![]() ![]() A new elite drawn from the new cadres of power replaces them. As Egypt moved from its cosmopolitan, liberal age in the 1930s and 1940s towards the tumult of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, the original residents of the architectural jewel quietly leave, mostly for self-imposed exile in Europe and the United States. Al Aswany uses a set of characters and crucially the space-the building and its surroundings, Cairo’s downtown-to dissect society at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and how it became what it is.Īl Aswany’s judgement is uncompromisingly clear. Erected in the mid 1930s in Cairo’s newly Europeanized centre, the building is an architectural jewel, and was then the home of a multitude of Egyptian pashas, wealthy Europeans, and star artists. Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2002), which became a bestselling Egyptian and Arab novel worldwide in the past decade, owes its title to the ambition of an Armenian millionaire who wanted immortality through a building that bears his name. ![]()
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