Interesting look at life in Egypt following WWII. The Automobile Club can best be described as an elite country club where the British, other foreigners, and the Egyptian monarchy come to gamble and socialize. The employees, however, are all Egyptian and describe themselves as servants. Overseen by the British James Wright, strict rules of procedure and protocol are followed. Alku, a Nubian, carries out these rules with an iron hand often beating the workers.

Set in the Automobile Club and in the home of the Abd el-Azia family, this novel tells the story of several of the family members. The father, once a large land owner in Upper Egypt loses his fortune and is forced to work in the Automobile Club in Cairo. After his death due to a beating by Alku, two of the sons, Kamel and Mahmud, are given work. Kamel's goal is to finish university; Mahmud's goal is to see how much fun he can have and he unwittingly becomes a paid lover of much older women. The daughter, Saleha, marries a man who turns out to be a drug dealer.

The story is a family story, a story of British oppression in Egypt, a story of the beginnings of rebellion, and a story of class. The style is very "straight forward" perhaps due to a translation. It's long, but readable and I became very interested in the characters. ( )

Strange beginning but finally getting down to it 24 pages in. (You can skip the first 23 pages with the car history and the framing story that never reappears.) Clich'ed writing (translation??), Stock characters (good son, devoted mother, evil advisor to the king, bad son, dumb son, good daughter, etc.), Predictable action (a romance adventure that ends up in ...., a revolutionary cell that ends up in..., etc. (I won't tell)), but the interplay of characters and levels (the book jumps back and forth) is interesting. The setting reveals Egypt about to fall to Nasser (never mentioned). So an if you are book desperate, or if you want to know more about Egypt go get it. ( )

The English translation may have lost some of the intended political inferences in Egyptian society. I thought this translated version was laboured and ham-fisted. On the face of it, the novel starts with a coming-to-life of characters in an author's unpublished novel and proceeds by stages to the difficulties faced by impoverished Egyptians. Keeping track of the novel's theme was difficult because the plot was overly detailed with characters who are rather unreal. Only towards the end of the book, does it become evident (to me) that these are metaphors for Egyptian politics. The time spent on allegorical characterization might better have been used for plain-speaking. However, perhaps the author would have been persecuted for such uncensored opinion in a country that has sadly deteriorated in terms of civil liberties. ( )

ho amato molto Palazzo Yacoubian, ma questa volta Al Aswani non riesce a toccare nessuna corda, anzi. Tema anologo a quello di Istanbul di Pamuk, ma oceani di distanza.

Despite setting his novel in Cairo in the 1940’s, Al Aswany expertly evokes the conditions that lead to the Arab spring revolt and the ousting of Mubarak in 2010. He uses the fictitious Automobile Club is a metaphor for Egypt, where the people are fearful and oppressed by their leaders but the seeds of revolt are definitely germinating. His biases are clearly evident in his character development and plotting. The characters are cardboard figures lacking in depth or complexity. The principal narrators are the Gaafar children, especially Kamel and Saleha, who struggle to achieve fulfilling lives through hard work and resistance following the untimely death of their father. Two other siblings, Mahmoud and Fawzy represent the more conservative factions in the Egyptian populace. They seek to adapt to the oppressive regime by engaging in various forms of corruption. Arrayed against the people is an oppressive regime represented by a king (a thinly disguised King Farouk I), who is portrayed as an obese libertine; James Wright, a corrupt British bureaucrat tasked with running things; and Alku, a brutal Nubian overseer. The plot follows several threads, all of which focus on elements of oppression and corruption with endings that are never very surprising.

Notwithstanding his simplistic approaches to his characters and plotting, Al Aswany has written an engaging novel, primarily because he is quite familiar with his subject and clearly has intense feelings about it. He succeeds in immersing the reader in an unfamiliar environment with many interesting and likable characters. Despite his ham-handed approach, the novel is quite entertaining. ( )