San Francisco Chronicle, CA
Aug. 12, 2006

A window into rich life of Cairo apartments
Reviewed by John Freeman

Sunday, August 13, 2006

The Yacoubian Building
By Alaa Al Aswany, translated by Humphrey Davies
HARPERCOLLINS; 253 PAGES; $13.95 PAPERBACK

All novels contain invisible cities, even those set in actual
metropolises. "Ulysses" does not unfold in Ireland but in James
Joyce’s mind. The same goes for the sprawling, heaving Cairo depicted
in Alaa Al Aswany’s tremendously likable new novel, "The Yacoubian
Building."
At the heart of the book is a once-glamorous, now run-down apartment
complex built by an Armenian millionaire. Unlike in New York, where
higher floors come at a premium, the Yacoubian rooftop bows under the
weight of makeshift shanties that house the poor. "The children run
around all over the roof barefoot and half naked," writes Al Aswany,
with a sweep of his narrative hand, "and the women spend the day
cooking, holding gossip sessions in the sun, and, frequently,
quarreling." The men return home from work "exhausted and in a hurry
to partake of their small pleasures — tasty hot food and a few pipes
of tobacco (or hashish if they have the money)."

The third pleasure, of course, is sex, and the vibrations from it
rattle through the rafters to the floorboards, from the poor down to
the rich, giving this book a deliciously lewd throb. There is Zaki
Bey, a 65-year-old cosmopolitan playboy who has enjoyed more lovers
than Casanova, and Taha el Shazli, an ambitious businessman who takes
on a second wife to slake his lust.

The women get by, too. Busyana uses her feminine charms to get a
little extra money out of her boss at work, and then trades up by
making Zaki her lover. Souad, Taha’s new wife, retreats into memories
of her first husband when she is making love to her pompous new
husband, who can barely take his djellaba off some nights because he
is in such a welter of desire. In such moments, it is hard to forget
that she is essentially being paid for her affections.

Everyone is scheming in "The Yacoubian Building," giving this novel
the shape and tone of a soap opera. Zaki’s sister Dalwat tries to get
him declared incompetent so she will have his large apartment all to
herself. Malak, a partially disabled shirt tailor, uses his
customers’ pity against them. Hatim Rasheed, the desiccated
aristocrat editor of Le Caire, a French Cairo weekly, goes to the gay
bar downstairs and lures men to his room with promises of riches.
When one of his lovers leaves him, he shouts: "You’re just a
barefoot, ignorant Sa’idi. I picked you up from the street, cleaned
you up, and I made you a human being."

Ranging widely around his Cairo, Al Aswany describes the many ways
his characters scrabble against one another in this struggle to be
human. Some of them renounce the living world, like a young man who
is tortured for participating in a political protest. The experience
drives him into the hands of radical Islamic sheikhs, whose Wahhabi
interpretation of Islam is especially unkind to the fleshly urges.

If the novel makes any political point, it is that the restrictions
that such religious and cultural police put upon the bodies of Cairo
residents are just another slight against their humanity. For all the
compromises some of them make, Al Aswany argues that, for poor women
especially, sex gives them a chance to be alive. "They do not love it
simply as a way of quenching lust," writes Al Aswany, "but because
sex, and their husbands’ greed for it, makes them feel that despite
all the misery they suffer they are still women, beautiful and
desired by their menfolk."

Al Aswany can manage these soapbox asides because his narrative style
is digressive, and in confidence. Occasionally it seems as if an
indiscreet superintendent, jangling keys and all, is taking us around
the Yacoubian Building, whispering about secrets hushed up. This
vision of life connects high with low, rich with poor, through shared
vices and needs. The clandestine bars of Cairo attract the powerful
and the weak, for both desire the available women who serve the
drinks.

Cairo — at least the one where Al Aswany is mayor — has a choice:
to pay homage to its cosmopolitan roots and respect its diversity, or
close down and oppress its already suffering populations. Happily,
"The Yacoubian Building" does not attempt to fix these odds by
closing neatly. Some plotlines end abruptly, in tragedy, while others
simply vanish into the noise of the street. As in so many Jane Austen
novels, there is a wedding and a funeral, which bring with them an
appropriate mix of hope and despair. The difference here is this book
has shown us everything — and I mean everything — that has led up
to the wedding night.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.