Alaa Al Aswany’s “Chicago”
Harper, 2008
Since the publication of his successful debut
The Yacoubian Building (2004), Alaa Al Aswany has become one of Egypt's most celebrated writers, a vocal opponent to the corruption and nepotism that have characterized President Mubarek's regime. Yet his new novel,
(translated from Arabic by Farouk Abdel Wahab), is set not in Egypt but in the United States, tracking a brief period in the lives of several doctors (students and faculty) in post-9/11 Chicago. Their storylines are connected through the Department of Histology at the University of Illinois, and histology—the microscopic study of cross-sections of biological tissues—offers a fitting analogy for Al Aswany's narrative technique: a poetic examination of the delicate anatomy of ordinary life. Al Aswany overlaps slices of the daily acts of his myriad characters who are linked to one another through a shared place. In