Top Notch

I've been cheerfully startled at the quality of the stories in Yusuf Idris's The Cheapest Nights. For quite a few years now I've naively assumed that Egyptian lit starts and ends with the brilliant Naguib Mafouz, with Nawal El Saadawi offering a powerful by-way into particularly feminist concerns. It turns out I'm definitely wrong on the first count (and most likely patronisingly all over the place on the second.)

There are fifteen short stories in the collection from Yusuf Idris and they are all beautifully crafted, but at least five strike me as absolute classics of the genre, up there with Joyce, Chekov, Hemingway and the like. If I were pushed I'd say that The Dregs of the City, in its evocation of the hopelessness of the poor quarter at the back of the mosque of Al Azhar, comprises in its 40 or so pages an urgent social critique that outdoes that of any equivalent writer from the west. The thing is that somehow he makes us understand that the denizens of the neighborhood in question are not hopeless at all because Shohrat, the servant and unwilling lover of Judge Abdallah, who journeys into that forbidden territory in search of her and his missing wristwatch, is more than a match for him, despite the degradation he visits upon her. The tale escapes summary and easy understanding, a notable characteristic of so much that is in this slim volume.

I suppose I think of Naguib Mafouz as a writer in the tradition of Dickens, considering the sense of The Cairo Trilogy as a sprawling epic featuring real 'characters' in the old-fashioned, but eminently valid, sense of the word. Yusuf Idris strikes me as his antithesis, based on what I've read so far: brutally focused and, somehow, cold in his analysis, yet wonderfully non-judgmental. I'd love to read more, but I've got a feeling that not much of his stuff is available in English translation.

Oh, and by the by, I'm guessing Wadida Wassef's translation for the Penguin Classics edition is excellent since it reads so well.