Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #399 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Daily Telegraph
'...an engaging series of stories, peopled with wonderful characters, that builds to a passionate climax.'

Sunday Telegraph
'...offers fascinating insights into a modern Muslim society.'

Sunday Times
'a restless human drama and a resonant history lesson.'

Customer Reviews

Egyptian society unveiled: disturbing, charming, enlightening and more
The threads of The Yacoubian Building twist together to create a compelling and easily digested story. It's a series of individual tales set in modern Egypt, each offering a slightly different view of life in a modern middle-eastern city, where lives overlap in an old colonial apartment block. Once I'd read enough to keep the characters straight in my mind the pages absolutely flew by; I found it to be very engaging and absorbing.
We meet various characters whose lives are enhanced / overturned / damaged by the events which unfold as the plot weaves between them. The Yacoubian Building offers western readers like myself a fascinating glimpse at how life might be lived at different social levels in Cairo; you can almost get swept away in the deliberate bustle and hustle of the street life which the novel brilliantly evokes. The book also explains how a Muslim youth might come to be radicalised - but it is not a book about Muslim extremism. It also reveals political corruption, the reality of being a young working woman in Egyptian society, the nature of love and how it can be found when least expected, how a homosexual might struggle to find a permanent partner and any form of social acceptance, and how some folk still mourn the loss of grandeur which faded along with the old colonial influence.
There's plenty of sex in The Yacoubian Building, too; some of it is sensually delirious, some of it is graphically unpleasant and sordid, and most of it is honestly believable.
Not all of the plot threads come to a satisfactory end (I couldn't help wondering what happened to some of the minor characters), and if you're looking for an upbeat and positive conclusion then you may not be entirely happy with the way some of these stories are resolved. However, I'm glad the author resisted the temptation to neatly sew everything together and, despite some of the bitter endings, my overall impression of The Yacoubian Building is positive. I'll definitely look out for other books by the same author, and appreciate the very sympathetic and considered work of the translator.
8/10

An interesting slice of Cairo life
Al Aswany populates the Yacoubian Building with a set of socially diverse characters and then relates a set of stories involving various residents. This device allows him to create a portrait of life in Cairo; the injustices suffered by the poor, the corruption of the elite, the political and economic realities of a repressed society and the way religion is used by different players to achieve their purposes.

The main characters are each introduced in some detail and because there are a large number of them, this means that lengthy digressions into the background of characters are still taking place halfway through the book. This tends to almost bog the narrative down in places. The other disadvantage of having so many central characters is that it makes it difficult to develop them in any real way. Though a number of them do emerge by the end of the book as having the necessary depth to make them interesting, others remain close to being stereotypes. The novel is an interesting slice of modern Cairo life and as such is a rewarding read, but it doesn't quite ever become totally engrossing.

Uneven and somewhat Challenging
I read this because it was recommended on The Book Show with Mariella Frostrup and it sounded interesting. It is a loosely connected series of stories following the lives of a group of people living in an apartment building in the heart of Cairo. It was represented to be sexy, funny and intriguing.
I enjoyed the book, but I would say that it wasn't at all funny, and the sex, although there is plenty of it is often complex, tragic and dark. The story starts off in a fairly pedestrian way, introducing you to the various characters and setting up their narratives. It then gets increasingly dark, tragic and at times horribly disturbing with issues such as torture, police brutality, rape, corruption and religious fundamentalism rearing their heads.
About half way through the book we are plunged headlong into the dark undercurrents of Egyptian society and emerge only in the last few pages of the book in what seems like a highly incongruous, and to be honest, given all that precedes it, unlikely, happy ending.
This book is well written and engaging but I found the rapid swing into the seamier side of life quite challenging at times.
Parts of the book recalled one of my favourite books of all time, Justine by Lawrence Durrell, the first book in the Alexandria Quartet, which also swings between the poetic and the horrific, so maybe this is just what life in Cairo is like. An interesting, but ultimately quite unpleasant read.