The Lodging House by Khairy Shalaby. Translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab. Published by TheAmerican University Press in Cairo, 439 pages.

First published in Arabic in 1992 as Wikalat Atiya, “The Lodging House,” won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003. Farouk Abdel Wahab, the Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago, undertook the difficult task of translating this dense novel into English. A useful glossary helps the reader understand words from the Egyptian colloquial dialect whose equivalent does not exist in English.

This award-winning novel depicts the colorful but dramatic story of a young man’s descent into the underworld. The main character, the son of poor peasants, is grossly mistreated by a lecturer at the Public Teacher’s Institute. In a fit of anger, he assaults the instructor and is subsequently not only expelled from the Institute but also receives a six-month suspended jail sentence. This irresponsible act shatters the student’s dream of a better future. Penniless, homeless and jobless, he meets a friendly, young vegetable vendor, Mahrous, who brings him to the disreputable Wikalat Atiya, a historic, run-down caravanserai that shelters marginal and underprivileged characters.

The first-person narrative used in “The Lodging House” is highly reminiscent of the picaresque novel, an early form of novel relating the adventures of a rogue or low-born adventurer known in Spanish as ‘picaro’. The picaresque novel originated in Spain in the 16th century and almost immediately made its way into French, Dutch and English literature. By the mid-18th century, however, the picaresque style in Europe gave way to the realistic novel with a more elaborate plot and a greater development of character. The ‘picaro’ usually drifts from place to place in his ceaseless efforts to survive. A casteless outsider, he feels inwardly unrestrained by prevailing social codes and norms, and he conforms outwardly to them only when it serves his own ends. The story often turns into an ironic and satirical survey of the hypocrisies and corruptions of society while also offering the reader a rich mine of observations concerning people in low or humble walks of life.

As we follow the hero’s daily adventures in today’s Egypt, we are treated to extraordinarily vivid descriptions of larger-than-life characters such as the kind Mahrous, “sitting in front of a pile of radishes and gargir spread out on a sack, calling to the customers in mawwals that extolled the virtues of his radishes and gargir with a fervor and vitality surpassing that of Abu Nuwas; the green eyes were in his radishes, and as for the gargir, it was a lover’s eyelashes, it was the tassels on the draperies in her boudoir.”

The author excels in describing professions, little known places and picturesque characters such as Amm Shawadfi, in charge of renting the rooms at the Wikalat Atiya: “His skin was so rough it seemed like the trunk of an acacia tree burned by a blazing sun. His fingernails and toenails were long like fearsome talons, and his face like a black clay pot, the hairs of his beard sticking out like barbed wire. Out of his face peered eyes like those of an old camel, with red sparks flying out of them, and a mouth wide as a toilet bowl without a single tooth, and a nose like a roasted corncob.”

The novel’s anonymous hero introduces us to an extraordinary crowd of men and women living on the fringes of society. Their lives are created from an astonishing mishmash of real, fantastic, bizarre and weird elements; their timeless joys, tragedies and problems are narrated in a maze of tales, reminiscent of the ancient Arab tradition of storytelling.

In their citation, the members of the Award Committee of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature said: “The Lodging House is a novel of epic dimensions. The reader is escorted on a journey to an underworld populated with memorable marginal characters. It reveals the relationship between an increasingly marginalized middle class and the already marginal popular class: a battleground for the narrator’s unique storytelling techniques that emphasize the aesthetics of the popular tale and exploit them in a stunning manner.” At the award ceremony, Dr. Samia Mehrez said in her welcoming address, “Wikalat Atiya is indeed the gem that crowns Khairy Shalaby’s long and prolific history as one of Egypt’s most distinguished storytellers.”