Review

The Yacoubian Building

By Alaa Al Aswany

Published by HarperCollins

Faced with the task of packaging the paperback edition of an Egyptian novel for the UK’s English-speaking market, the publishers could have opted for an atmospheric, blurred photograph of a bustling Cairo souk, or a raging Saharan sandstorm.

Instead, they have, rather bravely and thoroughly in keeping with the novel, opted for a highly stylised, enticing cartoon-like illustration of a building’s façade, with evocative silhouettes at each window and on the roof. It almost looks like an advent caldendar.

Such a detailed description of a book’s cover may seem an odd way to begin a review, but it is relevant in this case, because the building and its inhabitants lie at the very heart of Al Aswany’s bewitching novel. Straddling social, sexual, political and religious divides, the book explores the contradictions of Cairo society, but the characters – and the situations in which they find themselves – are so vividly drawn that the reader is immediately immersed in their soap opera lives.

All manner of people live in the once resplendent Yacoubian building, the rich in spacious apartments, the poor in metal shacks on the roof. The cast of characters includes a homosexual newspaper editor, an elderly lothario, the ambitious son of the doorkeeper, and a pair of scheming brothers. Their stories intertwine with those of others to create a dazzling mosaic of love, hate and frustration in a once-grandiose city.

Beneath the soap opera veneer, The Yacoubian Building also manages to address more serious issues: endemic corruption among Cairo’s politicians and law enforcers; the widespread condemnation of homosexuality (unless the ‘offender’ is a nice person, in which case a blind eye is turned); and the radicalisation of Islamist students opposed to the increasingly popular adoption of Western ‘values’.

Al Aswany is particularly damning about the subservience of women in modern Egyptian society. His female characters are all, to a greater or lesser extent, controlled by men. Women may have the freedom to wear provocatively low-cut dresses and strive for equality, but ultimately they come to realise that the only way to escape poverty is to submit themselves, usually sexually, to men. This gives them power of sorts, but it is a hollow and demeaning way to guarantee them security.

Life in present-day Cairo, then, is a battle for survival in a city uncertain of itself. Following Nasser’s revolution in the 1950s, which destroyed the old colonial order, and the declaration of emergency law after the assassination of Sadat in 1981, which is still in place 25 years later, the city is struggling to come to terms with its past and its future.

These knife-edge tensions and daily struggles give the novel its bubbling energy and make us care about the lives of the Yacoubian building’s troubled inhabitants.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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Translator: Humphrey Davies