A street in the sky

James Buchan
Saturday February 17, 2007

Guardian
The Yacoubian Building
by Alaa al Aswany
255pp, Fourth Estate, £14.99

The Yacoubian Building is the sort of dense neighbourhood novel which, though quite out of style when set in London or Paris, has been revived for the banlieue of downtown Cairo. With its parade of big-city characters, both ludicrous and tender, its warm heart and political indignation, it belongs to a literary tradition that goes back to the 1840s, to Eugène Sue and Charles Dickens. Nearer at hand, it stands midway between the foundation novel of Egyptian Arabic, Naguib Mahfouz's Zaqaq al Midaq (Midaq Alley, 1947) and the modern Egyptian television serial.

Published in Egypt in 2002 as Imarat Yaqubyan, the novel has been a bestseller in Arabic. While Mahfouz had a greater success in English and French than in his mother tongue, the Arabic Yacoubian is now in its ninth edition. It has been filmed (by Marwan Hamed) with a care and expense unprecedented in the Egyptian cinema.

Mahfouz set his novel in a poor working-class district, seeking to portray the changes wrought by the second world war, and the British Eighth Army, to sexual morals and long-lived social traditions. The Yacoubian Building unfolds in the former European quarter downtown at the time of the 1990 Gulf war.

The Yacoubian building itself is a once-handsome art deco block on the boulevard known now as Talaat Harb, but here called by its old name of Suleiman Basha Street. Built in 1934 for an Armenian millionaire, its fall from grace is for this author just one aspect of Egypt's general dilapidation. The pashas, cotton millionaires and foreigners who occupied the apartments were all chased out at the coup d'état of 1952 and replaced by military officers and their country wives.

With the opening of the country to foreign capital in the 1970s, the downtown district became outmoded, and apartments in the building were let out as offices (including the clinic where Alaa al Aswany first practised as a dentist). Whether in fact, or merely in fiction, old store-rooms on the roof of the building are rented in the novel to poor immigrants from the villages, so that Aswany manages to have both a middle-class apartment block and a teeming Mahfouzian alley in the air.

The characters are a sort of compendium. There is Zaki Bey, an elderly roué with his pre-revolutionary manners and liking for dope and women; Hatim Rashid, a newspaper editor who pursues rough young men from the sticks; and Hagg Muhammad Azzam, a self-made millionaire with a shady past and political ambitions. On the roof, the shirtmaker Malak is working out a deep-laid plan to capture an apartment downstairs.

The heterosexual romantic interest is supplied by Taha, the bright and pious doorman's son, and his girlfriend Buhayna. When Taha proves too honest for the Police Academy, he drifts towards Muslim militancy and away from Buhayna, who is meanwhile finding that there are ways of making money out of men without ruining herself for the marriage market.