Cairo's city center is a crumbling testament to a more opulent time.  Its rooftop terraces are cracked and its marble staircases grooved and rounded by countless feet too nervous to trust ornate iron elevators last serviced too many years ago.   The Greek Club, an exclusive and smokey gathering place for beer-drinking artists and the late-night wealthy set, is perched above the city's wide main circle, poised with a view to the monument below.  It was in this hall, surrounded by an inconceivable and surreal cast of people, that I first heard about The Yacoubian Building.  At the table was an American expat translator who had just finished the English version of the new book by Alaa al-Aswany, and he was reluctant to say much about it.  The unspoken and internalized, it turns out, is a persistent theme.

The novel unfolds in layers, much of it in the streets around the Greek Club, intertwining personalities and brashly exposing the seething private pressures and vices that flow through the massively populated metropolis: things many in Cairo are reluctant to say much about.  Introducing an array of characters that includes a respected elderly gentleman, a policeman, a business owner, and two lovers whose lives diverge dramatically, the novel explores loneliness, desperation, religion, and nostalgia through the crossing of barriers and and the intersection of lives.  Corruption, homosexuality, fundamentalism, terrorism, and sexual dynamics are omnipresent unspoken realities in Cairo.  This novel exposes them.

The hugely successful (at least in Egypt) film adaptation was quickly restricted to a handful of theatres upon release and censored by order of the government.  That means it has to be good.

Themba