The Prospect Reading Group met recently to discuss Alaa Al Aswany’s novel, The Yacoubian Building. This report was put together by a member of the group, the writer Mary Ann Hushlak:

Readers found themselves hesitating at first about this book, because the first 50-odd pages dwell so much on sex and slimebags. But once the politics were brought into the relationships, it all became rather more interesting. Even so, we asked ourselves, was it credible that most of the relationships revolved around exploitative sex? Was it soap opera or was it reportage? Was the building truly important or just a device? Had the author constructed a novel, or a series of interconnected short stories, and did that matter?

The Yacoubian building itself is described as an Art Deco apartment built in downtown Cairo when ‘downtown’ was a sophisticated part of the city. Now, the storerooms on the roof are rented to poor immigrants, who live cheek by jowl with pre-1952 revolution cosmopolitans and military officers in the downstairs apartments. The building is, in effect, the equivalent of a noisy street. What the building is not is a ‘character’, in the way that it is in Nicholas Rinaldi’s Between Two Rivers or in George Perec’s masterpiece, Life: A User’s Manual. In these latter novels, the focus is on the interior life spent in the apartments. In The Yacoubian Building, life faces out to the world.

Corruption and being corrupted is everywhere in this novel – there is no escape. Yet for all that, one couple does find love. Their relationship may have started from a corrupt premise but – human beings being what they are – they find the tiny space that remains free from distortion.

Was the story soap opera or reportage? There are parallels between this kind of expose of cultural, political and social corruption during the first Gulf War, and the novels of Charles Dickens. Soap drama is usual much more structured in its storytelling. But they can have the same kind of larger-than-life characters: in this case, the ageing roue who longs for Egypt’s cosmopolitan past; the doorman’s son, who becomes a fervent Islamist, his childhood sweetheart who must provide for her widowed mother and siblings and guard her honour; and the homosexual intellectual who pursues young men from the villages. Perhaps it is possible to be both reportorial and dramatic.

For some readers, the characters leaned towards two-dimensionality, something considered to be more in keeping with the short story as a form. This led to the question, what defines a novel as distinct from interconnected short stories? For others in the group, the interesting distinction is between stories grounded in oral speech – the sense that they could as easily be told as read – and those from a written culture.