The Struggles and Hopes of Modern Egypt: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany

Book Review
The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany
First Published in 2002
This Edition Published in 2006 by Harper Perennial (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.) and Translated by Humphrey Davies

Written by Alaa Al Aswany, an Egyptian dentist and a journalist, The Yacoubian Building has been the best selling novel in the Arab world for the past two years. It's a wonderful story about the frustrations and hopes of Egyptians across the full strata of society who all live or work in the Yacoubian Building, a residential and commercial building in Cairo constructed in the high European style in 1934 during the colonial era. There's Taha el Shazli, a very good student and a devout Muslim whose father is the building's doorkeeper; Malak, a fat tailor; Hatim Rasheed, an intelligent and homosexual editor of the French language newspaper Le Caire;Hagg Muhammad Azzam, an extremely wealthy businessman; Souad Gaber, a beautiful secretary from Alexandria; Busayna, the oldest daughter of a poor family; Kamal el Fouli, a master politician and the leader of the Patriotic Party; and Zaki Bey el Dessouki, the oldest resident of the building who still lives in the colonial times of the past.

All the characters are striving to make the best for themselves and their families. But the corruption and injustice omnipresent in Egyptian society--a direct swipe at the dictatorial policies of the (American-supported) president Hosni Mubarak and his political party who have been in power for almost 25 years--make their aspiriations difficult to accomplish without making moral sacrifices. For some, morality is a very loose word, especially for those in power. For others, it is very difficult given their daily struggle with poverty. And still for others, religion takes away any moral ambiguity.

The flow of the story is magnificent, the depth of characters is very vivid, and its frankness, particularly as it relates to sex, is astonishing. Another reason for the book's success is that the story's relation to today's social issues in Egypt and the Arab world at-large is very real and can be understood by anyone attuned to world events, even the reader who hasn't traveled to or lived there.