The Cheapest Nights [Paperback]

Yusuf Idris (Author), Wadida Wassef (Translator)

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: Three Continents Pr (May 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 089410666X
• ISBN-13: 978-0894106668
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,151,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lives To Care About, September 18, 2001

By 

Harold Michel (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cheapest Nights (Paperback)

With a few short lines or several words, Yusuf Idris creates people that we recognize and people we care about. Right at the beginning of each story, you immediatly are concerned about each of the well rounded characters, their lives and future. They are strugling with life. These are people who have faults, goodness, dispare and hope. I have recommended this book to many people and everyone has enjoyed it. Yusuf Idris is a great storyteller deserving a wider audience. His tales are human tales told/drawn with a greater skill than many of the well known authors writing today.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars fascinating social commentary, May 1, 2000

By 

"lro2" (Salt Lake City, Utah) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cheapest Nights (Paperback)

"The Cheapest Nights" is a collection of short stories written by the famous Yussuf Idriss. The stories deal with various aspects of Egyptian life in primarily rural communities. One of the main themes is greed and the way it distorts individuals. While some of his stories dwell on cruelty and weakness, Idriss also has stories that illustrate the human capacity for tenderness and forgiveness. Overall, the short stories in this book provide a kaleidoscope of images and characters that left me wanting to read more.

4.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile, April 11, 2007

By 

Reader in Tokyo - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Cheapest Nights (Paperback)

This book was first published in 1978 and contained 15 short stories by Yusuf Idris (1927-91), the Egyptian short-story writer, novelist and playwright. It was titled after his first collection of stories, published in 1954, but also contained pieces from five later collections, to show work from various stages of his career. Twelve of the stories were published between 1954 and 1960, and three between 1966 and 1970.

The stories were set among the working class and struggling poor of the country and city. Those I liked best combined compassion and irony in various measures, focusing on relations between men and women: "The Shame," about what happened to a beautiful, trusting girl after she was accused of impropriety with a man, and how the people around her responded. "The Errand," in which a man in the country agreed to take a deranged woman to a hospital in Cairo mainly so he could see the city again, but came to regret his decision. And "The Dregs of the City," about a prosperous judge who hired, used, discarded and humiliated a simple married woman struggling to feed her family. This story was told through the eyes of the callous judge, who felt a twinge of regret and then moved on. The story felt overlong, but its portrait of the woman that came through, as in the other stories, was haunting.

Another was "Death from Old Age," which catalogued the patients faced by a hospital doctor and followed the story of one, an old man who gathered death notices and who eventually needed one himself. The story was inspired by the author's own medical practice. ("By ten o'clock I was through with the world of infants and youngsters and adults and I prepared to enter the sphere of the dead. They, too, have their problems. Death is by no means the end of a man. As a matter of fact in dying a man gives a lot more trouble than he ever did while he lived . . . . And while the state never bothered much about an individual during his lifetime, it suddenly gives him the greatest attention the moment he expires. Just as the law cares nothing for how he lived but will move heaven and earth to know how he died.")

The best of these pieces called to mind the best stories of Chekhov. Some of the other stories contained bitter irony but less compassion, and struck me as skilled but cold: "The Cheapest Nights," in which the only entertainment a poor, drunken, ignorant man with many children could afford was to return home to his wife, which led to the creation of more children. Or "The Funeral Ceremony," in which two men handling the ceremonies were so poor that they were concerned entirely with their meager earnings, ignoring the deceased.

The three stories published around the late 1960s differed in style from the earlier ones, being more allusive and maybe allegorical, and harder to follow.

On the whole, I got from this collection a better appreciation of the author's great skill at combining compassion and irony, and describing the psychology of his characters, usually men but occasionally women. I was struck by his compassion for both. And by his frank treatment of relations between the sexes and sexuality, rarely encountered in short-story anthologies from the Arab world of that period or from later decades until the 1990s. It would've been interesting to read a story of his written entirely from a woman's point of view.