The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany

This is going to have to be a bit of a different review, not only because I no longer have access to the book (I know, I could check it out from the library...but that takes work) but also because it isn't going to make the cut, GASP!

We originally put this novel on the list because we were looking to add a bit of, shall we say, diversity to the list. Like the halls of congress, the western literary world is littered with old dead white guys with the occasional woman/minority thrown in. This book is apparently the highest selling book in the Arab speaking world, but I suppose we should not have confused popularity for quality. That's not to say it's a bad book, just not good enough to make the list.

The Yacoubian Building is the story of the residents of the Yacoubian Building, a real-life building in downtown Cairo. It jumps around between the lives of those who live in shacks on the roof of the building and those who live in the run down opulence below them. Almost exactly like the book cover above, whoa.

Readability: Easily read. My only issue was keeping track of names (probably due to my unfortunate ignorance of Arabic names) and difficulty with transitions between story lines.

Enjoyability: I never really got into it. I just kept reading it to, well, finish it, and then pawned it off on a friend as soon as possible (and I have a book collecting addiction, to a serious degree).

Favorite quote(s):,Favorite character:, Least favorite character: Yep, don't have the book anymore...

Social impact: As I said earlier, this is the top-selling novel in the Arab world and it does deal with many an important, and controversial, issue-homosexuality, terrorism, women's roles/sexuality, poverty etc. but it deals with them in a way that, no offense intended, feels very stale, old-fashioned and sometimes insulting. I know, I should step back and view this from the position of someone in the Arab world where ideas like those explored in this book probably are fairly revolutionary but, from by white-person-privileged-American perspective it just doesn't work. It's sometimes like reading an 'enlightened' Victorian talk about 'women's problems.'

Greatest impact: I found the transition of one of the characters from a bright boy living in poverty to member of a terrorist cell fascinating.


Recommended for: People interested in learning more about Egyptians and Egyptian society, from a fairly mediocre book.

Overall: Eh.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Readability:

Through the first 7/8 of the book, an easy read. Prose is spare and not overly complicated, although it must be said that most of what happens is internal to the characters and some might say that not a lot happens. So that's the first 7/8. Then all of a sudden the last bit shifts and really feels more like a dream than anything else, or what it feels like to be inside a nervous breakdown. Actually a lot of stuff happens during this last section, but it is pervaded by the feeling of detachment or dissociation (or is that just the way the desert feels?).

Enjoyability:

I really really liked this book. I love the way Bowles describes the landscape, the desert: "By the road sometimes were high clumps of dead thistle plants, coated with white dust, and from the plants the locusts called, a high, unceasing scream like the sound of heat itself." I like the way you can FEEL the dichotomy of being a traveler, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the strangeness and otherness of this foreign place. There's this wonderful scene when Kit is homesick for Europe and pulls out all these extravagant silk dresses and then just curls up in them on her bed. There are these moments of striking beauty and then moments where all they can focus on is the flies or the heat or the food. Plus I liked that I didn't really know what was going to happen - there were several moments along the way when I just thought 'What?!'
Definitely a book and a writer I will come back to.

Favorite character: Probably Turner, just because he's such a cheerful and genuinely good-hearted fellow. Of course he does sleep with his best friend's wife, but he means well (is that any excuse?). I liked Kit in a lot of parts too, but get frustrated because she is has such a tendency to be dependent on others. I had high hopes for her during Port's illness when she stepped up and got them away from the Typhoid epidemic in S'ba, and then was taking care of him, but the ending makes me feel like maybe that was only possible because she was about to have a nervous breakdown.

Most un-favorite character: Mrs. Lyle. It's very hard to be sympathetic to someone who is a wealthy writer/photographer who spends all her time gallivanting around Africa, and yet is utterly bitter, critical, and ungrateful. Here's what Port has to say about her: "Her life had been devoid of personal contacts, and she needed them. Thus she manufactured them as best she could; each fight was an abortive attempt at establishing some kind of human relationship. Even with Eric [her son], she had come to accept the dispute as the natural mode of talking. He decided that she was the loneliest woman he had ever seen, but he could not care very much." I can only care enough to hate her a little.

Best Quotes:

"But not here in this sad colonial room where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room."

"As she stared she found herself wondering why it was that a diseased face, which basically means nothing, should be so much more horrible to look at than a face whose tissues are healthy but whose expression reveals an interior corruption."

"... it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time."

" 'Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth--' She hesitated.

Port laughed abruptly. 'And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And that's when you're conscious of the bitter taste.' "

"At least you would learn not to be afraid of God. You would see that even when God is most terrible, he is never cruel, the way men are."

"What delight, not to be responsible - not to have to decide anything of what was to happen! To know, even if there was no hope, that no action one might take or fail to take could change the outcome in the slightest degree - that it was impossible to be at fault in any way, and thus impossible to feel regret, or, above all, guilt. She realized the absurdity of still hoping to attain such a state permanently, but the hope would not leave her."

Recommended for:

People who liked The Quiet American or are fond of Hemingway, travelers and expatriates, and people who don't mind books where (according to Bowles) "all the action takes place inside people's heads."

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles: Our foray into Africa continues, and gets really strange.

Over a month has passed since our last post. All things considered it was a very strange month, so I suppose this is an appropriate book to jump back in with.

The Sheltering Sky begins as a kind of travelogue surrounding a married couple, Port and Kit, and their friend Turner's travels through post-war Northern Africa. Port and Kit have taken this trip as a last-ditch attempt at trying to save their failing marriage, and Turner is along for the ride for his own questionable purposes. They wander through Northern Africa engaging in various morally questionable actions and encountering a variety of characters, including the ever-present obnoxious Americans, until a series of events leads the book into some seriously existential and disturbing territory. (read it and you'll see what I mean)

Readability: This novel is very readable. The writing is sharp and the plot not only pulls you along with wondering what will happen next, but also with wondering what is going on in the character's heads.

Enjoyability: I'll admit, this book took me a bit to get into. At first I just kept thinking--ooh great, another book about Europeans traveling through Africa and spending a lot of time not enjoying themselves. Seriously people, why go to Africa if all you can do is complain about how 'uncivilized' it is? Somehow, though, it got under my skin. It certainly is a book I can keep thinking about and its dreamlike quality, combined with its non judgemental attitude, makes me keep questioning why the characters acted the way they did. A warning--the last 50 pages are a shocker.
Favorite quote(s):
"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
"Humanity?" Cried Port. "What's that? Who is humanity? I'll tell you. Humanity is everyone but ones self. So of what interest can it possibly be to anybody?"
"In this way he missed the night's grand finale: the shifting colors that played on the sky from behind the earth before the rising of the sun."

"Its strange," he said with a deprecatory smile, "how, ever since I discovered that my passport was gone, I've felt only half alive. But it's a very depressing thing in a place like this to have no proof of who you are."

"Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth'-she hesitated.Port laughed abruptly. 'and now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end ant that's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

"The new moon had slipped behind the earth's sharp edge"

Favorite character: Kit...I think. I had conflicting feelings about most of the characters in this book. They make poor decisions, complain, treat each other poorly but with all of this they feel real. What happens to Kit at the end of the novel is unsettling but could I say I wouldn't do the same? Probably not. Somehow, this end feels appropriate despite its distressing nature. In the end it's all about the desert anyway so, maybe that's my favorite character.

Least favorite character: The creeptastic caravan owners who 'help' Kit towards the end of the novel.

Social impact: Paul Bowles spent much of his life as a ex-pat in Northern Africa and clearly questions of identity for expats, as well as their detrimental affects on local culture, were an important theme for him and likely brought attention to the phenomenon. I couldn't help thinking though...man, I wish one of these novels was written by an African for a change...

Greatest impact: Identity and mortality are main themes of The Sheltering Sky and this novel does a great job examining these ideas. It also accurately portrays the feeling you get when you're in a strange country and the relationship of people who were once close but don't know how to get back to what they once had. What really got me ultimately was the desert itself and its power to change people.

Recommended for: People who enjoy novels about expats. If you like the work W. Somerset Maugham. If you like books that question the nature of identity/mortality. OR simply if it's a long, cold winter and you just need a book to make you feel warm again.

Overall:

"It was the end of the line"