![]() ![]() It all comes down to what a person is willing to sell themselves for. Marriage, as we see in one blunt subplot involving the businessman-turned-politician, is just another form of prostitution. Women are subjected to constant sexual harassment if they don’t go along, they’re fired. Bribes are necessary to avoid ending up on the wrong side of a legal dispute, to open a business, or to find a place to live. It seems that one needs two things in abundance to make it in Cairo: luck and hustle. Even though they are all of different classes, genders, and ages, they are all linked because they live, at one time or another in the 1930s era Yacoubian Building, in what used to be a fashionable part of the city. The characters-a poor, young woman a young man who wants to be a police officer a philanderer a businessman who goes into politics a gay newspaper editor and others-show us different slices of that life. This unusual book jumps from character to character to paint a portrait of modern Cairene life. Corruption is everywhere in this novel, in spite of this novel’s deceptively sensual beginning. Alaa al Aswany paints a depressing picture of life in Cairo around the turn of the twenty-first century in The Yacoubian Building (solidly translated by Humphrey T. ![]()
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