Souad becomes pregnant and refuses to have an abortion Azzam gets involved in business dealings with “The Big Man”, who demands 25 percent of his business Taha is arrested by the police for his involvement with the fundamentalists and tortured Busanya finds love in the most unlikely place and Hatim’s obsession with Abu takes a nasty turn. Gradually, the decisions that the characters take have serious consequences. And finally, there is Malan, ambitious and determined to acquire one of the apartments for himself, so he can move out of his room on the roof. This moves her away from Taha, and the couple break up. His love, Busanya el Sayed, is a young woman who lives in the rooms on the roof and works to support her mother and family, which she can only do by compromising her principles.

Taha fails the exam to get into the police and becomes a fundamentalist.

And then there is Taha el Shazli, the son of the doorkeeper who is brighter than several of the children whose families his father serves. But Abduh has a wife and child and uses the money he gets from Hatim to support them. He thinks he has found it in Abduh, a policeman. Hatim Rashid is a respected newspaper editor who looks for love among rough young men. Although he has married Souad, he keeps her in the Yacoubian building like a secret mistress. Hagg Muhammed Azzam is a shady businessman with political ambitions, who takes a second wife, Souad, without the knowledge of his first wife. He lives with his embittered sister, Dawlat, and uses his “office” in the Yacoubian building for his romantic assignations. Zaki Bey is an aristocrat who loves women and drink. (It was also where the author, Al Aswamy, first practiced dentistry.) The little rooms on the roof are rented to newcomers to the city.

When the story begins, downtown Cairo has become outmoded and the apartments in the Yacoubian building are being rented as offices. After the coup of 1952, the aristocrats fled and were replaced by army officers and their families, who moved their domestic staff into the storage rooms. The Yacoubian building (which actually exists) is art deco building in downtown Cairo that started out for the upper classes: spacious apartments with small rooms on the roof that were used for storage. Alaa Al Aswamy uses the lives of a group of people in an apartment building to provide a glimpse into Cairo’s society. Sometimes the lives become tangled with each other, but more often than not they run on parallel tracks. Peel away the outer layer of an apartment building and you’ll find a microcosm of life: people living in within a small space with their joys, sorrows, triumphs and despair, just a few feet away from each other.

The yacoubian building book review