The Yacoubian Building

I guess the last post helps explain why I read The Yacoubian Building. It is about the residents of a building in Cairo and was the best selling Arabic novel in 2002 and 2003.

On the one hand reading the book seemed like a good way to get a bit of a feel for Egypt. On the other hand, the book is meant as a harsh criticism of the government and society so I imagine it is fairly exaggerated. The big message I got from it was how people lived their lives getting around the restrictions of religion and the government, and how those two push people's lives. Other than just trying to get a feel for the country, I think it is a good book on its own. A lot of it is about sex (married, homosexual, unmarried, paid, forced, pedophillia), religion, secret second marriages, greed, violence, politics, corruption, forced abortion, torture, terrorism (and for completeness, a tortured terrorist having sex because of religion) - topics that help to keep the pages turning and as you can imagine caused a bit of controversy in the Arab world. The building he picks has rich residents in the main building and poor residents living on the roof so he is able to cover a large number of perspectives and stories. The downside is that, like the show heros, it has so many characters and story lines I feel like there isn't as much of any one story line as I'd like.

One thing I learned about myself is that when I read, in my head all the characters are white by default, even if the book is set in Egypt.