Despite global success with The Yacoubian Building , Alaa Al-Aswany is not giving up his day job, he tells Sam Bayoumi
Popular authors rarely advertise their home address or that of their place of work. Particularly not authors who might court controversy. But outside the apartment building where the author of the Arab world-bestseller The Yacoubian Building works is an illuminated sign reading “Dr Alaa Al-Aswany, Dentist, MS University of Illinois, USA, 4th floor”.
Despite the international acclaim of his first novel (it has been translated into about 20 languages), the box office-smash movie that was made of it and the runaway success of his newest book, Chicago, which
has outsold its predecessor, Al-Aswany keeps up the day job. The most famous dentist in Egypt still sees patients six days a week – with occasional breaks to jet off on international book tours. On Fridays, from 4pm onwards, after peering into the last mouth of the afternoon, he sets aside time for visiting journalists.
Interviews are conducted in the surgery, in the presence of the dentist’s chair and trays of alarming looking instruments. It’s a highly unliterary – not to say unnerving – setting for a chat. But Al-Aswany himself is an entirely genial presence, a large man who laughs frequently and speaks with the gravelly voice of a committed chain-smoker. A packet of Kents is never far from his hand.
“No writer ever makes money in Egypt,” he says, by way of explaining why each morning he continues to don his white coat. “Not even Naguib Mahfouz – he worked every day as a civil servant until he retired.” Al-Aswany is unclear exactly how many copies of The Yacoubian Building have been sold (“I take what my publisher tells me and then multiply it by three”), but what is undisputed is the fact that, soon after publication, Yacoubian became the most talked about book in Egypt and the country’s best-selling novel of the past decade. Like the Harry Potter stories, it reached an audience that would never normally read a book.
According to Al-Aswany, the idea for Yacoubian came while he was walking in the once-chic neighbourhood of Garden City, where his office is located. An old apartment block was being torn down; half the building was gone, leaving the rooms and hallways of the other part exposed, like an opened-up dolls house. “Those rooms once had life,” says Al-Aswany, “people who lived and people who died”. The image remained with him for years until he finally sat down to write his novel.
Al-Aswany claims to be mystified by the book’s success, but it’s not hard to see why Egyptians were enthralled. The author employs his cast of soap-operatic characters (corrupted innocent, aged playboy, bullying businessman, self-loathing gay) – most of whom inhabit a once-grand apartment block in downtown Cairo – to work his way through a list of some of the most controversial issues in Egyptian society; drugs, prostitution, corruption, homosexuality, elitism and the allure of radical Islam. With so many taboos being aired, it seems incredible Al-Aswany got the manuscript published.
“There is no real censorship on books in Egypt, but the big publishers were afraid. So I found a small publisher who was very courageous. We put small numbers out at first and, almost straight away, it was selling in an unbelievable way. By the time anyone official was aware of it, it was too late, the book was out there.”
Trouble came with last year’s transferral of the novel onto the big screen. Residents of the real Yacoubian Building, where AlAswany had his first dental studio in a part of what was his father’s former office, smelled money and hired lawyers to get them a cut of what was the biggest budget ever lavished on an Egyptian film. More than 100 MPs clamoured for the film to be censored saying it was “spreading obscenity and debauchery”. MP Mustafa Bakri, who spearheaded the campaign said, “As a citizen, I felt hurt when I watched it”. Other citizens obviously felt quite differently because the film was as big a hit in Egypt as the novel. It has since gone on to screen around the world. However, Al-Aswany was not invited to the film premiere of The Yacoubian Building: “National security forces objected to my presence,” he says.
In February of this year, Al-Aswany’s second novel, Chicago, was published in Arabic. It’s set in the US city where he studied medicine in the 1980s and follows the lives of another ensemble cast, in this case, a mix of Americans and Egyptian immigrants. The former dental student says he has nothing but good memories of his time at the University of Illinois. “Once I was walking on the campus,” he says, “and my entire master’s thesis was blown out of my hands by the wind. The pages flew everywhere. People stopped their cars and got out to help me catch all the pages.”
In common with his first novel, Chicago is a page-turner and it has already gone through eight editions in Arabic in eight months (it will be published in English early next year). Al-Aswany is, he says, working on a new novel, but at this point the doorbell chimes ”Silent Night” to announce the arrival of the next interviewer. Our appointment is finished. On the way out I pick up a card advertising Al-Aswany’s dental services via a series of glowing testimonials: “I’ve got a perfect work in my mouth,” writes “John Everingham, British lawyer”. We wait to learn if his dentist has another perfect work in his head. |
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