'Imarat Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building), Alaa El-Aswani, Cairo: Miret, 2002. A book review by Amina Elbendary published in Al-Ahram Weekly, 13-19 June 2002

“Amidst what the literary periodical Akhbar Al- Adab has termed the "fictional explosion" currently taking place in Egypt, Alaa El-Aswani's first novel, 'Imarat Yacoubian, stands out”

“The novel tells the story of the inhabitants of the Yacoubian Building, built in 1934 by an Armenian-Egyptian businessman on Soliman Pasha Street in downtown Cairo, a place where many lives intersect.

As the reader soon discovers, this building has many aspects - spatial, architectural, intellectual, political and textual. At the time when the novel is set, both before and shortly after the 1952 Revolution, downtown Cairo, wast al- balad, was the centre of the city. Since then, both the city and the building have greatly changed, as has the middle-class whose members would once have lived there, changes that the novel both acknowledges and laments. The building's tenants change after the Revolution, army officers moving into flats abandoned by the former elite and foreign businessmen.

However, the novel, though set in Cairo, extends well beyond this downtown building, exploring the geographical and political corners of the Egyptian scene and looking back on post- revolutionary events from the perspective of the early 1990s, just as the Gulf War was erupting.

The comparison with Mahfouz's Miramar again comes to mind, for much as does the pension in the Nobel Prize winner's novel, the Yacoubian building here serves as a kind of national locus, the lives of the building's inhabitants adding up to something like the Alaa El-Aswani's History of Modern Egypt. Like the novel's form, this is history traditionally told, connecting money, power and corruption and bringing together wealthy businessmen, corrupt officials and militant fundamentalists, with little in the way of innovative analysis.