The Yacoubian Building

This is not a funny way of spelling 'Jacobean'. Forget half-timbered cottages. This very grand Cairo building, described in the eponymous book by Alaa al Aswany, was built by Mr Agop Yacoubian (could also be transliterated 'Agopian', 'Yakopian', 'Hakopian' – basically translates as 'Jacobson'), the Armenian, for the cream of Egyptian society in 1934, naming it after himself (there's a similar custom in Istanbul, where many buildings have the names of the original owners, eg the 'Pamuk Buildings'). At that time Cairo was like any European capital, clean, tidy and 'everyone knew their place'. Educated Egyptians had gained their education abroad and many had a secret hankering for life in France.

A revolution and many changes in society later, the building has come down in the world during the period of the first Gulf War described in the book. Shacks on the roof, used for storage by the first tenants (whose servants lived in their flats) were later used as accommodation for servants, and later still lost their association with the flat they belonged to and are now rented out to all comers – who still have a very posh address. Some of the flats continue to be rented by the original tenants, others have new residents, such as the mistress of an ambitious capitalist or a gay newspaper editor.

The book follows the lives of a number of people in the building, over a (slightly unclear) period of a few months. Some people take benefit of opportunities offering themselves to them – even at some considerable price; others, prevented from achieving their dream for seemingly unjust reasons, change their lives completely; some get very close to disaster but manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat; others, out of greed or ambition, get themselves into very expensive hot water indeed. The level of violence perpetrated within the building, or to its residents in other locations, is quite high. I would worry about renting a flat there!

The book offers a fascinating, and rather scary, insight into life in modern-day Egypt (has anything changed in the last 15 years?). There's the contrast between the elderly, and sometimes not so elderly, western-oriented people on the one hand and the young Islamists and their desire to become martyrs for the cause, if they have to, on the other; there's the police who, it seems, can be bought by anyone, and whose methods of investigation/interrogation are far from sensitive; there are employers who satisfy their needs with the young female employees; and there are the many fly-by-night dodgy characters who you shouldn't trust with anything. But there are some decent people, too – though they seem to make themselves vulnerable to abuse by all the other groups.

At one stage you think that the book might be a bit disappointing, and that it might only give a snapshot of people's lives; but in fact most situations are resolved by the end, though not always as you might like. It's very readable and would be quite nice to read on a flight from London to Cairo, though it is a bit denser, more intense, and much better written than the average airport novel.

(Book reviews normally go into my Viola in Vilnius blog, but this fits better here).