A Son of the Rock

Translated from the Arabic, ʿImārat Yaʿqūbīān, by Humphrey Davies

Harper Perennial, 2007. 253p.

The Yacoubian Building was first published in 2002 but has probably lost none of its relevance even given recent events in Egypt. The book is about the inhabitants of said building in Cairo and their various (mis)fortunes. Whether all Egyptian life is there I’m not in a position to judge; there certainly is a wide cross-section of society within its pages, though. The characters are memorable enough; some verge, as in magic realism, on larger than life, but their motivations are always clear. The viewpoint characters engage sympathy and are used to point each other up effectively.

In part the book deals with the daily grind of living under a dictatorship and the petty corruptions involved in survival but also slyly illustrates how those abused by power can be used by unscrupulous religious manipulators to further their own ends.

The wider culture Aswany portrays may not be as saturated with sex as in the West – though there is a mention of semi-naked girls on television adverts – but everyday life as depicted here most certainly is. Then again, love, sex and death are the novelistic big themes, possibly the more so in a society where lack of sexual expression is expected. Or, given that it was also a salient feature of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, does sex become more important when it perhaps represents the only means of personal expression in repressive societies?

The translation is effective (if into American English) and mostly flows easily – the book is very straightforward to read yet doesn’t lack complexity – but had a couple of infelicities. A footballer does not “shoot” the ball to another player and the ugly word “governorate” is employed to describe what appears to be an administrative district. (Governorate has a Wikipedia entry but “does not exist” in either dictionary.com or thesaurus.com.) The term bailiwick might have been better but is perhaps too old English. Would district or jurisdiction not have been clear enough?

To sum up, The Yacoubian Building is a very readable and interesting illustration of the differences and similarities between cultures and of what it means to be human.