ALAA AL ASWANY THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING PDF
Alaa Al Aswany’s empathy and perceptive detail in this novel about the An actual downtown Cairo landmark called the Yacoubian Building is. The Yacoubian Building [Alaa Al Aswany] on *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Yacoubian Building. : The Yacoubian Building: A Novel (): Alaa Al Aswany: Books.
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Big-shot lawyer Kamal el Fouli and his cohort, Hagg Azzam, in whose favor El Fouli rigs the People’s Assembly vote, pepper their wheeling and dealing with “God willing,” and justify their actions by implying that they are but implementing God’s will: Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review ‘s biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers.
Beside the large, fancy apartments a second separate community developed on the roof, where what had originally been rooms for storage and laundry were eventually converted into tiny and Spartan residential units. Built in for an Armenian millionaire, its fall from grace is for this author just one aspect of Egypt’s general dilapidation.
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Both men and women are manipulative and thieving, with women using their seductive prowess to trap men into self-serving situations. Together, they give a biting condemnation of a nation that has squandered its promise and which has been forced to compromise its own principles, resulting in a corrupt and undemocratic political system dominated by a single party the fictitious “Patriotic Party”, a thinly veiled version of Egypt’s National Democratic Partya society whose most talented members abandon the country for promising careers abroad, and an increasingly disenchanted and restive populace that has no loyalty to the government and which sees extremist Islam as one of the few viable options to counter growing poverty, economic stagnation, and a perceived degradation of morals and lack of social cohesion.
The Yacoubian Building
Built in the s, the building was an “architectural gem” that housed “the cream of society”, but it underwent considerable change over the decades that followed. All goes well until the final question — “Your father — what’s his profession, Taha? Cairo’s Yacoubian building is past its prime: Among them is Taha el Shazli, the son of the doorkeeper, whose great ambition since childhood has been to join the police.
Yet Aswany is so good-natured that even his terrorist is allowed to enjoy, before his martyrdom, a paradisial marriage portrayed in the shimmering palette of gihadi bad taste. sawany
The Yacoubian Building – Wikipedia
For other uses, see Yacoubian Building disambiguation. When Hagg Muhammad Azzam, desperate to protect his business interests, seeks a meeting with “the Big Man” at his cement Yacojbian, he is greeted not by a person but by a disembodied voice through a loudspeaker. The rose opened to the touch of his fingers and he watered it more than once till it was quenched. Along the way, he is beaten and yacoubbian by the police, his ideals alsa any possible last belief in the integrity of the Egyptian thhe and system shaken beyond repair — though even in the final confrontation it is the personal affront that drives him to action and that also leads him to fail in the larger objectives, as Al Aswany offers a man driven to militancy for personal reasons, not Islamic ideals.
But instead of ending his book with an explosive bang, one that might leave an indelible mark on the reader, the novelist chooses to keep things light, resorting to a Hollywood-style finale, where everything ties up nicely and happily. Al Aswany, a dentist by profession and a regular contributor to Egyptian newspapers and magazines, derisively portrays the contradiction between many of the protagonists’ thoughts, actions and utterances and their piousness.
Meanwhile his ex-girlfriend has to sell herself to make ends meet. Help WWB bring you the best new writing from around the world.
This article is about the novel. In following Talal’s ascension to martyrdom, the author illustrates the Egyptian government’s vicious clamping down on Islamists, a policy that the book suggests has only fed the hatred the young feel hte their leaders and aggrandized their sense of betrayal.
Al Aswany writes of its fictional counterpart as having been designed “in the high classical European style, the balconies decorated with Greek faces carved in stone, the columns, steps, and corridors all of natural marble.
In fact, The Yacoubian Building is arguably oversexed, too many of the characters too simplistically driven by lust, such as Hatim: All in all, they constitute a loathsome bunch: Al Aswany’s Egypt is a cruel place, one that forces many of its citizens into compromising situations.
Review: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany | Books | The Guardian
For the eponymous film, see The Yacoubian Building film. The Yacoubian building itself is a once-handsome art deco block on the boulevard known now as Talaat Harb, but here called by its old name of Suleiman Basha Street. The moment you take power, they submit to you and grovel to you and you can do what you want with them.
The truth is that in Mubarak’s Egypt, just as in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad or even the shah’s Tehran, sex is one thing but the boss is quite another, and the difference is a matter of life and death. It is also only as of late that authors and filmmakers have begun to examine the omnipotent presence of religion in their society. When Taha proves too honest for the Police Academy, he drifts towards Muslim militancy and away from Buhayna, who is meanwhile finding that there are ways of making money out of men without ruining herself for the marriage market.
It has been filmed by Marwan Hamed with a care and expense unprecedented in the Egyptian cinema. The Yacoubian Building is entertaining and does offer a good overview of contemporary Cairo life, but with its many stories and its simplifications can feel more like it skims the surface than truly explores the many hidden depths even as it shares so many intimacies.
The Yacoubian Building unfolds in the former European quarter downtown at the time of the Gulf war. There’s the sex-obsessed Zaki Bey, and his servant Abaskharon — and Abaskharon’s brother Malak, who gets a toehold on the Yacoubian roof and underhandedly manages to take hold of other bits and pieces, with designs for even more.
Some peoples are excitable and rebellious by nature but the Egyptian keeps his head down his whole life long so he can eat.
There’s moral decay throughout The Yacoubian Buildingbut Al Aswany does not so much condemn immorality per se, but rather the double standards, especially where money and influence are involved. If the characters, good and bad, educated or not, have a quality in common, it is a sort of big-city sophistication.