by Alaa al-Aswany 
Egypt. 272 pages. 2002.
The Yacoubian Building is based on an actual building in Cairo, built in 1934 for a wealthy Armenian and populated over the years by the wealthy, army officers and their families, middle class families, and in Alaa Al Aswany’s novel, a mixture of minor wealth in its larger apartments and poor immigrants from the countryside who live in shacks on the roof. The characters include an elderly womanizer with nostalgia for the days before the Nasser revolution, the doorman’s son who becomes involved with Islamists after being unhappy with the limited possibilities for his life, his girlfriend who tries to maintain her honor despite constant sexual harassment, a gay newspaper editor from an aristocratic background, and a newly wealthy man comfortable with greed and corruption and interested in buying a wife. Alaa Al Aswany’s novel of a complex and vibrant Cairo has received mostly positive reviews with The Telegraph saying, “Al Aswany manages to capture the challenges facing much of the developing world, and weaves an extra dimension into this superbly crafted feat of storytelling.” (Reviews of Books)
About the Author:
Alaa al-Aswany (born 1957) is an Egyptian writer, and a founding member of the political movement Kefaya.
Trained as a dentist in Egypt and Chicago, USA, el-Aswany has contributed numerous articles to Egyptian newspapers on literature, politics, and social issues. His second novel, The Yacoubian Building, an ironic depiction of modern Egyptian society, has been widely read in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. It has been translated into English, French and Norwegian, and was adapted into a film (2006) and a television series (2007) of the same name. Chicago, a novel set in the city in which the author was educated, was published in January 2007. Al-Aswany participated in the Blue Metropolis in Montreal, June 2008, and was featured in interviews with the CBC programme “Writers and Company.” (Wikipedia)
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A film was made of the book in 2006. Details are avaiable on IMDB here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425321/
I wasn’t able to attend the meeting so this is from my discussion with myself
as I read the book.
The novel presented us with a cross-section of Egyptian society. While the author stepped outside the box when it came to gays, he seemed to stay inside the box when it came to women–though he may have thought he was doing otherwise.
This may seem presumptuous of me–I know little of Egyptian society or history. Dependence and its politics may likely be the dominant story still, even by the Gulf War period in the 1990s?
I thought the women characters he developed were interesting and complex, “within the box,” but when Taha was at the University, I hoped maybe we would get to know an interesting female student character there. Instead, sigh, they were all just interested in chasing after the rich good-looking men.
The latest World Book Club on the BBC World Service featured Alaa Al Aswaany’s “The Yacoubian Building”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/2009/11/091109_wbc_alaa_al_aswaany.shtml