. Boken kom ut 2002 och har sedan dess varit världens mest sålda arabiskspråkiga roman, översatts till 15 språk och gjorts till film. Nu är den alltså översatt till svenska. Så här skriver Internetbokhandeln om handlingen:

“Beläget mitt i Kairos myllrande kärna ligger Yacoubians hus, uppfört på trettiotalet i klassisk europeisk stil och en gång hemvist för ministrar och miljonärer. Numera finns där alla sorters människor: en fattig men vacker kvinna som snabbt får lära sig att mäns lustar är det som styr samhället, portvaktarsonen som på grund av sin bakgrund nekas inträde till polishögskolan och i frustration vänder sig mot religiös fundamentalism, chefredaktören som i varje ny man han möter försöker hitta tillbaka till det han i unga år upplevde med sin förste älskare, en korrupt rikeman och politiker som tänjer på Koranen för att tillgodose sina egna begär.

I Yacoubians hus blandas hyresgästernas öden med minnen från en annan tid och bilder från dagens Egypten, en smältdegel där religiös extremism och politisk korruption föder varandra, där ungdomlig entusiasm snabbt kan förbytas i ursinne, och där gamla seder blandas med den nya tiden.”

Så nu hoppas jag att mitt bibliotek köper in boken snart! Eller…att “jultomten” kommer med den!

Many fiction writers have finessed the concept of ‘literature as place’. Thus Cairo, the biggest city in both Africa and the Arab world, has featured as a principle ‘character’ in books as varied as Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building and Olivia Manning’s Levant Trilogy. Now the British journalist (and author of a notable book on the al-Jazeera media phenonmenon) Hugh Miles has joined the ranks, with a powerful and often funny memoir of his time in the heaving city, his wooing of and eventual marriage to an Egyptian woman of good family and his consequent conversion to Islam: Playing Cards in Cairo (Abacus, £10.99).

In modern literature, there are many examples of ‘faction’: novels into which real people or actual events are integrated. But Hugh Miles has brilliantly succeeded in producing a mirror-like variant of this: a factual book that in large parts reads like a novel. Much of it is in directly reported speech, not least the conversation between middle class Egyptian girls (at which he is a card-playing attendee and eavesdropper) giving the flavour of an Oriental Tales of the City. It would make a wonderful feature film.

Because Miles is steeped in Arab culture — he was born into a diplomatic family in Saudi Arabia, and studied Arabic at Oxford and in Yemen — he is able to portray the Egyptian reality with far more authority and perspicacity than a less well-informed Western observer could have done. The bitter-sweet end product is a triumph, blending often hilarious dialogue with straight-down-the-line reporting of the underbelly of Cairene life, such as police corruption and brutality, and the grinding poverty of the masses. Highly recommended.

I’ve just received review copies of the first three titles produced by a new imprint on the London publishing scene: Arabia Books. Launched by two of the capital’s most adventurous independent publishers, Gary Pulsifer of Arcadia and Barbara Schwepcke of Haus, Arabia Books intends to bring out at least ten new fiction titles a year, as well distributing more than 50 additional titles of Arabic literature mainly acquired from the American University of Cairo Press (AUC). AUC has helped make known to a wider public such great Egyptian novelists at Naguib Mahfouz (who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature) and Alaa Al Aswany (author of the wonderful The Yacoubian Building), but this new venture will bring a much greater range of Arabic-language novelists to the attention of the English-speaking world.

Arabia Books’ publishing programme does not get officially launched until next month, but that gives us critics time to get stuck into the three initial offerings: Ibrahim al-Koni’s Gold Dust, Hala El Badry’s A Certain Woman and Bahaa Taher’s Love in Exile. I have often thought that the West would understand the Arab world much better if more Arabic literature were available in English — and vice versa!

Links: www.arcadiabooks.co.uk and www.hauspublishishing.co.uk

Det blir ikke så mange oppdateringer for tiden, men så blir det ikke mye lesing på meg heller! Jeg jobber heltid, og tilbringer mye av dagen med å oppdatere nettsider, så…

Nesten så jeg gleder meg til skolen begynner igjen, merkelig nok så har jeg MYE bedre tid da…

De få bøkene jeg har lest har ikke vært særlig mye å skrive om. “Breaking Dawn” er selvsagt unntatt fra denne karakteristikken! Noen av de nye bøkene jeg har lest de siste to ukene er:

• Brian Keaney – Menneskedyret. (Grei fantasy-serie, men bøkene virker så korte. Jeg kommer aldri helt inn i historien)
• Nicholas Sparks – Kjære John. (Typisk Sparks-roman, helt ok)
• Melanie Wallace – Vintervakten. (Merkelig sak)
• Alaa Al Aswany – Chicago. (Jeg var vel en av de få som ga opp “Yacoubian-bygningen. Jeg kom meg gjennom denne, men det var bare så vidt. Rotete.)
• Elif Shafak – Bastarden fra Istanbul. (Jeg var positivt overrasket de første hundre sidene, men det gikk fort over… Jeg ble fort lei av intellektuelle som sitter og diskuterer på café)
• Jeg leser også Anna Karenina, men det er et pågående prosjekt. For å være helt ærlig så vil det antagelig pågå i noen år til…

In which The Gay Recluse reads a book five years later and says wtf.

Last fall, after we posted our thoughts on the suffocation of the gay voice in American literature, a reader suggested that for the sake of comparison we check out The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa al Aswany, which said reader described to us — earnestly, and not without indignation — as a good example of a gay voice in Egyptian literature. So we bought the book, have finally read it and are now ready to file our report.

A little background: the novel was a best seller in Egypt for two years running — 2002 and 2003 — and was acclaimed for “breaking taboos” with its “frank sexuality,” including (omg!) that of the homo variety; NPR — among others — loved it: “Packed with uncomfortable truths,” writes Robert Siegel of All Things Considered on the back of our paperback edition, “it is as much about the human condition as the Egyptian character.”

The plot is built around an old colonial-era building (the Yacoubian) in downtown Cairo, where the author presents the comings and goings of about a dozen characters, each of whom could be said to represent a segment of Egyptian society. There is a fading aristocrat who spends his time chasing after whores; a corrupt politician who rigs elections and also chases after whores (wait, is this Albany?); a crafty businessman who sells cheap whatever; a couple of whores, who — because some taboos are not in fact broken — are lower-class women with no choice but to sell their bodies; a working-class teenage boy who is denied entrance into the state police academy and consequently turns into an Islamic terrorist; and so on.

Aswany presents all of this in a lyrical-enough prose that probably explains the NPR infatuation and occasionally offers a glimmer of emotional complexity, or at least enough to carry us through to the end. At times it was enjoyable, albeit in a major-network-mini-series-about-Egypt kind of way, which is to say the characters felt more like placards than people. But because this is about Egypt, we are fascinated! We come away with the sense that just like the United States it is a very corrupt place, ruled by thugs, bourgeois hypocrites and religious fundamentalists.

We might have embraced this empty-calories treatment were it not for two more serious flaws: the first is Aswany’s treatment of “the gays” in his book, which can be described as unintentionally hilarious but ultimately off-putting. Though Aswany — unlike most post-war American writers — must be commended for noting the existence of homosexuality, the book is nevertheless filled with passages such as this:

Homosexuals… often excel in professions that depend on contact with other people, such as public relations, acting, brokering, and the law. Their success in these fields is attributable to their lack of that sense of shame that costs others opportunities, while their sexual lives, filled as they are with diverse and unusal encounters, give them deeper insight into human nature and make them more capable of influencing others. We wish! Lol!

Or check this out:

[Homosexuals] make themselves known to one another and hold secret conversations by means of hand movements. Thus, if one of them takes the other’s hand and strokes his wrist with his finger while shaking it, that means that he desires him, and if a man brings two fingers together and moves them while talking to someone, this means that he is inviting his interlocutor to have sex, and if he points to his heart with one finger, it means that his lover has sole possession of his heart, and so on. Seriously? — secret code — LOL!!! Don’t stop, please!!! Hilarious!!!

Or how about Aswany’s description of Hatim, the effeminate (which is to say, half-French) newspaper reporter:

He tries…with practiced touches, to bring out the feminine side of his beauty. He wears transparent gallabiyas embroidered with beautiful colors over his naked body, is clean-shaven, applies an appropriate and carefully calculated amount of eye pencil to his eyebrows, and uses a small amount of eye shadow. Then he brushes his smooth hair back or leaves stray locks over his forehead. By these means he always attempts, in making himself attractive, to realize the model of the beautiful youth of ancient times. Get it? He’s womanly or “passive” because “tough” guys don’t like to get fucked — lol!

Or this:

With his smart clothes, svelte figure, and fine French features, he would look like a scintillating movie star were it not for the wrinkles that his riotous life has left on his face and that sad, mysterious, gloomy look that often haunts the faces of homosexuals. Now we know why we look so sad and gloomy — damn!

So you get the point. When it comes to the gays, Aswany trades in nothing but stereotypes. And btw (spoiler alert!) guess which character literally gets his head smashed in by his (masculine, married) lover at the end of the book? Moral of the story: queens (and terrorists, cause the terrorist kid also gets blown away) are degenerates who deserve to die!

Meanwhile — and this is serious problem two, which seeps into our consciousness as we read — the author has literary aspirations. Here’s what he says in an interview:

People say Yacoubian Building was popular because of the sex, exposed corruption, police brutality, etc., but won’t acknowledge that, perhaps, it was a good piece of literature.

This? Literature of the good variety? We hate to break it to you, Alaa al Aswany, but in this case “People” are right! Let us get on our soapbox for a moment and say that one job of literature is to deconstruct stereotypes, or at least demonstrate to the reader some awareness that you are using them for a reason, whether irony, sarcasm or humor. And we don’t care where you’re from: please don’t ask us to consider your work “literature” when you give us characters that have no bearing on the complicated truth of the world you so carelessly ignore. [And as a final note, fuck Robert Siegel -- who endorsed the idea that it was "controversial" to make a newspaper editor gay -- and everyone else who reviewed this positively without slamming the idiotic (if at times hilarious) ignorance that seeps from its pages.]

Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz

In the contemporary Arab world, Bilad ash-Sham, or the Levant, surely comes first for poetry. Whether you’re looking for Muhammad Maghout’s bitter satire, anti-romanticism, and defence of the poor and the peasants, or for Mahmoud Darwish’s lyrical nationalism — whether you appreciate the modernist obscurity of Adonis or the powerful simplicity of Nizar Qabbani; you will turn to Syria and Palestine for your verse fix. The Arabs certainly do. For poetry in the Middle East isn’t the elite preoccupation it has become in the West. Taxi drivers and market men will quote you snippets of Qabbani’s love poetry or angry anti-occupation verse according to their temperament and the twist of the conversation. Even the illiterate may know some Qabbani from hearing it quoted in the café or crooned by the Iraqi singer Kazem as-Saher, with orchestral accompaniment. When Arab rappers want to express hardcore identity, they proclaim: “I’m an Arab like Mahmoud Darwish!” (the ‘Dam’ crew from Palestine.) That’s how uncissy Arab poetry is.

But for the Arabic novel, a genre which is only a century old (although there are much earlier precursors), the action is centred in Egypt, unsurprisingly – Egypt with its huge population and its indefinable, unmeasurable metropolis.

The most famous of Egyptian novelists is Naguib Mahfouz. Amongst the Arabs his books are bestsellers in garish covers, and many have been made into classic films. His international reputation was sealed when he became the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Reflecting changes in 20th century Arab reality, his style developed from heroic through realist to magical realist or romantic symbolist.

His career began in the 1930s with historical novels such as ‘Thebes at War’ which used ancient Egyptian history to bolster patriotic pride, racial identity, and resistance to the British.

In the 1950s Mahfouz focussed on the archetypal novelistic theme: social change. This and his extensive reading of European novels resulted in the brilliant psychological realism and richly-peopled urban setting of ‘The Cairo Trilogy’, which follows three generations of a family’s life from the First World War to the Free Officers’ Revolution. The Trilogy did everything the 19th Century European realist novel had done, but perhaps did it better.

In the 60s and 70s Mahfouz’s work became more experimental. My own favourite comes from this period: ‘The Harafish,’ which means ‘the rabble’. It is a more universal study of human lust for power and immortality, and is also sexy and drama-packed. By now Mahfouz’s alleyway, that key social unit of traditional Arab cities, has become not just necessary realist background but a freefloating metaphor. It could represent Egypt, or the Arab world, or humanity. Its daily action reflects psychological and sexual tensions as well as social and political conflict.

The vaguely allegorical ‘Children of Gebelawi’ (its Arabic title is ‘Children of our Alley’) traces human history from the Fall through Judaism, Christianity and Islam to modern secular scientism. In its troubled Egyptian context, the book was controversial enough to get the old man stabbed in the neck by an Islamist in 1994. Mahfouz found it difficult to write after that, but continued producing small works until his death in 2006.

His books are classics of world literature and should be read by anyone who likes reading, whether or not they are interested in Egypt.

One star of the ‘Sixties Generation’ is Gamal al-Ghitani, whose historical novel ‘Zayni Barakat’ is particularly good. This is set in 1516 when Egypt’s Mamluk dynasty was crumbling before rising Ottoman power, but like all historical novels it has as much to say about the moment of its authorship. Many Western journalists are frustrated novelists; the oft-censored and once imprisoned Ghitani is a frustrated journalist. His fiction refers to the rise of a new Egyptian ruling class, to Israeli conquest and American hegemony, and the experience of living in a police state.

The Marxist writer Sonallah Ibrahim, in a reaction against social realism and linear narrative, produces kafkaesque and often hilarious criticism of contemporary Egypt. Another frustrated social commentator, Ibrahim blurs borders between literature and reportage. In ‘Zaat’, for instance, chapters describing the sexual, workplace and bureaucratic battles of the eponymous heroine are intercut with headlines culled from the Egyptian press which tell their own story of galloping corruption, loss of national independence, social dislocation and hypocritical Islamism.

A contemporary Egyptian bestseller, in Europe as well as in the Arab world, is Alaa al-Aswany’s ‘The Yacoubian Building.’ Mahfouz’s microcosmic alleyway has been replaced by a residential building inhabited by, amongst others, a gay character, a pious businessman-politician who makes his real money by trafficking drugs, a young woman who has to smile through sexual harrassment in order to keep her job and feed her family, and the doorkeeper’s son who is turned to political violence by frustrated ambition and police torture. Aswany doesn’t quite have the stature of Mahfouz, not yet at least, but he has the same humanist focus on social change and the same democratic comprehensiveness.

Most contemporary of all in its tone is Ahmad al-Aidy’s ‘Being Abbas el Abd’, which is an Egyptian ‘Fight Club’, amongst other things. It contains graphic weirdness and all manner of iconoclasm. Its humour and quickness of thought, and its up-to-the-minute Cairene cynicism, produce devastating lines such as a list of the ‘three options of the Arabs’: “Security in exchange for peace. Oil in exchange for food. And silence in exchange for aid.”

This slim novel has a high frequency of lines you want to underline and repeat for their own sake. Like: “She swivels her gaze with the neutrality of a security camera.” Or: “Another of the ladies is embracing me at an angle that allows her reticent breast to remain that way.” Or: “The usual Oriental machismo – that machismo that blazes up in a house as the light of a female fades.”

‘Being Abbas el Abd’ has a post-modern playfulness in its relationship with genre and literary tradition. When a prostitute relates her first sexual encounters, “She doesn’t say anything about ‘plucking roses’ or ‘and so Shahrazad reached the morning’s shore.’” The book tells us what is happening to contemporary (Egyptian) Arabic as well as to the Arabs. This is a language refigured by the computer and mobile phone, by the closepacked discourses and jargons of the metropolis, by advertising and Hollywood, by psychobabble, by the English language. “Close your eyes, drag and drop the Defilement icon into the folders of your brain,” writes our narrator. In the Arabic, there are expressions which are uncomfortably direct translations from English idiom (‘give a damn’ for instance). In translation, we read, “‘I forgive U,’ she says, dubbing herself into English.”

I have some problems with the Humphrey Davies translation. When I read “Cut to the chase,” or “Don’t act dumb with me! I mean like what’s with the women?” I have to struggle to place myself back in Cairo. But that’s because this American slang sounds foreign to me. al-Aidy is trying to make his Arabic conform to what he hears in the buses and cafés, to make it as local as possible. How do you translate that?

‘Being Abbas el Abd’ is fast-moving, globalised, irreverent, erotic, and alienated. As such it would surprise Martin Amis, who tells us that a monolithic Islamism has won everywhere in the Muslim world. It would confuse any of the commentators who complacently wrap up the ‘Arab mind’ in a trite image or two.

The West is hearing a lot about the Arabs, but only within the straitened confines of its corporate media, which inevitably simplifies. “Making Sense Of It All,” sloganises BBC World. Non-fiction written by outsiders can be good (on Egypt, ‘In an Antique Land’ by Amitav Ghosh is to be recommended), but the stuff in the best-seller lists (Bernard Lewis, VS Naipaul) usually has a narrow agenda. Novels provide context and complexity. They offer a more nuanced understanding and a sense of the human texture of a part of the world which is, naturally, every bit as diverse as any other.

Synopsis: The Yacoubian Building holds all that Egypt was and has become over the 75 years since its namesake was built on one of downtown Cairo’s main boulevards. From the pious son of the building’s doorkeeper and the raucous, impoverished squatters on its roof, via the tattered aristocrat and the gay intellectual in its apartments, to the ruthless businessman whose stores occupy its ground floor, each sharply etched character embodies a facet of modern Egypt — where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies, where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism, and where an older, less violent vision of society may yet prevail.Alaa Al Aswany’s novel caused an unprecedented stir when it was first published in 2002 and has remained the world’s best selling novel in the Arabic language since.

Review: Another window on another culture. ‘The Yacoubian Building’ focuses on the occupants of one building and spans many classes. It tells the story of 5 different main characters woven together coming to different conclusions. This was a good book, it was well written but personally I didn’t find it compelling although the stories took on a greater impetus as the book progressed. Incidentally this has been made into a film – released in the UK in September 2007.

LibraryThing rating: *****

Other Books I’ve Read By This Author: None – would possibly look out for others.

Reviewed by JudyB