Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works), 2 volumes, Albert Cossery, Paris: Editions Jo�lle Losfeld/ Gallimard, 2005. pp608 & 624 Born in Cairo in 1913, the Franco- Egyptian writer Albert Cossery published his first book, a collection of short stories, in 1941, and his books have been appearing at a slow, but steady, pace ever since. A first novel, La maison de la mort certaine (House of Certain Death) appeared in Cairo in 1944 shortly before Cossery's permanent move to Paris, and this inaugurated a stream of others, culminating in the publication of his last book, Les Couleurs de l'infamie (The Colours of Infamy), in 1999. Over the years, Cossery's short, exquisitely written novels have found a small but dedicated French readership. With the books appearing at a rate of only one a decade over the past 40 years or so, the publication of a new novel by Albert Cossery has become something of an event, as is the appearance of this new two-volume set of Cossery's collected works, published late last year by editor Jo�lle Losfeld and Gallimard. Cossery's first book, Les hommes oubliés de Dieu (Men forgotten by God), reproduced in volume one of this collected edition, announced the author's subject matter and acted as a passport to the world of metropolitan French publishing. Made up of five short pieces mostly given over to mood and situation, the book presents fragments from the lives of Cairo's lower middle-classes -- shopkeepers, craftsman, the owners of cafés and the like -- as well as from those of its less respectable underworld. Cossery himself, born into Cairo's Levantine community and speaking Arabic at home and French at school as a pupil of various of the city's French lycées, had direct acquaintance with this world, and it has been, with only one or two exceptions, the staple of his writing ever since, despite what turned out to be a permanent move to Paris in 1945. Adopted by the expatriate American writer Henry Miller as a significant post-war voice, Cossery was able to establish himself as a writer in Paris, while at the same time retaining his Egyptian sensibility. Miller's influence assisted him in publishing his work in France, La Maison de la mort certaine swiftly being followed by another novel, Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile (Idlers of the Fertile Valley), in 1948. These books, set in Egypt in the 1930s milieu which Cossery knew best and of which he apparently still considers himself to be a part, were followed in 1955 by the book that perhaps best expresses Cossery's characteristic outlook on life and is still his best-known work. This novel, Mendiants et orgueilleux (Proud Beggars), the story of Gohar, a university professor who abandons his career in order to become a beggar in what Cossery is still given to calling, in 1930s style, Cairo's "native," as opposed to "European" town, was given a new lease of life in 1991 thanks to Egyptian filmmaker Asma el-Bakry's enchanting film version. Marked by Cossery's trademark elegance, the novel is humorous and reflective by turns, the characters and situations belonging to a Cairene world that is instantly recognisable as Cossery's own, whether developed in this novel or in those following it. This is a world of simple pleasures, charming humour and the mockery of anything that might smack of authority, Cossery claiming that these qualities reflect life in the Egyptian streets. However, the novel also has another purpose, besides its wish to entertain, and this is to argue seriously for the virtues of marginality, of doing nothing, when faced with a world apparently rotten with folly and corruption. Cossery, like many a satirist before him, also has a significant moral purpose, and it is this that he explores in the enhanced psychological content of this novel, as well as through its narrative. While Cossery's earlier pieces in Les hommes oubliés de Dieu are marked by protest at the poverty and injustice that the author saw all around him, they do not probe very far into the mental lives of the characters portrayed, nor do they entirely successfully bring together the content of Cossery's writing with its surface polish and its humour. The latter, in particular, seems to have made Miller uneasy, since in an appreciation of Cossery that still appears on modern editions of the stories Miller comments that Cossery, "despite what might be thought at first glance," does not "take pleasure in ... the horrors of poverty" that he describes. He does not, Miller explains, "speak for himself, but for the multitude," even if he does so in a language "the multitude" is unlikely ever to use. Writing about Cairo's beggars, thieves and underworld in the kind of exacting French associated with Proust is an unusual project, and it seems to have been this that upset Miller. While later critics have sometimes talked of Cossery's "dandyism" or "aristocratic" manner, Mendiants et orgueilleux, focusing on the Cairene milieu introduced in the earlier short stories, sets out a coherent, if perhaps rather limited, response to it, insisting along the way on the virtues of intelligence, light-heartedness and, not least, friendship. These seem to have sustained the author since then, and they are to be found in different combinations in all the subsequent novels. A murder takes place in Mendiants et orgueilleux, but this event, Cossery explained in an interview with French filmmaker Michel Mitrani published in book form in 1995 ( Conversation avec Albert Cossery, Editions de l'INA), is not a blunt device designed to awake reflection on responsibility, as is, for example, the murder in Albert Camus's celebrated novel L'Etranger. The important thing, Cossery explains, was to engineer a meeting between Gohar, a kind of moral touchstone in the novel, and the police officer Nour el Dine, sent to investigate the murder and himself the bearer of a complicated personal life. A curious sympathy grows up between Gohar and his official pursuer, so much so that Nour el Dine's self- conception and ambitions are reconstructed in the light of Gohar's example. While Nour el Dine seems unlikely ever fully to embrace Gohar's light-heartedness or that of the novel's other "proud beggar," Yéghen, by the end of the text it seems that he has realised that in looking for the author of the murder he has been looking in the wrong direction. What he should have been looking for is a way of satisfying his "immense need for peace," perhaps by following Gohar's example. Subsequent novels take up this kind of dual concern with the proper, for Cossery, manner of relating to the world and the achievement of salvation within it. Cossery's later novels also continue his exploration of other possibilities besides those of good-humoured, and impecunious, contemplation recommended in Mendiants et orgeuilleux and the search for personal sympathy and friendship. El Kordi, for example, another character in this novel, is a revolutionary, given, as Cossery would have it, to indulging his fantasies of personal advancement in the service of "the people". However, El Kordi's knowledge of the people is rather limited, not going much further than what he learns of them in his work as a minor civil servant in the ministry of public works, the atmosphere of which is well caught. Revolutionaries unfailingly pop up in Cossery's subsequent novels, La Violence et la dérision (Violence and Derision, 1964), Un complot de saltimbanques (An Acrobats' Plot, 1975) and Une ambition dans le désert (Ambition in the Desert, 1984), perhaps a reflection of the precarious character of the monarchical regime in 1930s Egypt. On the whole, however, revolutionaries, and the revolutionary path towards social change, are rejected, even as Cossery spends an unusual amount of time writing about them. The key to this attitude is to be found in La Violence et la dérision, Cossery's next novel and one of his best, which is about an attempt (finally successful) to bring down a local governor not by violence but by mockery. Set in Alexandria, the novel describes an attempt by the authorities to crack down on "laziness and nonchalance, judging these to be crimes against the nation." For Karim, Heykal and friends this campaign threatens "an entire civilisation and way of life," and they set out to ruin the city's governor not by organising a campaign against him but by writing letters full of exaggerated praise to the newspapers and putting up posters praising his sagacity. A public-subscription campaign is set up to erect a statue of the governor, the idea being to "put the terrible weapon of mockery at the service of the revolution," no "political police in the world" being able to suspect a campaign of praise, even if this slides into ridicule. Humour is similarly deployed in Un complot de saltimbanques, where, it turns out, the only "plot" is that of a group of friends seeking to enjoy themselves. Though Hillali, chief of police in a provincial Egyptian town, is convinced that an attempt is afoot to destabilise the state, or at least his position within it, in fact the plot has more to do with a kind of moral education among friends: how to extract Rezk from his unhappy condition of police informer, how to ensure that Teymour, recently returned from a period of study abroad, will correctly appreciate the possibilities that life back home now offers him, and how to encourage Imtaz, a disgraced young actor, not to make the mistake of supposing that the glamour of the Cairo stage can be a substitute for life correctly lived in the provinces. Though it might be felt that Cossery rather shows his hand in this novel, it underlines the way in which, best shown in Mendiants et orgueilleux, the adoption of a particular attitude to the world can at the same time be seen as a "gentle deliverance" from it. The publication of all Cossery's novels in this two-volume set is being seen as an event worth marking in France, Le Monde giving it an entire page in its 13 January edition, for example. Cossery himself insists in interviews that he is an "Egyptian writer," having "never felt myself to be outside Egypt" even when writing in French for a European audience. Indeed, one way of framing him would be to see him as an "Egyptian writer writing in French" in the way suggested by Jean-Jacques Luthi in his La Littérature d'expression française en Egypte, 1798-1998 (2000), a historical description of French-language writing and publishing in Egypt. This largely disappeared after 1956, but it once produced talents as various as the poets Georges Henein and Edmond Jabès, novelist Andrée Chedid, feminist Doria Shafik and journalist Robert Solé, as well as the academic and politician Boutros Boutros-Ghali, educated in France and retaining close links to it. Another way of understanding Cossery's writing would be to emphasise its author's links with French intellectual life in the 1940s and 1950s. He was, after all, a friend and associate of Miller, Camus and others, and his work is strongly marked by existentialist themes. Now aged 92 and no longer writing following the publication of Les Couleurs de l'infamie six years ago (reviewed in Al-Ahram Weekly in November 1999), this complete edition of Cossery's work collects together what is a very singular oeuvre. There seem to be no plans at present to translate it into either Arabic or English. By David Tresilian
