Published in 2002 in Arabic and in 2007 by Fourth Estate in English, this novel evokes the lives of a large cast of characters who either live, work or are associated with an apartment block in Cairo. In its sense of community it evokes for me… Liverpool! There is that street in Liverpool where the following could happen too: ‘The distance between Baehler Passage, where Zaki Bey el Dessouki lives, and his office in the Yacoubian Building is not more than a hundred meters, but it takes him an hour to cover it each morning as he is obliged to greet his friends on the street.’
I picked it up after flicking through it because it read well and I wanted to explore lots of things going on in the novel more fully: how to juggle a large cast of characters using the free indirect speech technique; the uses of omniscience; plot patterning (Chapter one returns in last chapter);characterisation by the switching from one consciousness to another, within a chapter or within a page.
The biggest writing riddle for me was how the author moves in and out of past and present tense so gracefully in such an epic novel. I never quite got the pattern, though the slide in and out never bothered me so there must be a pattern.
By the second part of the novel, this ‘hang’ of multiple characters starts to gain momentum and firm up into a more mobile plot – certain characters emerge as more important and the trials of one couple starts to become central. It ends in marriage so therefore on an upbeat. Along the way, the author does the main gay relationship in the novel well and the big age gap relationships astutely; the rags to riches story is smartly developed. I found the political episodes a little flat (eg the Muslim Brotherhood speeches) or predictable, though I am not sure how much that is because I did not agree with the politics of the novel. All in all, The Yakoubian Building is a tour de force of how to write this kind of ‘multiple points of view’ narrative.
Miscellaneous further musings: Is the reverence of things French only the characters’ – ie a demonstration of how colonialism remains in the minds of the characters/ inhabitants? Or is it also an opinion of the author? The author shows the power-politics hyphen convincingly. There is no great heroic character who is young and with agency. A society apparently controlled by the older generation and by men.