Arts & Book Review
February 16, 2007
First Edition

ARTS & BOOKS REVIEW; Pg. 24

Home truths in Egypt’s multi-story saga;
The Yacoubian Building By Alaa Al Aswany, trans Humphrey Davies
FOURTH ESTATE £14.99

by ALEV ADIL

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact that Alaa Al
Aswany’s novel has had in Egypt. The Yacoubian Building has topped
the bestseller lists for over two years, been adapted for the screen
by Marwan Hamid and inspired impassioned cultural debate. This
addictively readable evocation of Cairo at a time of political and
social ferment, during the first Gulf War, is both a damning critique
and a love letter to a city and its inhabitants. It engages with
corruption, homophobia, sexism, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism;
all sensitive and controversial issues in contemporary Egyptian
society.

Yet despite dealing with serious subjects, the experience of reading
the novel is more akin to a guilty literary pleasure than a civic
duty. Al Aswany’s interwoven narratives of the diverse inhabitants of
a once grand, now dilapidated, apartment block in downtown Cairo
marry the humanist realism of Balzac with the hyperbolic momentum of
Egyptian soap opera.

Built in 1934 by an Italian firm for an Armenian millionaire, the
Yacoubian Building, "ten lofty stories in the high European style",
is a metaphor for wider historical upheavals. Initially home to the
"cream of society", after the nationalist revolution in 1952 and the
"exodus of Jews and foreigners", the apartments are taken over by
army officers and their families. As the middle classes abandon the
inner city the inhabitants become more varied, and the little lock-up
sheds on the roof become homes for migrants from the countryside.

The inhabitants offer us a multiplicity of stories and perspectives,
from the rabble on the roof to aristocrats in their 10-room
apartments. While ageing roué Zaki Bey whiles away his evenings in
Maxim’s listening to Edith Piaf, nostalgic for Egypt’s cosmopolitan
past, Taha the doorman’s son becomes a fervent advocate for its
Islamic future.

Taha’s trajectory from an ambitious schoolboy, whose aspiration is to
join the police force, to a fundamentalist terrorist is perhaps the
most compelling of the novel’s plots. We are shown how social
exclusion, police corruption and American atrocities in Iraq all play
their part in his conversion, although it is oppression and torture
that finally set him on the path to violence.

Busayna, Taha’s childhood sweetheart, is worn down by the double
standards which expect her to provide for her widowed mother and
siblings, to guard her honour, and to endure sexual harassment at
work. Hatim Rasheed, the editor of a French-language newspaper, an
aristocrat and an intellectual, is madly in love with Abduh, an
underfed conscript with unbrushed teeth.

Many Egyptian readers have found Al Aswany’s depiction of male
homosexuality the most challenging aspect of the novel. Yet the
depiction is often uncomfortable because it seems prejudiced rather
than permissive. Homosexuals, the novel tells us, excel in
professions like public relations because they lack "that sense of
shame that costs others opportunities". At times, the voice is
culturally as well as sexually conservative. Despite acknowledging
the rich contribution of Copts, Greeks, Armenians and Jews to
Egyptian culture, the novel slips into monocultural assumptions.

But perhaps intellectual consistency is too much to ask, especially
when Humphrey Davies’s elegant translation provides us with the most
emotionally compelling Egyptian novel published in English since
Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy.