KEY POINTS:
Author, dentist and political activist Alaa Al Aswany is not a man for tricksy literary devices. He is a story-teller. Make that stories, plural. Like his previous novel The Yacoubian Building, this is a multi-narrative compilation of people and plots.
The earlier book took its characters and crises from an apartment block in central Cairo. Here, things happen at the University of Illinois Medical Centre, where
Aswany studied in the 1980s. There is a cast of ... not quite thousands. They include Ra'fat, immigrant to the United States, propagandist for the Western Way and denigrator of all other ways; his friend Salah, the academic with male menopause problems; dedicated, devout, eventually damaged Shaymaa, the young woman thrown into campus life; Danana, the pot-bellied, sexually predatory agent of the Secret Police.
Oh, and a whole heap of Americans. The narratives teem with urban myth, folk tale, dreams, anecdotes, scandals. There is the drunken speech that helped rebuild a city, the pyrotechnic perils of fried peppers, the quickest way to alienate a potential father-in-law, the genesis of cell photography.
Aswany loves to share his research with the reader. No, he insists on sharing his research with the reader. Hear about the original Native Americans of the Great Lakes area. Hear about the modern persecution of Christian Copts, about developments in histology, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the meretricious nature of Modern Art, sexual practices from A to W. The author's lectures begin on the first page with the genocidal behaviour of Pilgrim settlers, and continue till the last page, where he's into the hallucinatory effects of anaesthesia.
When Aswany stops being didactic and concentrates on being dramatic, things canter forward. And sideways. And backwards. The plot frequently teeters on the edge of (and occasionally lurches into) soap opera, especially in the final scenes, where you get a drug overdose, a beating from the FBI, a fatal shooting, a sexual rejection, a terminated pregnancy.
No, I am not spoiling things: you can see and hear them all coming. The clash of cultures meeting and the grunts of bodies meeting are recurring motifs in the book. The former starts on page 1, the latter on page 8.
There are perceptive studies of those poised or adrift between contrasting lifestyles and values, and minute examinations of individual behaviour, especially when it's in any way aberrant.
There are severe judgments of American racism and greed, and of Egypt: "corrupt ... illiterate ... despotic ... scientifically backward." Read it in big gulps. After all, it seems to have been largely written that way.
Chicago
By Alaa Al Aswany (Fourth Estate $34.99)
* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
