The Yacoubian Building

The Yacoubian Building is the title of an Egyptian novel published in 2002 and of a film released four years later. Alaa el-Aswany's novel tells the stories of some half-dozen contemporary inhabitants of downtown Cairo. I found it interesting but not compelling. Usually I try to give a novel and its film some inbetween time, whichever I experience first. For reasons I can no longer remember (perhaps because I wasn't that impressed with the novel or didn't expect to be with the movie) I didn't and I saw the movie a week after I'd finished the novel. The novel and the film have been wildly popular in Egypt. That's certainly one reason to read and see them, i.e. if you have an interest in Egypt or Arab culture more generally. Another is that one of the novel's main characters, Hatim Rasheed, is homosexual. Hatim is a successful newspaper editor. He's not "out" (nobody apparently in Egypt is) but he's unmarried and makes no pretense of being a ladies' man. After years of various failed arrangements he hopes to mentor a young man into a lifelong companionship. Not that the young man need live with him (that would be asking too much!) but that he might become near, dear and particularly attentive. Hatim thinks he has found such a companion in the person of a policeman, whose career and marriage (!) Hatim promotes. None of it however works out and Hatim is sad, aging and lonely at book's end. Reading The Yacoubian Building will take you back to sometime in the early last century. El-Aswany does not introduce Hatim to damn him, but whenever he writes about his condition there's much talk about "the homosexual". These passages read as though they were put there to enlighten an uninformed but excitedly curious public.

The movie is almost three hours long. It's striking how effortlessly exotic it can be, just the sights and sounds of Cairo bring that about. Most of the novel reaches its apogee of unfamiliarity merely in the characters' names. Viewing the movie I was continually struck by how much had been left out and how confusing it might be to a naive viewer, but that underspecification might have given it a mysterious momentum which it lacked for me. The homosexual Hatim is of course in the movie too, but cinema being a more popular genre it's not enough that he be left sad, aging and lonely. A hustler (the cutest actor in a decidedly uncute cast) sees to it that Hatim has an appropriate terminus.

Bottom line: the book and the film are must read/see if you're interested in homosexuality in contemporary Arab culture. Otherwise, stay home and re-view The Children's Hour.

"Covering" — obligatory reading!

Our man from the Tar Heel State informs me that Kenji Yoshino's Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights has been chosen as this summer's obligatory reading for incoming freshmen to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I couldn't agree more. I expect everyone at our last meeting would concur. It's one of the best books we've read. Do take a look at it—even if you aren't interested in civil rights!

Espirit d'escalator

Descending into the Dupont Metro Station from the northern entrance at 20th & P, you may have noticed that thirty years after its completion the circular rim haloing the escalators has been written on. It's the last stanza of the Gay Gray Poet's "The Wound-Dresser" (a timely reminiscence of the horrors of war to a later, glory-struck generation):

Thus in silence in dreams' projections,

Returning, resuming, I thred my way through the hospitals,

The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,

I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,

Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,

The next two lines, concluding the poem, are

(Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested,

Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Homophobic? I don't think so. They are in parenthesis (representing interior monologue), and the rim does seem filled.

woodworms & tallboys

"Where would you find homosexual woodworms? … In a tallboy." From Anthony Shaffer's play Sleuth (1970). Quoted out of context, but context here doesn't seem to matter. I can think of no explanation that makes this even remotely funny. I think I understand "tallboys" and "woodworms" ... it must be the "homosexual" part — how embarrassing! I don't know whether this quip's in the first (Mankiewicz) movie. The more sittable among you may inform me whether or not it's in the forthcoming Branagh.

A Defiant Entreaty

Turn to the list of Edmund White's other books, "BY THE SAME AUTHOR," opposite the title page of My Lives. I defy anyone to make any sense of its ordering ... beziehungsweise, as the Germans might say, I beseech anyone to tell me any sense they can make of it!

The Third Friend?

We didn't discuss (because I hadn't yet read it myself?) the supplemental essay at the end of the paperback edition, "My Lives, 'My Master,' My Reader." White laments the (only) three friends he's lost through his writing. Susan Sontag of course we know about (Caracole). T, it turns out, was lost as well with the publication of My Lives. Who I wonder was the third? Larry Kramer naturally comes to mind, but how much of a loss could he have been!?

(Wikipedia, by the way, is a floodgate to interviews with Edmund White. David Shankbone's, which I referred to last night, is so hot on the pixels that it was "published" this month!)

EVW III's generosity

A question I forgot to ask last night was how reading My Lives changed anyone's understanding or perception of Edmund White, whether there was anything really new and revelatory in it. Given that most of us had read nothing by him before, this was perhaps not such a lost opportunity. For myself, however, the big revelation was that White hadn't been born prattling away en français. He's so smart and sophisticated I assumed without knowing it that he was fluent in French at least by the time he hit The Big Apple. It was touching to learn how late he learned to speak French and with what difficulty. (And nothing roots his upbringing so irremediably in the fifties as his having studied French at Cranbrook without ever having to speak or hear it!) This was a big surprise for me but is a part of a larger value of My Lives, which unfortunately we scarcely touched on last night: to wit, how someone from the well insulated heartland comes gradually over a life time to make contact with a larger world. It's summed up in a way by his comments on page 351: "My true friends share my feeling of being a tourist on earth, a visitor dropping in on life ... [striving] to be wordly without being blasé, to be innocent without being naive—to know everything and to take nothing or granted...." This is the highest and most admirable generosity, feeling generous about life.