Plus ça change

I asked monshu what he thought of Somer, now that he's finished almost two books by him, and his response was, "He's entertaining." Which I suppose is all we really ask of our genre fiction. Maybe I'll read more from him later, but for now I'm still trying to do some reading that matters. And, as is so often the case, I'm getting bogged down.

It was months ago now that I started reading Hanan al-Shaykh's Story of Zahra (حكاية زهرة), by progress has been slow and fitful. I think my difficulty is the lack of plot. The story of a mentally-disturbed woman's difficulties in a fairly traditional Lebanese Shi'a community are harrowing but narrated very episodically, so it's easy to put down and hard to pick up again. But what really thwarted me was the chapter where he uncle describes his political formation. Now it's back to Zahra's voice and she's narrating the civil war, so things should pick up a little steam again.

Like Zahra, Alaa al-Aswany's Yacoubian Building (عمارة يعقوبيان) gained notoriety in the Arab world for its frank handling of taboo subjects while also becoming a bestseller and doing well in translation. But I'm put off by his tone. The book may have been written in 2002, but the patronising descriptions of women and homosexuals would be at home in the work of a macho American writer from the 1960s. I'd be willing to cut the man some slack given his cultural milieu except that fellow Cairene Naguib Mahfouz handled the same subject matter more sympathetically in Midaq Alley (زقاق المدق), and that emerged a decade before Aswany did!

Structurally, Yacoubian owes more than a little to Midaq as well. The main difference is that the denizens of the Yacoubian Building, from the slum dwellers on the roof to the millionaires in the rez-de-chaussée, represent a broader sampling of Cairene society than Midaq Alley, which was more plebeian. But there are haves and have-nots in both communities, and in the end everything seems to come down to commercial transactions. Servants exchange loyalty for profit, young women exchange beauty for employment and security, and enough money buys anything, even happiness.

Also, it's odd how little seems to have changed in 55 years. I'm still waiting for a cell phone or a computer to pop up in one of Aswany's vignettes. As I told the Old Man, I guess the problem is that the characters introduced so far are either too poor to have them or, if rich, too old to give a damn. For all I know, the author may even be striving for nostalgia and setting his stories somewhat earlier than he wrote them. All will become clear, I guess, those hopefully before too much more time has passed. I want to move on to something truly engaging again, if I can figure out what that would be.