BOOKS: CAIRO PLAYS HOST TO SCHEMES AND SECRETS
By John Freeman For The Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 13, 2006 Sunday
Main Edition

FICTION

The Yacoubian Building. By Alaa Al Aswany, translated by Humphrey
Davies. HarperPerennial. $13.95 paperback. 253 pages.

Verdict: An Egyptian Dickens.

All novels contain imaginary places, even those set in actual cities.

"Ulysses" does not unfold in the Republic of Ireland but in James
Joyce’s mind. The same goes for the sprawling, heaving Cairo depicted
in Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany’s tremendously likable new novel,
"The Yacoubian Building."

At the heart of the novel is a once-glamorous apartment complex built
by an Armenian millionaire. Unlike most American cities, where higher
floors come at a premium, the opposite is true in this building. 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,"
Al Aswany writes, "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. There is Zaki Bey, a 65-year-old cosmopolitan playboy,
and Taha el Shazli, an ambitious businessman who takes on a second
wife to slake his lust. The women get by, too, if only by using men’s
weakness for sex against them.

Everyone is scheming in "The Yacoubian Building," giving this novel
the shape and feel of a soap opera set to an Arabic beat. Zaki’s
sister tries to get him declared incompetent so that she will have
their large apartment all to herself. Malak, a partially crippled
shirt tailor, uses his customers’ pity against them. Hatim Rasheed,
the desiccated aristocrat editor of 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."

This struggle to be human is constant in "The Yacoubian Building."

Ranging widely around his Cairo, Al Aswany describes the many ways
that his characters scrabble against one another in this fight. Some
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 sheiks, whose Wahhabi interpretation of
Islam is especially unkind to urges of the flesh.

If the book makes any political point, it is that the restrictions
such religious and cultural police put on residents are just one
more 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," Al Aswany
writes, "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."

Occasionally it feels like a very indiscreet superintendent, jangling
keys and all, is taking us around the Yacoubian Building, whispering
about secrets long hushed over. This vision of life connects high and
low, rich with poor, through shared vices and needs. The clandestine
bars of Cairo attract the powerful and the downtrodden alike, for
both desire the available women who serve the drinks.

Cairo — at least the one imagined by Al Aswany — has a choice:
to pay homage to its cosmopolitan roots and respect its diversity,
or close down, and become restrictive of its already suffering
populations.

Happily, this book 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 that has led up to the wedding night.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress