Culture-clash on the campus

Chicago, by Alaa al-Aswani

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Because I spend part of each winter in Egypt, friends from time to time ask me to recommend, not a guide, but a book that will give them the ‘feel’ of that country. Invariably my choice has been The Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel Prize. But since the English publication of Alaa al-Aswani’s The Yakoubian Building in 2007, it too has become, for me, an instant recommendation. This is a remarkable work, in which the goings-on in a venerable residential block, still in actual existence, is brilliantly presented as a microcosm of Cairo life.

With his latest novel, al-Aswani has attempted to create a parallel microcosm, this time in America among Egyptians who have moved there sometimes for political but chiefly for career and economic reasons. His setting is Chicago, as the title indicates, specifically its famed Illinois Medical Centre, at which he himself spent some time as a student. The lives of a number of people, employees and students, in its Histology Department do not so much collide as fleetingly brush against in each other in a narrative that, unlike that of The Yakoubian Building, seems to have been created out of bricks themselves solid enough but precariously joined togehter with cement far too sparsely applied.

Among the numerous characters, three stand out. These are a professor whose pride in everything American, coupled with contempt for everything Egyptian, falters when his emancipated daughter takes up with a American drug-taking painter; a veil-wearing, highly intelligent spinster, on a scholarship to the Centre, whose obedience to a rigorous sexual code gradually disintegrates when she falls in love with a neurotic oddity; and a young dissident poet, presented not, like the other characters, in the third person but through pages from his diary.