Steamy Cairo account unveils vigorous trade in basic instincts
by John Freeman

Weekend Australian
April 21, 2007 Saturday
Qld Review Edition

The Yacoubian Building

By Alaa Al Aswany

Translated by Humphrey Davies

Fourth Estate, 256pp, $45

ALL novels contain invisible cities, even those set in actual
metropolises. Ulysses does not unfold in Dublin but in James Joyce’s
mind. The same goes for the sprawling, heaving Cairo depicted in Alaa
Al Aswany’s tremendously likable novel, The Yacoubian Building. A
contentious bestseller in the Arab world, exposing the political
corruption, sexual repression, religious extremism and modern hopes of
Egypt, it was turned into the most expensive Egyptian movie yet made.

At the heart of the book is a once glamorous, now run-down apartment
complex built by an Armenian millionaire. Unlike in New York and
London, 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,"
Al Aswany writes, with a sweep of his narrative hand, "and the
women spend the day cooking, holding gossip sessions in the sun and,
frequently, quarrelling." 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, 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. 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 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.

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 sheiks, 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 on the bodies of Cairo
residents are just another slight against their humanity. For all of
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," he 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."

Al Aswany can manage these soapbox asides as his narrative style is
digressive and confident. 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 plot lines 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 US’s National Book Critics Circle.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress