Alaa Al Aswany

Yacoubian Building (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Yacoubian Building holds all that Egypt was and has become over the 75 years since its namesake was built on one of downtown Cairo's main boulevards. From the pious son of the building's doorkeeper and the raucous, impoverished squatters on its roof, via the tattered aristocrat and the gay intellectual in its apartments, to the ruthless businessman whose stores occupy its ground floor, each sharply etched character embodies a facet of modern Egypt-one where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies, where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism, and where an older, less violent vision of society may yet prevail. Alaa Al Aswany's novel caused an unprecedented stir when it was first published in 2002 and has remained the world's best selling novel in the Arabic language since.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: I.B.Tauris
• Seitenzahl: 266
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. September 2004
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781617971860
• Artikelnr.: 41339265

Autorenporträt

Alaa Al Aswany is the internationally bestselling author of The Yacoubian Building and Chicago. A journalist who writes a controversial opposition column, Al Aswany makes his living as a dentist in Cairo.

Rezensionen

"A bewitching political novel of contemporary Cairo that is also an engagé novel about sex, a romantic novel about power and a comic yet sympathetic novel about the vagaries of the human heart. Even the least politically oriented reader will find it engrossing." - New York Times Book Review

"All novels contain invisible cities, even those set in actual metropolises. Ulysses does not unfold in Ireland but in James Joyce's mind. The same goes for the sprawling, heaving Cairo depicted in Alaa Al Aswany's tremendously likable new novel. . . . Occasionally it seems as if an indiscreet superintendent, jangling keys and all, is taking us around the Yacoubian Building, whispering about secrets hushed up. This vision of life connects high with low, rich with poor, through shared vices and needs." - John Freeman, San Francisco Chronicle

"[L]ike the late Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa Al Aswany is a world writer, making Egyptian concerns into human ones and beautifully illuminating our always extraordinary and sometimes sad and baffling world." - The Times (London)

"[A] hilarious, sensual, bawdy and beautiful novel." - Nerve

"There's some real human tragedy (and comedy) at play here, and the panorama you get of a nation on edge is an eye-opener." - Seattle Times

"[A] frank and hilarious soap opera set to an Arabic beat." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

"No other Egyptian, or Arab writer for that matter, has so boldly broken through the literary stagnation of the last 50 years by addressing these themes. Except perhaps Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Laureate who penned the Cairo Trilogy in the 1950s." - Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Foreign Policy Magazine

"With its interlocking vignettes and intertwining characters, Alaa al-Aswany's hip and racy novel creates a complex narrative of contemporary Egyptian life." - Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, The Daily Star (Beirut)

"Richly peppered with complex characters. . . . A provocative survey of the social and political pressures of the present that has many Egyptians looking nostalgically to their more tolerant and hopeful past." - Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

"Captivating and controversial .. . .an amazing glimpse of modern Egyptian society and culture." - New York Review of Books