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A review by _sarahramadan
The Book of Cairo: A City in Short Fiction by
3.0
I didn't really know what to expect from this book, maybe a collection of stories that really captured the atmosphere of one of my favourite cities. What I found was different, and to be honest I didn't really 'get' a few of these stories, and I found some boring, but some of them were intriguing.
The story which tells the story of how various members of a typical Cairo traffic jam end up there was good; I love stories where different people's lives come together. I was gripped by the story of the sexually frustrated guy smoking weed in his apartment, the descriptions and language explicit in a way I didn't really expect from an Arab writer - he actually ended up in jail for writing so sexually in one of his other books.
The satirical piece on a policeman trying to find The Truth was another that stood out to me, for displaying police brutality and torture methods yet insisting sardonically that policemen who do this are still normal people, because they still fast and read and pace in their apartments.
So I suppose this book really did look into the heart of many issues at the heart of Cairene life that its citizens face and of course when works are translated they do not carry the same essence as they do in their original language so I must take that into account. However I think I was just not really able to sink my teeth into a fair few of these stories, and although I enjoyed reading something different for a change, I ended up being a little underwhelmed.
The story which tells the story of how various members of a typical Cairo traffic jam end up there was good; I love stories where different people's lives come together. I was gripped by the story of the sexually frustrated guy smoking weed in his apartment, the descriptions and language explicit in a way I didn't really expect from an Arab writer - he actually ended up in jail for writing so sexually in one of his other books.
The satirical piece on a policeman trying to find The Truth was another that stood out to me, for displaying police brutality and torture methods yet insisting sardonically that policemen who do this are still normal people, because they still fast and read and pace in their apartments.
So I suppose this book really did look into the heart of many issues at the heart of Cairene life that its citizens face and of course when works are translated they do not carry the same essence as they do in their original language so I must take that into account. However I think I was just not really able to sink my teeth into a fair few of these stories, and although I enjoyed reading something different for a change, I ended up being a little underwhelmed.