Word: chicago
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...written explicitly about issues like homosexuality and abortion that had long been taboo in Arabic literature. One of the main characters in Yacoubian, for example, is the gay editor of a Cairo newspaper, who uses money to seduce a married Egyptian soldier desperate to feed his family. In Chicago, a female character visits a sex shop and there's a lengthy discussion of the merits of vibrators...
...novel displays Al Aswany's ability to portray in the most subtle, realistic manner the complex forces that shape such lives. With Chicago, he has produced a highly political diatribe against dictatorship, reflecting the rising calls for democracy in Egypt at the time he was writing it. The climax of the book unfolds with a scheme by Nagi, the medical student, and Salah, the professor, to stage a small protest during an official visit to the U.S. by the unnamed Egyptian President. Having been selected to give a short speech welcoming the President to Chicago, Salah intends to read...
Although the story is fiction, Chicago is drawn from the two years that Al Aswany spent in the city during the mid-'80s while earning a dentistry degree from the University of Illinois. When he wasn't hitting the books, he would go out into the city - to a gay church, a black-pride organization, the Chicago Symphony - in search of American culture and ideas for a future novel. Nowadays, he could get by happily without his second income, but Al Aswany says he has no intention of giving up his dentistry practice, since filling cavities and performing root canals...
...Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. A longtime political columnist for the opposition newspaper Al-Arabi, he joined the nonviolent Kifaya! (Enough!) movement in 2004. He has been harassed by security police, and Islamic radicals have publicly denounced him. But despite the outward pessimism in Yacoubian and Chicago, Al Aswany strives to be optimistic about his country's future. He believes some progress has been made, thanks to the courageous efforts of Egyptian judges, teachers, journalists and bloggers in demanding greater freedoms. "Egypt is not the same country it was 10 years ago," he says, sitting down...
...author resists any analysis of his writing, but he does not dispute that both of his novels end with a spark of hope. Yacoubian concludes with the hopefulness of Busayna's marriage - albeit to the dubious Zaki Bey. And Chicago ends with a similarly unexpected union. Perhaps this is Al Aswany's way of suggesting that Egypt, too, broken down as it may be, will continue its quest for renewal...