The Lodging House [Hardcover]

Khairy Shalaby (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 29, 2007

A young man's dreams for a better future as a student in the Teachers Institute are shattered after he assaults one of his instructors for discriminating against him. From then on, he begins his descent into the underworld. Penniless, he seeks refuge in Wikalat Atiya, a historic but now completely run-down caravanserai that has become the home of the town's marginal and underprivileged characters. This award-winning novel takes on epic dimensions as the narrator escorts us on a journey to this underworld, portraying - as he sinks further into its intricate relationships - the many characters that inhabit it. Through a labyrinth of tales, reminiscent of the popular Arab tradition of storytelling, we are introduced to these marginal beings, whose lives oscillate between the real and the fantastic, the contemporary and the timeless, and to the relationship between the newly marginalized middle class and the already marginal popular class. And while the narrator starts out as a spectator of these characters lives, he soon becomes an integral part of the lodging house's community of rogues.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Winner of the 2007 Banipal Prize for Translation 'Khaira Shalaby's The Loding House is a wise, anarchic, ribald, compassionate compendium of life at its most precarious and most ebullient. Its narrator is a young drop-out explelled from teachers' college for assaulting an instructor who picked on him as 'barefoot riffraff', one of a generation of peasants and urban poor rising with the widening of education. His fall deposits him in Wikalat Atiya, once a famed caravanserai outside Alexandria, now a twilight zone in the city of Damanhour. Descending into an underworld of heaving doss houses, hashish dens and Bohemian tea houses, he finds a rogues' gallery of fugitives and addicts fearful of the regime's secret police. Yet as he comes to know its characters-from peddlars and conment to midwives and matchmakers-he is buoyed by a world of shared fests and morality tales, seductive and self-reliant women, and landlords who give meddling authorities the run-around.' --The Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, October 2007

About the Author

Khairy Shalaby, born in Kafr al-Shaykh in Egypt's Nile Delta in 1938, has written seventy books, including novels, short stories, historical tales, and critical studies. The Lodging House was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003. Farouk Abdel Wahab, the Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago, has translated numerous Arabic works of fiction, most recently A Certain Woman by Hala El Badry (AUC Press 2003).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: AUC Press (January 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9774249445
• ISBN-13: 978-9774249440
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,278,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars superb modern arab novel, October 3, 2009

By 

Ioannis Loulis "jcl" (athens greece) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lodging House (Hardcover)

Alawi's "The Yakoubian Building", puts the modern egyptian novel on the international map, justifyingly so. Of course, this novel,though extremely readable, is a far cry from the best of of the Mahfouz novels, like "Miramar", "Adrift on the Nile", or "Midaq alley", to name a few. As an Alexandrian Greek I have been devouring Egyptian novels with facination. Some of these have proved to be average, others rather disappointing. However the "lodging house" exceeds all expectations, not because it won the Mahfouz prize (others that won it are average), but because it compares with the best of the Egyptian master's novels

The story, in a way reminds one of Alawi's bestseller, but surpasses it in sophistication and ambition. It is the story of an expelled student who sinks into the underworld of a provincial town (damanhour) in a building which attracts the downtrodden. What happens next is the fusion of multiple stories, where pathos, eros, smells and characters interact, as the reader is drawn and enveloped into a real and fascinating world of senses. As this world unfolds, the reader feels there is no escape, and what is more, he does not want to make a break but experience's it to the inevitable bitter end. Superb.