Check In To The Yacoubian Building

Alaa Al Aswany is the most famous dentist in Cairo. Securing an appointment with him at his clinic—it’s in the Garden City district of town—is a considerable feat, not just because he’s good at what he does (although I’m sure he is), but because he is an international celebrity--especially since his recent novel, the Yacoubian Building, came out. That’s when business really took off. He can barely keep up now. People are curious, interested in meeting the man many suggest might be the nation’s next Naguib Mahfouz.

The Yacoubian building really exists. It’s a downtown high rise, we’re told, an impressive "ten lofty stories" complete with “corridors all of natural marble." Erected in 1943 by a wealthy Armenian businessman of the same name, its beginnings were grand, and the building quickly earned a reputation for housing Cairo’s elite. But that was before the revolution. After, things changed, rather abruptly in fact, and at the Yacoubian, the apartment building’s rooftop tin sheds soon began being usurped by squatters (Cue the class wars).

The building is a character itself in the novel, which chronicles the disparate but equally difficult lives of those who occupy it. I read the book this past weekend, not in one sitting but almost. Its plot is engrossing, its characters scheming, desperate, often theatric. The comparisons to Mafhouz are easy to make—after all, they are writing about the same people, the same country--but the two are quite distinct in their approach.

Aswany is at his best when considering the troubled political terrain of the country, a landscape marred by alarming corruption, greed and hypocrisy. It’s less (less than Mahfouz at least) about the complete development of the characters, and more about what’s going on in their lives, in the background, even. And yet that’s not to say we don’t get to know the tenants of the Yacoubian. Far from it.

Most memorable perhaps is Zaki, an aging, weathered Don Juan with a taste for strong liquor and beautiful women. He lives in the building, has forever, but clearly belongs to a different era, one that we are made to understand has long expired, petering out when Egypt’s minority groups (the Jews, Armenians, Greeks) left post-revolution. What they left behind is indeed bleak: a desolate, troubled cultural and social landscape.

My favorite character has to be the one most objectionable (abhorrent?) to Egyptian clerics. That would be Hatim Rasheed, the half-French, half-Egyptian editor of Le Caire newspaper. Hatim is gay, not openly so of course, society would never allow for it, but settled nonetheless in his identity. Because of Hatim, the Yacoubian Building has been applauded by literary critics and social commentators, for its frank, bold look at a topic considered quite taboo throughout the Middle East: homosexuality.

The book is ultimately a great success, its narrative brimming with sex, corruption, the struggle for power, sex, poverty, religion, and more sex. But if I had to pick a bone with Aswany, it’d be over his portrayal of women. They are all exceedingly difficult to like: calculating, catty.

Yacoubian Building, the film, is also out now.