A street in the sky

James Buchan applauds Alaa al Aswany’s Arabic bestseller about sex and
power, The Yacoubian Building

Saturday February 17, 2007
The Guardian

Buy The Yacoubian Building at the Guardian bookshop

The Yacoubian Building
by Alaa al Aswany
255pp, Fourth Estate, £14.99

The Yacoubian Building is the sort of dense neighbourhood novel which,
though quite out of style when set in London or Paris, has been
revived for the banlieue of downtown Cairo. With its parade of
big-city characters, both ludicrous and tender, its warm heart and
political indignation, it belongs to a literary tradition that goes
back to the 1840s, to Eugène Sue and Charles Dickens. Nearer at hand,
it stands midway between the foundation novel of Egyptian Arabic,
Naguib Mahfouz’s Zaqaq al Midaq (Midaq Alley, 1947) and the modern
Egyptian television serial.

Published in Egypt in 2002 as Imarat Yaqubyan, the novel has been a
bestseller in Arabic. While Mahfouz had a greater success in English
and French than in his mother tongue, the Arabic Yacoubian is now in
its ninth edition. It has been filmed (by Marwan Hamed) with a care
and expense unprecedented in the Egyptian cinema. Mahfouz set his
novel in a poor working-class district, seeking to portray the changes
wrought by the second world war, and the British Eighth Army, to
sexual morals and long-lived social traditions. The Yacoubian Building
unfolds in the former European quarter downtown at the time of the
1990 Gulf war.

The Yacoubian building itself is a once-handsome art deco block on the
boulevard known now as Talaat Harb, but here called by its old name of
Suleiman Basha Street. Built in 1934 for an Armenian millionaire, its
fall from grace is for this author just one aspect of Egypt’s general
dilapidation. The pashas, cotton millionaires and foreigners who
occupied the apartments were all chased out at the coup d’état of 1952
and replaced by military officers and their country wives.

With the opening of the country to foreign capital in the 1970s, the
downtown district became outmoded, and apartments in the building were
let out as offices (including the clinic where Alaa al Aswany first
practised as a dentist). Whether in fact, or merely in fiction, old
store-rooms on the roof of the building are rented in the novel to
poor immigrants from the villages, so that Aswany manages to have both
a middle-class apartment block and a teeming Mahfouzian alley in the
air.

The characters are a sort of compendium. There is Zaki Bey, an elderly
roué with his pre-revolutionary manners and liking for dope and women;
Hatim Rashid, a newspaper editor who pursues rough young men from the
sticks; and Hagg Muhammad Azzam, a self-made millionaire with a shady
past and political ambitions. On the roof, the shirtmaker Malak is
working out a deep-laid plan to capture an apartment downstairs.

The heterosexual romantic interest is supplied by Taha, the bright and
pious doorman’s son, and his girlfriend Buhayna. When Taha proves too
honest for the Police Academy, he drifts towards Muslim militancy and
away from Buhayna, who is meanwhile finding that there are ways of
making money out of men without ruining herself for the marriage
market.

If the characters, good and bad, educated or not, have a quality in
common, it is a sort of big-city sophistication. The plotting is neat,
the episodes are funny and sad, and there are deaths and weddings
aplenty. For all the Mahfouzian decor – prostitution, hashish,
homosexuality – there is none of the oddity, even clownishness, of
character or the intensity of savour and texture of Midaq
Alley. Aswany’s is an altogether more worldly Egypt, and one that is
in a hurry to get somewhere or other.

Mahfouz always doubted whether virtue could survive on an empty
stomach. For Aswany, political probity and sexual virtue in Egypt
have been obliterated by the British, the monarchy, the Nasserists,
the clergy and now the nouveaux riches. As his unamiable political
fixer Kamal el Fouli pronounces: "The Egyptians are the easiest people
in the world to rule. The moment you take power, they submit to you
and grovel to you and you can do what you want with them." That is not
true, as the British and the monarchy found to their cost, but you can
see why his characters should think it so.

Even Islamic militancy, or what the Egyptians call gihad, is just a
drug like Black Label whisky or picking up police recruits or dope or
groping young women on crowded buses in Tahrir Square. Yet Aswany is
so good-natured that even his terrorist is allowed to enjoy, before
his martyrdom, a paradisial marriage portrayed in the shimmering
palette of gihadi bad taste. It is balanced by a wedding in a whisky
bar, where a good-hearted French lady, a survivor of the good times,
sings "La Vie en Rose".

For all its risqué material, and its parade of sodomy and scripture,
The Yacoubian Building is restrained in its portrayal of the actual
relations of power and wealth in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. When Hagg
Muhammad Azzam, desperate to protect his business interests, seeks a
meeting with "the Big Man" at his cement Versailles, he is greeted not
by a person but by a disembodied voice through a loudspeaker. The veil
of power is intact. The truth is that in Mubarak’s Egypt, just as in
Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad or even the shah’s Tehran, sex is one thing
but the boss is quite another, and the difference is a matter of life
and death.

· James Buchan has translated from Persian Hushang Golshiri’s Shazdeh
Ehtejab (The Prince, Harvill Secker)