Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
In Al Aswany's follow-up to The Yacoubian Building (2005), Egyptian students and professors find scant refuge in post-9/11 Chicago. Originally published in Egypt in 2007, and a bestseller in France, the novel was inspired by the author's student days in the Windy City. His grad-student characters are in the United States to study histology on scholarships sponsored by the Egyptian government. Shaymaa Muhammadi is a modest, veiled, devout Muslim who, at 30-plus, has almost despaired of finding a husband. Top student Tariq Haseeb is given to boorish behavior, especially around women he likes. Ahmad Danana is an arrogant slacker whose scholarship is safe only if he spies on fellow students for the Egyptian secret police. Nagi Abd al-Samad, a dissident poet blackballed from Cairo's university system, seeks a safe harbor in science. Most of their professors are long-term Egyptian exiles. Muhammad Salah married for a green card but has never forgotten his activist Egyptian girlfriend Zeinab; he's still stung by her long-ago accusations of cowardice. Cardiac surgeon Karam Doss, a Coptic Christian, fled Egypt's regime-sanctioned religious intolerance. Ra'fat Thabit is undone when his daughter Sarah becomes a drug addict. American John Graham is a '60s holdover who still cherishes the radical ideals long forsaken by his fellow baby boomers. Rounding out the cast are wives, lovers and an arch-villain, General Safwat Shakir, who rose through the ranks of Egypt's totalitarian state by "improving" torture methods. Now, as an envoy in Washington, he extends his government's oppressive reach to Egyptian expatriates. Sexual obsessions (acted upon in lurid detail) intertwine with polemics: Characters mouth Al Aswany's many pet peeves, among them America's support of repressive Middle Eastern regimes like Egypt's and the pernicious influence of Saudi Arabia's repressive culture on Islam. The story lines converge when Egypt's dictator visits Chicago, testing the mettle of dissidents and loyalists alike. Racy delivery and breathless cliffhangers scarcely conceal the author's pessimism about democracy's future in Egyptor, for that matter, in the United States. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly
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Egyptian author al Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) weaves a vivid tapestry of clashing cultures in post-9/11 Chicago. Dr. Ra'fat Thabit, an Egyptian-American professor at the University of Illinois Medical School, has burrowed deep into American culture, but finds his identity threatened after his rebellious daughter falls under the sway of a shady boyfriend. Ra'fat's colleague, Dr. Muhammad Shamay, retreats from his American wife into extended reveries of his life in Cairo in the 1970s when he was young and in love with a revolutionary. His histology student, Nagi Abd al-Samad, really wants to be a poet. Nagi begins a relationship with an American girl named Wendy (who just so happens to be Jewish). Meanwhile, Shymaa Muhammadi, a medical student who wears a veil, finds her traditional values under siege when Tariq Haseeb, another Egyptian med student, begins seducing her with dogged persistence. The characters are beautifully realized—Ra'fat's family trouble is especially well done—and though their cumulative effect is muted, each of the story lines is individually compelling. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
*Starred Review* Aswany came to Chicago from Egypt in the late 1980s to attend the University of Illinois. A practicing dentist in Cairo, he became a best-selling novelist with The Yacoubian Building (2002), about the occupants of a Cairo apartment building. In his newest galvanizing novel, he creates another galaxy of lives, this time transforming the medical school at the University of Illinois into a seething microcosm of contentious politics, religious beliefs, and ambitions. Marshaling a magnetic cast of professors, Egyptian émigrés with American wives and children, and Egyptian students on visas and in culture shock, Aswany, using alternating points of view, uncoils a dramatic yet darkly hilarious plot involving imperiled marriages and covert political activity. Neatly smashing any notion of monolithic ethnicity and contrasting extreme ideology with determined morality, Aswany also expresses deep compassion for women, especially in the stories of two lonely, pious students and that of a desperately job-seeking black woman married to a white professor. Brilliant and forthright in his insights into sexuality, racism, and tyranny; empathic in his psychological intensity; and righteous in his protest of covert post-9/11 brutality and injustice, Aswany has written a daring novel of our delusions and dreams, vulnerabilities and strengths.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal
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In this absorbing novel by best-selling Egyptian author Al Aswany (The Yacoubian Building), Egyptian medical students and professors at the University of Illinois Medical School experience various culture clashes and interpersonal problems. Shy and seemingly very religious, Shaymaa finds herself lost in her new life until she begins a relationship with the brilliant but repressed and miserable Tariq. This is the first relationship for each, and the author traces their emotional and sexual trials and failures as the two become closely attached. Another story line concerns a professor whose daughter has taken up with a young American artist and has followed him out of her parents' house and into cocaine addiction and sexual liberation. Egyptian politics and the repressive society under President Mubarak affect the lives of all expatriates, as evidenced by the presence of an older student named Danana, who is actually an agent of the Egyptian security department. Some of the American characters occasionally do and say things that, possibly as a result of the translation, strike discordant notes. Otherwise, the author is a fine, observant storyteller, and there is a warmth and intelligence informing these mostly sad stories. Recommended for larger collections.--Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.