Cairo Reading

I have been trying to finish my Cairo reading and have at last gotten somewhere, although not quite the end. I finished reading The Yacoubian Building today by Alaa Al Aswany. The style was so much like Mahfouz, I even thought Aswany must be his pen name. I had actually started reading Midaq Alley to see whether there was a particular thread in Egyptian literature that I could follow--- and lo and behold, I had chosen the very two books that seemed to be part of a trilogy.

Aswany's more risqué, of course, written as it is in the new millenium, however the themes of honest girl sells her body for money, the young man's hopes are thwarted, the greedy merchant who considers getting a second wife and who gets into politics gets his comeuppance, political 'stands', the cunning crippled and the unrepentant sexual deviant... And for Mahfouz's World War II, there is Aswany's even sexier terrorism. Whereas Mahfouz's novel takes place around Halili, Aswany's takes place downtown on Talat Harb.

However, one more novel wants to get into this discussion here, and that is Shafak's Flea Palace. Yacoubian Building and Flea Palace both hark back to La Belle Epoque, levantine cosmopolitanism, whatever you may want to call it. And they do this also through the fact that both apartments' original owners are Armenian. Exiled Armenians and their apartments in ruin has become an Eastern Mediterrenean topos of lost multiculturality. I think there's a paper in there somewhere.