Chicago: A Modern Arabic Novel

When Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany’s first novel The Yacoubian Building was published in 2002, overnight it became the bestselling novel in the Arab world. Set in a once grand but now decaying Cairo apartment building, the novel offered a startling insight into the corruption, torture, poverty and sexual harassment that confront ordinary Egyptians in their daily lives.

The Yacoubian Building was subsequently made into Egypt’s most internationally acclaimed (and highest-grossing) film ever, aired as a serial on Arabic satellite television. It also became a bestseller in more than 20 languages. Unsurprisingly, in the midst of all the hype, Al Aswany – an outspoken political activist – was routinely damned in the state-run media for “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad”, an official crime in his country.

The only Arabic-language novel to have created greater buzz and sell more copies since The Yacoubian Building is Al Aswany’s second novel, Chicago, which shifted 25,000 copies in its first week of publication, and has now sold in excess of 100,000 in the Arab-speaking world.

Set on the campus of the University of Illinois Medical Center where Al Aswany himself trained as a dentist (still his day job in Cairo), Chicago explores the interweaving lives of a group of Egyptian students and professors trying to find their bearings in a post-9/11 US. This is far from the Cairo of The Yacoubian Building, but the book is no less concerned with the contemporary Egyptian dilemma. Somewhat strangely, considering the novel’s title, Chicago itself is barely described, save for a long history of the city at the beginning of the book and a brief tour taken by one of the characters.

Instead, it is brought to life in the psychological landscape of the myriad uprooted characters. We meet a veiled PhD candidate from a traditional upper Egyptian city forced to have an abortion after getting pregnant out of wedlock with her Egyptian boyfriend, who in turn must decide whether to abandon her. There’s an emigre who has become so superficially Americanised that he proudly announces he has forgotten how to speak Arabic, but is driven to near insanity when his daughter moves in with her American boyfriend and so compromises her “honour”. Most memorable, however, is an Egyptian State Security informant whose constant religious pronouncements mask a self-serving hypocrisy as he uses his position, as head of the American Egyptian Students Union, to provide the Egyptian Embassy in Washington with information on his fellow students’ activities.

Crises of identity abound, then, and indeed a main theme of Chicago is how cultural upbringing shapes people’s lives across generations as well as beyond geographic boundaries. Nor do the characters experience much by way of the American dream: the country is presented as racist, corrupt and ruthless, with few redeeming qualities.

The plot hinges on a visit to Chicago by the unnamed president of Egypt, a brilliant portrait of real-life Hosni Mubarak: “His hair, dyed jet black, was rumoured to be (in whole or in part) one of the best hairpieces available in the world.” During the visit, close co-operation between the FBI and Egyptian security officials brings home to the Egyptians living there that the oppression and violence of home have followed them to their doorstep.

One male political activist is tortured and threatened with rape by the FBI after being arrested on trumped-up terrorism charges at the behest of their Egyptian counterparts, who, in turn, threaten to punish his family back home unless he stops protesting against the Egyptian regime.

Chicago was first published in weekly instalments in the opposition newspaper Al-Dustour, so the chapters often end with rather contrived cliff-hangers. New characters, especially in the first half of the novel, are introduced at almost too-rapid intervals, and too many of them are not fully brought to life. Instead, they are merely used to represent an idea or dilemma, which can then be clashed with another. The sex scenes, viewed as faintly scandalous back in Egypt, will also strike western readers as timid to the point of being faintly embarrassing. Nevertheless, Chicago is worth reading as a rare opportunity to consider the contemporary Egyptian condition.

John R. Bradley’s new book, ‘Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution’, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in June