Customer Reviews

Beer in the Snooker Club (Twentieth Century Lives)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Waguih Ghali, a member of the extended family of the former UN Secretary General, wrote this book in English, a language in which he was entirely at ease. In that, and in many other ways, this book is autobiographical. It traces the lives of several characters, but especially a couple of young men of the Egyptian upper class, at a time of great change in the 1950s. England is leaving Egypt, finally, in 1954. The Egyptian army has overthrown the royal family and instituted a republican system that both embodies the nationalistic and progressive hope of many Egyptians, and also becomes increasingly repressive. The characters, Ram and Font, are Egyptians who are Anglophone and upper class, and so are out of touch with the new order. How they deal with that order, with their identities, and their coming of age is the story of book.

At some level, this book is about Egypt, and it is a useful book in that sense. But it is also a wise, funny and beautiful read: a book that most readers will devour in one sitting and be left wanting more. This was Ghali's only book, but it is a real memorial to him.

BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB depicts Egypt in the tumultuous 1950's through the eyes of Ram, who is one of the more distinctive and conflicted characters I have recently encountered in fiction. Ram is an educated, well-connected Copt, probably in his mid-twenties. His best friend is Font, another Copt. Ram and Font spent four years in England and are obsessed with English civilization and culture, but they also despise British colonialism and hypocrisy and they participated in guerilla fighting against the British during the Suez War. Ram's long-time girlfriend is Edna, who is from a Jewish family that has lived in Egypt for five generations. Ram empathizes with the fellaheen and is intellectually outraged on their behalf, but he also mingles with the vapid dandies who play croquet and bridge and his favorite pastime is beer in the snooker club. Political activism or a comfortable life? I leave that for the reader to find out.

BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB was published in 1964. It was the first novel by Waguih Ghali, and when he committed suicide in 1968, it became his only novel. It surely is one of the finest "single-work" novels there is.

It is difficult to tidily characterize BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB. It is as ambiguous as the life it so clearly depicts. While scathing in its denunciation of the British in Egypt, it is equally condemnatory of Nasser, his betrayal of socialism, and his concentration camps and atrocities of political oppression. Egypt has not yet become Islamicized, but for Ram and Font (two Copts) and for Edna the handwriting on the wall is pretty clear. Several of the political sentiments of Ram (or Ghali, as I suspect they are the same) are interesting in retrospect. For one thing, the novel has no truck whatsoever with pan-Arabism. And it also voices a "let-live" attitude towards Israel: "Imagine a third of our income being pumped into an army to fight a miserable two million Jews who were massacred something terrible in the last war." The Egypt of BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB is at a stage of political, economic, and religious uncertainty or indecision. One of the central issues of the novel is, "What is an Egyptian?" And the same uncertainty or indecision extends to Ram's personal life: what to do with himself, whether or not to live attached to the purse strings of his rich aunt, whether or not to marry, and who?

There are a few missteps, but by and large the narrative technique and writing are accomplished. The novel is alternately comic and bitter, satirical and angry. Ghali is quite worldly and knowledgeable about all sorts of Western historical, political, and cultural matters, which are liberally sprinkled throughout the novel. He also is empathetic and politically astute. Consider this excerpt, which is representative of the depths this superficially light and breezy novel at times plumbs:

"If someone has read an enormous amount of literature, and has a thorough knowledge of contemporary history, from the beginning of this century to the present day, and he has an imagination, and he is intelligent, and he is just, and he is kind, and he cares about other people of all races, and he has enough time to think, and he is honest and sincere, there are two things can happen to him; he can join the Communist Party and then leave it, wallowing in its short-comings, or he can become mad. Or * * * if he is unconsciously insincere, he may join one of the many left-wing societies in Europe, and enjoy himself."

Like Ram, Ghali probably was culturally conflicted . . . and isolated. And likely one of the factors contributing to his suicide was that other Egyptians did not regard him as one of them. Whatever, BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB is a very worthy legacy. Its scandalous obscurity probably is due mostly to the fact that it resolutely steers clear of any of the vogue ideologies of the late-20th-Century. A novel written in English by a Copt that does not espouse pan-Arabism simply won't be promoted as one of the finest modern works produced by an Arab, although BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB surely is that. Waguih Ghali and the novel deserve a wide audience, and my applause and gratitude to New Amsterdam Books for keeping it in print.

Ram is a 20-something Coptic Egyptian without much direction, yet an opinion on just about everything. Ghali writes very much in the style of Albert Camus (i.e. existentialism; meandering plot) and at times is quite humorous ("It's better to have loved and had a venereal, then never to have loved at all.") The story has a little of everything: politics, love, drama. However, you have to know a little about 20th century Egyptian history/politics to get some of the references (Nasser, Aswan Dam, etc.) It's pretty easy to get through other than that.

Ghali's 1960s novel can't help but give the reader a strong dose of realism: here is a novel of late-1950s, early- 1960s Egypt, or more especially Cairo, which depicts a youth's life and times in the heart of the Arab world. It was a time when France and the U.K. decided to punish Egypt for nationalising the Suez canal with armed combat and invasion and when Israel, which claimed no collusion, joined in to destroy the Egyptian airforce before it got off the ground. But more especially, it's the story of a young man with rich relatives who turns his back on his idle youth and by various strategems manages to procure an exit visa for studies in the U.K. Ghali, who committed suicide a few years after the book was published, has a soft spot for the English but little tolerance for the bureacrats in Egypt and at Westminster who tend to stand in his way. There's a languid romance with a very down-to-earth but beautiful Cairene and his days are often filled with comforting his mother (who lost everything in the post-Farouk era) and being nice to his aunt who seems to have avoided losing her wealth after King Farouk was thrown out of Egypt but who now, under Nasser, is being forced to donate vast acreages of land to Egypt's poverty-stricken fellahin. Ghali has a wry wit, his prose is simple and clean and we are left with a feeling of loss.

With the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in slow progress, the 2010 re-issue of this beautiful novel first published in 1964 (reprinted in 1987) is opportune. It provides a time capsule of pre- and post-1952 revolutionary Egypt until the early 1960s as seen by Ram, a poor member of Egypt's old elite in which males tended to die young and widows managed their estates.
Even after Nasser's revolution, Egypt had a small, super-rich elite of Muslims, Coptic Christians and Jews, living in Cairo or Alexandria, well-educated, speaking French and English and knowing little Arabic. The (land-owning) upper class long thrived by pulling strings, nepotism, intermarriage within their own religious communities and a vibrant social circuit. They routinely travelled abroad or spent the hot summer months in Alexandria. Their children drove cars, gambled and drank heavily in elite Cairo waterholes like Groppi's.
This semi-autobiographical novel is all about poor, Coptic Ram and his growing confusion. He has none of the entitlements of his elite school fellows. His dad did not leave him or his mother a fortune, but still, a nice apartment and rich aunts. As a recognized full member of the elite, his friends pay his bar tabs, give him the key to their cars and another key to a jointly-rented apartment equipped with beds only...
A holiday trip to the UK with his enigmatic lover Edna and youth friend Font challenges all the knowledge acquired from reading "thousands" of books together. In the UK, Ram's sense of self splits: a Sunday dinner with an English family full of political contradictions leads to a mild form of disengagement: one part of Ram acts, talks, plays the smartly-westernized, white Egyptian, the other part watches him doing it. Here this reader stops. Enjoy!
This masterpiece does not stand alone. In 1966, the Sudanese writer Tayeb Saleh published an intriguing novel in Arabic (soon published in 20+ languages, soon forbidden in Sudan) called "Season of Migration to the North", which dealt in a different way with the confusing experience of first being taught about the blessings of Britain's civilising mission and then living in Britain itself. Wagieh Ghali's is a deep, highly political and very enjoyable novel. Tayeb Saleh spent most of his life outside Sudan, writing short stories and books, working many years for the BBC, UNESCO and in Qatar, where he started a glossy called 'Doha', which was distributed and admired throughout the Middle East because of its quality and sophistication. He passed away not long ago at the age of 80. Wagieh Ghali's track record is shorter. Read the book's new introduction by his 1964 editor, Diana Athill (b. 1917) for more information.
Finally, the 2011 Egyptian Revolution is complete when this book is translated into Arabic and for sale in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt and the Arab world.

This book is the best Egyptian novel of the 20th century, and anyone interested in the country should read it. The story itself is entertaining and well-written and it is incredibly useful in understanding the cosmopolitan Egypt of the early 20th century and its slow decline. The English-educated, socialist offspring of a very wealthy and well-connected Coptic Christian family in love with a Jewish girl is the protagonist and that alone indicates how the book itself is an extension of Ram's own internal conflicts.