By Mursi Saad El-Din There are certain novels which I keep going back to from time to time: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and Naguib Mahfouz's Trilogy, for example. What these novels have in common is what I call the genius of place. With all the characters these novels have, I believe that the main hero in all of them is the place, Alexandria in the case of the Quartet and El-Gamalia in the case of the Trilogy. The Quartet 's events can take place only at a certain time in Alexandria. To Durrell Alexandria was an extension of Greece. In his introduction to the 1982 edition of EM Forester's book on Alexandria he writes, "It opens upon a dreaming sea and its Homeric waves are rolled and unrolled by the fresh breezes from Rhodes and the Aegean. Going ashore in Alexandria is like walking the plank for instantly you feel, not only the plangently Greek city rising before you, but its tack cloth of deserts stretching away into the heart of Africa." For his part Cavafy, the Greek poet who was born, lived and died in Alexandria wrote in his lovely poem "The City": "The city follows you You will roam the same streets And you will age in the same neighbourhoods And you will grow grey in the same houses... There is no ship for you, there is no road." Such was the influence of Alexandria, a city that has not ceased to inspire novels, poems and books of history. I don't have to dwell at length on Naguib Mahfouz's Trilogy which earned him the Nobel Prize. His novels are both a guide to his part of Cairo and a history of the city's political and social events. No wonder all his novels have been translated into many languages, especially English. But I do want to mention another novel which can join these great masterpieces, Choubra by Naim Sabry. It is, again, a novel which I keep going back to whenever I feel nostalgic for that district of Cairo in which I grew up and was initiated into Cairo's social life. Sabry's novel is a combination of many things: geography, history, life and death and love stories. Above all it is an example of what life was like not only in Choubra, but in the whole of Egypt. It does not matter who you are, from which race, from which religion, in what language you talk. What is important is that you are here, living in Choubra in peace and safety. You are born and brought up here, you fall in love, marry and have your offspring. Your children grow up and start the same round of life until your doom. The author gives us a graphic description of Choubra. In fact he starts the novel with a map of the district with details of its streets and its landmarks. Choubra, he writes, "is neither an aristocratic district nor a popular one. It is in between, it has its rich and poor families. But it is proud of its heads, I mean, of course, the brains of the middle class, which were open to learning and understanding and development, and over and above love and the acceptance of others, which makes life a pleasure, happiness and good company." Now that I have come to the end of my column, I realise that I have not even lightly touched upon the plot and subplots of Sabry's novel. I leave this to readers of the novel, which I believe should take top priority for translation into English.
