Fire in Cairo

I just finished The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany. My book club will be discussing it this Saturday night. Back in January, The New Yorker ran a piece on the contemporary Arabic novel and this book was mentioned. The description of the novel appealed to me because I wanted to read a book that shed light on Arab culture and lifestyle but that did not focus on the Israel/Palestine conflict. The novel is good (but not great), and reads like a latin "telenovela." The story centers around a cast of characters that live and work in an apartment building in Cairo in the early 1990s. Every conceivable strata of Egyptian society is represented in this novel, from the impoverished and uneducated rabble that live on the building's roof to the wealthy westernized residents of the larger apartments. The book provides a vivid portrait of various elements of Egyptian society: the political corruption, the brutality by police, the tension between the secular authority and the Islamists, the treatment of women, homosexuality in an Arab country. I come away from this book with a real appreciation of the complexities of that society. It should spark a good discussion.