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The Cairo House: A Novel (Arab American Writing), by Samia Serageldin
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Samia Serageldin's heroine, the daughter of a politically prominent, land-owning Egyptian family, witnesses the changes sweeping her homeland. Looking back to the glamorous Egypt of the pashas and King Faruk, Serageldin moves forward to the police state of the colonels who seized power in 1952 and the disastrous consequences of Nasser's sequestration policies.
Through well-chosen portraits and telling descriptions of the era's fashions and furnishings, Serageldin conveys detailed social and cultural information. She offers a glimpse of the beach at Agami in the 1960s and conveys the change in mood through the Sadat years. Serageldin's fictional treatment of recent Egyptian history includes key events leading to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, such as the assassination of writer Yussef Siba'yi and the harassment of theologian Nasr Abu Zayd.
Serageldin's heroine goes into exile in Europe and the United States but returns to Egypt in an attempt to reconcile her past and present. Charting fresh territory for the American reader, this semi-autobiographical novel is one of the most sensitive and accessible documents of historical change in Egyptian life. The book will appeal to a general audience and will be particularly useful to students interested in the social customs of the upper class in Egypt in the Nasser and Sadat years.
- Sales Rank: #3456712 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Syracuse Univ Pr (Sd)
- Published on: 2000-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.32" h x .96" w x 6.30" l, 1.20 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 248 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
Serageldin's richly observed study of family and culture in transition and crisis succeeds both as ironical Proustian reminiscence and as a telling exploration of the ambiguities of status, loyalty, and belonging. (Kirkus Reviews)
Using a beautiful prose style, Serageldin makes Gigi's problems vivid and real... Fascinating and entertaining. (Library Journal)
About the Author
Samia Serageldin is an academic who lives in America. She is currently writing her next book.
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Easy to read, but lacking...
By AA
The Cairo House is a nice easy to read book. Unlike the several other excellent Arab American autobiographies published over the last few years, Cairo House falls short in offering balanced look at the author's life story, identity and life across three continents.
Cairo House comes across short in intellectual maturity with minimal retrospective analysis of events and relationships. Glimpses of the maturity and honesty come across in the later phases of the book, but much of the earlier phases are full of cardboard like characters.
Most disturbing for an Arab American is the author failure to move beyond colonial era thinking and rhetoric. Serageldin's attempt at defending Egypt's ruling classes of 30's and 40's is weak, thousands of miles away and several decades do not seem to have open her eyes to the failure of Egypt's elite to move beyond resisting British occupation to building a modern democratic society with some form of upward mobility.
The Cairo House however is entertaining, full of interesting tidbits about Egypt and does occasionally shed some light on Serageldin's confusion and loss of identity in an interesting and personable fashion.
For me Leila Ahmed's Border Passage, another autobiography of an Egyptian American woman of privileged upbringing is a masterpiece. In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Souif, an Egyptian British woman is another masterpiece in semi fictional work. Nadia, Captive of Hope by Fay Afaf Kanfani is also an excellent work by an Arab American woman and so is Out of Place by Edward Said. Perhaps it takes more than 10 years away to gain enough maturity to be able to offer a true thought provoking autobiography that examines issues of identity and the struggle of belonging as well as a true look at one's own family, shortcomings and indeed life
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Avoids the easy way out...
By Arthur C. Hurwitz
The Cairo House seems simultaneously, at various junctures in the text, like several types of genres of American writing, fictional or otherwise: The "Roots" book in which the writer explains the backgound of her family and just who they were before they became faceless identity-less, consuming individuals in the U.S., the "feminist" book about how a woman from an affluent background "finds herself" after a identity-less upbringing, a personality-surpressing early adulthood, and an unhappy first marriage, and finally, her ancedotal observations on the upheavals in Egypt over the period of her early life when her family's uncontested political hegimony in Egypt was underminded and often outrightly persecuted. Reading the Cairo House adds a certain diversity of understanding to the Gamal Abd Nasir period. The book animates the fall of her family during that time and the fact that no one in her old elite family had anything but antipathy for his rule.
None of the conundrums which characterize her life are ever resolved to the point of catharsis in the book. She never finds the perfect man, she never resolves the relationship between her country-of-immigration, the United States and the Egypt of her pampered childhood. She doesn't "find herself" by divorcing her second husband or ever find the perfect marriage. Also the question of Egypt and how it has changed since her childhood is not addressed with some sort of agenda-driven political conclusion.
I kept expecting Gihan's life in the novel to come to some sort of smug conclusion or resolution but it never does. In this way the novel's protanginist never finds "the truth," her truth, or any truth at all. Her life stumbled along until she married a certain individual and also found herself living in a certain place and none of it has any sort of trancendent meaning. The son she left behind in Egypt is never reunited with her either. He never becomes close to her, to the character's disconcernment.
Thus, the Cairo House is an honest book about her family's political fall from grace, her upbringing as a girl in a privileged family, and then her later marriages and immigration. It is an honest book about Egypt too, because it offers no ideological "take" on the political events which occured there.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A Beautiful Story of Three Cultures
By A Customer
The story of Gihan (Gigi), the daughter of a well-to-do Egyptian family, brings to life the richness, complexities and perplexities of leaving one's birth culture to live in foreign lands. It is upon her return to Cairo as an adult that Gigi begins telling her life in snapshot flashbacks. Through these portraits, the reader pieces together her happy life as a little girl, the less-happy changes that come under Nasser, and her two marriages -- the first to Egyptian Yussef, the second to frenchman Luc -- that take her from Egypt to England to France and finally to the United States. Throughout her narrative, Gigi moves easily from one culture to another, all too easily in a way, since her return to Cairo prompts her to reexamine her life and to wonder whether she hasn't just drifted along without much resistance. Her one possible true love from her childhood, Tamer, reproaches her precisely for being too dutiful, too ready to do what was expected of her. In the end, she does not seize the possibility of his love but continues to do what is expected of her, to move downstream like a leaf borne along by the water.
Beautifully written, haunting and evocative, THE CAIRO HOUSE is a fictional treatment of recent Egyptian history and cultural change in Egyptian life as well as a bittersweet reflection on the ability to feel comfortable in many cultures but at home in none. Serageldin's command of the cultural and linguistic layers of her narrative is masterful. The passages of transition -- the coming and going in the international airport -- ring particularly true. A rewarding read.
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