Being Abbas el Abd

A Modern Arabic Novel from Egypt
By Ahmed Alaidy

“What is madness?” asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy’s jittery, funny, and angry new novel, Being Abbas el Abd. Assuring readers that they are about to find out, the narrator takes us on his subsequent itinerary through the insanity of present-day Cairo—in and out of minibuses, malls, and crash pads. Despite sniper fire from multiple sources (traffic cops, buxom but inaccessible co-eds, minibus barkers drumming bellydance rhythms on the paneling of their vehicles, and others) the narrator navigates the city’s pinball machine of social life with tolerable efficiency, and is ever ready with a withering response. In the interstices of his grouchy, chain-smoking, pharmaceutically- oriented, twenty-something life, however, lurk characters such as his elusive Uncle Awni, a well-known psychiatrist now on an ever-extending visit to America. And then there’s Abbas, the narrator’s best friend who, while delivering mordant homilies on life and society (“We will survive only when we’ve turned our museums into public lavatories”), surfaces at critical moments to drive our hero into uncontrollably multiplying difficulties.

Ahmed Alaidy’s work develops private meanings and personal rhythms that mirror the weft and warp of the narrator’s mind and revel in every linguistic register. A literary sensation in its original Arabic edition, Being Abbas el Abd heralds the arrival of a major new voice in Arabic literature.


 
Ahmed Alaidy was born in 1974, studied at Cairo University, and has worked as a scriptwriter for the cinema. He has written satirical stories for young people and currently writes a political comic strip for an Egyptian weekly. Alaidy has participated in international writers’ programs at The University of Iowa and Hong Kong University. Being Abbas el Abd is his first novel.