Ability To Create A Problem

Time in Cairo.  I’ll be doing this for a bit now. Then Israel.  Jordan?  Lebanon?  For now Cairo is a lot to take on.  I spent a bit of faltering time starting a few pages here and there with "The Yacoubian Building" yesterday.  It was clear that Alaa al-Aswany needed to introduce one and then another character with seemingly nothing to tie them together but the building.  I struggled, as one does, to keep the names in place and remember if this was the same older guy who’d been shuffling down the street when I was last in the bathroom stealing in a few pages earlier in the day.  

This morning I committed one hour.  And then another.  And soon I decided it was probably best to let this gentleman weave the whole story to its integrated conclusion.  A dentist by trade, apparently, who lived in the very building in which the novel is set, Mr. Aswany has a plausible cast.  The women are curvaceous.  The bad guys are heartless.  The sense of entrapment, the depiction of building' politics where a space of the roof is defended as though it were an acreage, the petty dreams that get crushed and perhaps most tellingly the conversion to extremism this was all believable and by the last fifty pages I think I began to see how he’d unwind the yarn he’d begun with, so that we’d soon see who got their just-deserts in this urban mouse trap.

Later in the day we went over to Vassar Farms and saw a different, deciduous mouse trap unwind.  Bill had a different purpose which was to cast frustrations of opposite genders, and station and loyalty and bring them very near to conflagration only to have the smiling comedic faces triumph over tragedy with a happy ending.  Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” was wonderfully rendered by the students at the summer theatre this evening.  A perfect night with sun on its way down and a half moon rising up in the air.  I believed.  I couldn’t really remember any of Orlando’s line’s that I once learned when I was in high school to perform it.  But these young people did well and I suspended disbelief with abandon and it appears that my teenagers just may have done so, as well. 

I liked the ‘As You Like It’s unwinding, more than I did the “Yacoubian Building.”  Aswany had a different purpose, of course.  He wanted to show me the confetti of lives tossed out one window in Cairo, so I might better understand that city.  Shakespeare wanted to entertain me and remind me that “All the World’s A Stage.”  And I suppose, it isn’t fair to compare anyone to Shakespeare and his unique ability to create a problem and solve it in five acts.  They were, regardless, the bookends of my day.

Friday 7/20/18