In Humphrey’s often impressive translation we find the same flavor of wit and passion for life that breathes through Aswani’s own un-classical Arabic prose. Like Al-Quddos or Dickens, Aswani has the ability to completely evoke an entire personality in a few sentences and make a world of nuanced human feeling and, entertainingly, failings, come alive for us – including even incidental characters (like the sly comic figure of the alcoholic Ali ‘the Driver’ - what a terrifying hobby for a chauffeur!) The physical Yakoubian building is more than a microcosm of Cairo (as Naguib Mahfouz’s “Midaq Alley” can be seen) but rather wishes to be a mirror for the entirety of Egypt’s teeming and wonderful cultures, and a Vanitas held to its deep flaws. People still live in the once-beautiful structure of the past, the still-lovely Yacoubian building as fine as the most elegant in Paris according to its better-informed residents, but malaise attacks everything. 

 

The lives of residents – including the near-geriatric but womanizing aristocrat Zaki Bey el Dessouki, or Soad (the second wife of prominent businessman Hagg Muhammad Azzam) turned into a virtual mistress by the bizarre rules her hypocritical husband imposes, or Hatem, the flawed and corrupting intellectual – are contrasted to the literally marginal folk eking out a living on the roof, so excluded by the society they love and live in that they are barely in the Building at all, fighting for the right to subsist in airless former dog kennels “never used as places for servants to sleep, let alone live” – like the army-conscript Abduh desperate for a chance at a better life, or the brave and idealistic Taha, son of the building’s doorman and a superb student, and his equally impoverished sweetheart Busayna, forced into dehumanizing situations to be able to survive. 

 

Despite its sometimes dark subject matter, Aswani’s novel is exuberant and his writing is shocking, racy, salacious – full of sex, gossip and intrigue – as it maps the ways that every character's different practical and philosophical responses to Egypt's decadence escalate into adventures and conflicts. The different people’s stories, deliciously close to entwining, are deliberately kept apart again and again, showing us further how little Egyptian society now intermingles, how fragmentation affects everything. Busayna’s heartbreaking cry that “People are suffering” underlines the lessons that the poor are forced to learn, that “this country doesn’t belong to us” and that the rich and powerful will force onto those who resist: “We know how to put you in your place,” says the voice of power. “This country’s ours.” Complimenting this, Aswani’s moralism infuses the book in asides and character descriptions, for example in one character’s intellectual skills which, we are casually informed, “like so many talents in Egypt has been diverted, distorted and adulterated by lying, hypocrisy and intrigue.” or someone “sympathetic to the little hypocrisies of the faithful, the prayer of thanks.”

 

This is a controversial and fiercely engaging novel that has stirred considerable argument and analysis. No less a figure than Professor Joseph Massad, probably the most articulate and gifted Arab intellectual writing today, devotes pages of his seminal new book (“Desiring Arabs”) to some of the pro-Westernising sexual politics of the Yacoubian Building and its meaning for and in Arabic societies. At a more populist level, Arabic critics of this novel have focused on admiring and attacking the (to some people) distasteful descriptions of contemporary politics and civil society that Aswani highlights – and specifically on Aswani’s willingness to show empathy (no matter how limited) with every viewpoint represented. Indeed, whatever "The Yacoubian Building"s other merits, one has to acknowledge Aswani’s power to stir debates within Egypt and beyond on subjects as diverse as the legitimacy of government and private homosexuality, drug dealing and class politics, and ofcourse the desperation that fuels Islamic resistance to horrific abuses as well as the moral politics of Adultery (which Aswani seems rather to approve of, if done enthusiastically) – an encyclopediac range of contemporary issues that has caused “The Yacoubian Building” to become the informant of the international press seeking to navigate Egyptian culture (as we see in The Economist this last week, reporting on the Egyptian police use of torture, and the outcry against this across Egypt, in precisely the terms that “The Yacoubian Building” has helped set out and define).

                                      

Most worryingly, by pushing the thoughts and perspectives of his characters through a moralistic filter, Aswani is able to parade various attitudes that are highly questionable as if they were conclusions which the reader is urged to share, but with the ability to disown these perspectives at a moments notice as ‘merely’ the idiosyncrasies of different characters – including crude misogyny (berating impoverished women’s “defectiveness of mind” p.14) and an abject belief that “Western” culture is structurally superior to more traditional Egyptian culture when for example, he talks of “great Western values – democracy, freedom, justice, hard work and equality” p.73 (while later commenting darkly that “the moment you take power [the Egyptian people] grovel to you…its just the way that God made them” p.81). Surely anyone who reads the Holy Koran (a rather famous Arabic-language book!) will be rather overwhelmed by the emphasis on precisely these values of justice, freedom, hard work and equality, and even the idea of democracy in the need for meritocratically ordered societies. As a mark of the sophistication of this novel, and contrary to certain positions paraded in the book, Aswani allows precisely the committed Muslim purists to most embody these values.

 

Indeed, Aswani is subtle but insistent in locating the dilemmas of the Yacoubian Building’s inhabitants amongst a harshly international system. Is it, after all, a good thing to see ‘the good old days of Egypt’, represented in the grand old building itself, as an imitative European (neo-Italian/Parisian) construction? Murderous Western involvement in the Arabic world, for example in Palestine and Iraq (as seen in the loss of Masoud, Soad’s first husband, almost certainly killed by his hope to “come back with lots of money” from Baghdad, p127) is one face of this. The other, tellingly, is the elegant half-European Hatim who rails against the unwillingness of Europe to embrace Egypt in his tragic soliloquy abusing his mother, once a waitress in a Paris bar: “Your marriage to my father [a leading Egyptian jurist and professor] was a bigger social leap than you’d ever dreamed of. Despite this you spent the next 30 years despising my father and blackmailing him because he was Egyptian and you were French. You played the role of the cultured European among savages.” He weeps with the sorrow of cultured Egyptians faced with narcissistic injury when rejected by those whom they would have as their peers.

 

Indeed, what has been taken by some critics as an inward looking Egyptian focus hides a pervasive reflection of Western(-izing) values; all “The Yacoubian Building”s younger characters, of every social class, either escape contemporary Egyptian reality into various kinds of idealism, or dream of fleeing to the West – including incidental characters like Zaki Bey el Dessouki’s rich and presumably equally aristocratic nephew, a qualified doctor who “like most of his generation was sick to death of the situation in Egypt”. Even Aswani's fundamentalist Muslims embrace and fight for non-Muslim Western concepts like “the Nation” of Egypt in negation of actual Islamic concepts like a single community of Muslims world-wide (the ummah). In this context, Aswani’s latest novel, “Chicago” – now being serialized in Cairo – continues this focus on, and subjection to, a Western worldview in his writing.

 

Perhaps part of this is made a problem by the translation, which does sometimes seem to fail when interpreting Aswani’s writing – for example, in some cases of a bizarrely weak and literal conversational English (surely no-one in any contemporary society would in seriousness speak a sentence like: “that’s it, momma’s boy, we’re going to behave like ruffians”) or in concepts like the mistranslation of the Arabic word “deviance” into the English word “homosexual” (a word never used in the Arabic original) or the translation of the Arabic “Yehud” as the highly charged “Jew” in English – rather than to mean “Israeli” or “Zionist” as it is actually used by Arabic speakers, an important weakness for a novel ostensibly reflecting the 1990 Gulf War period (and the Arabic newspaper vocabulary to describe Zionism used even by all America's Arabic allies in that period) as well as the revulsion of ordinary Egyptians against “the filthy war” that promoted so many agendas antithetical to the Arabic world. Equally, despite the original Hagop Yacoubian’s un-Egyptian (Christian Armenian) status and the novel’s wistful admiration of that more liberal polyglot past which allowed Hagop Bey to create the building, a xenophobic pro-Egyptian identification with ‘Islamic’ values creeps into attacks on comic or predatory (Christian) characters like Abaskharon and Malak and taints the half-French characters, Hatim, who lives “in all ways like a European”. This does not affect the sheer pleasure or readability of the novel, even if it makes one take pause; what purpose did Aswani hope to further by this when, as a counter-example, the clearly Christian restaurateur, Christine, is an immensely wise and sympathetic character? (Aswani may argue, that surely there are bad Muslims and bad Christians and good folk too in every community, and his right is to represents them all?) To be explicit, then, the structure, characterization and plotting of the novel are so strong that one barely notices such concerns as one races to read what happens next and who does what to whom.

 

Indeed, at his best, Aswani clearly desires to transmit to us his deep moral seriousness, conveyed with continuous flickers of generosity of spirit – we are charmed (sometimes despite ourselves) by his ability to understand and show sympathy with all his characters, no matter how extreme or distasteful, understanding their passions and troubles. This contrasts with his often pitiless judgments on their conduct and personalities and for us as readers, heightens the sensation that we are living with people we know well and whose shocking secret lives we are suddenly being invited to disapprove of. Finally, this structure and ability to harmonise serious themes with plots is never more powerfully present than at the novel’s sweet and symbolic end, echoing its beginning with the return of the graceful figure of the no-longer youthful rake, Zaki el Dessouki, and with the image of fusion and rebirth of new and old ways of life, a mixing of Egypt’s inherent dynamism that stirs one profoundly with optimism. Who, after all, can resist literature when presented to us as breathless gossip? A very great pleasure and a deserved success.