All human life is there
Caroline Moorehead THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING by Alaa Al Aswany, translated by Humphrey Davies Fourth Estate, £14.99, pp. 255, ISBN 9780060878139 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 1 n 1934, an Egyptian millionaire called Hagop Yacoubian, doyen of Cairo's Armenian community, put up a ten-storey block of apartments in Suleiman Basha Street in Downtown, the name Cairenes gave to the social and commercial heart of their city. In appearance discreetly art deco, it blended perfectly with its largely European surroundings, restaurants, cinemas, shops and bars, designed to look much like those you could find in Paris or Berlin. But after the revolution of 1952 and the exodus of the many foreigners who had made Cairo their home, the building, like the surrounding area, fell on less elegant times. Poorer people moved into the Yacoubian, filling not the once sumptuous apartments, but the former storerooms on the roof, little iron boxes without windows, thereby creating a parallel roof-top life, such as exists all over modern Cairo. And it is this building, the Yacoubian, that gives its title to Alaa Al Aswany's novel, differing from its fictional counterpart only in a detail of architecture, for the real building is not art deco at all but 'high European style', something that Al Aswany is very familiar with since, a dentist by profession, he opened his first dental clinic in the Yacoubian before turning to writing.
Set ostensibly in 1990, as the Americans prepared to invade Kuwait with the tacit support of the Egyptians, Al Aswany's novel is also about the Cairo of today, when fears of Islamist extremism push police and the army into increasing acts of repression. Cairo, dirty, chaotic, overcrowded and noisy, is a city of confusion and anxiety.
In the Yacoubian of the novel live the newly rich, getting richer, and the poor, scrabbling for a toehold on the roof. It is their stories, deftly feeding one into another, that make up the narrative of this accomplished novel. There is Zaki, with his gleaming false teeth, dyed black hair and immaculate suits, whose father was a former prime minister and who dreams of the days when the city was 'clean and smart and the people were well-mannered and responsible'. Zaki loves women, all women, oriental dancers, society ladies, schoolgirls, housemaids and those 'possessed by a satanic lust that they can never quench', and whose look is bright and empty, like that of a hungry animal. There is Taha, the doorkeeper's son, whose torture at the hands of the police drives him into the ranks of the Islamists plotting revolution; vicious and cowardly Malak, scheming to extend his empire on the roof; and Hagg Azzam, the pious entrepreneur with his hundred luxury suits, intent on bribing his way to the top. Each of these, in their own way, as well as the women they court and lust after, is entangled in a web of intrigue, manipulation and corruption. The Yacoubian Building is a novel rich in images, its characters with their sagging bellies, whining manners and plump, soft figures, none of whom live easily, even if,through many of the stories runs a thread of sentiment and even love. Al Aswany's Cairo is an edgy and uncomfortable place, with its mixture of a faded European past and a tense Islamist present, and something of the sheer press of people endlessly jostling for a purchase on life, for work, for money, for somewhere to live, for preferment, for happiness comes across in the daily life of the building. The cardinal sins, in the Yacoubian, are not corruption and perjury, but those of innocence and the failure truly to understand the real meaning of power.
For 2002 and 2003 The Yacoubian Building was the bestselling novel in the Arab world. With its agreeable and unobtrusive translation by Humphrey Davies it deserves as wide an audience in the West. People in Egypt, Al Aswany has his narrator observe, are particularly interested in the lives of others, delving into them 'with persistence and focus', and it is his particular skill as a novelist at fixing his large cast of characters, and their intricately mingled lives with such sharpness and humour that makes this book so enjoyable. Poignant, sad, funny, often disquieting, The Yacoubian Building is a remarkable novel.
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