I know a city / that every day fills with sun / and everything is enraptured in that moment

(Giuseppe Ungaretti, Silenzio, from L'allegria). The city is Alexandria, Egypt:

here is the sky, free of black clouds; here are the little white clouds scattered in the air like children skipping with joy across the immensity of space. Thank you, God! Here you are, you who never abandon your son Shagara Muhammad Ali, this strange name that caused him so much trouble during childhood and adolescence, and which your discontented servants still do not know well. God, please let me finish what I am doing...

Shagara is a petty crook: he works in a factory, in a dusty office cluttered with paperwork, and is often assigned the task of organizing rallies and trips for workers chanting praise for Sadat, who succeeded Nasser in Egypt. Shagara skims off this assignment, pocketing a portion of the money given to him to pay the workers and bus drivers. Everyone knows it, but it is par for the course in a corrupt country. He moves through a city that is surreal, turbulent, and ever identical to itself, and

that old feeling came back with a vengeance: that I owned it, that I had built it myself, that I had traced its boundaries and erected the buildings along its sides

. Is Alexandria real or merely Shagara's delirium? Strange, inexplicable, and unsettling things occur: a corpse was found in a sack, yet when they opened it, a breathtaking woman emerged; drunken dogs wandered all alone, shouting, "to hell with the British Empire on which the sun never sets"; a bird had seized a child in its talons and flown off "toward the seventh heaven where God reigns." And there were other incredible events that left the people stunned, even as they carried on living just as before. Rising prices, rampant corruption, peace with Israel after so much bloodshed, and the arrogance of a technocratic government set fire to the revolt. Alexandria is engulfed by an irrepressible, furious popular uprising.

But why, at this very moment, do I fix my gaze on the faces of women and young girls? (...) Perhaps because things drift past before my eyes and I take no notice at all?

What is the source of our indifference? Is it perhaps that mysterious "house of jasmine," repository of enigmas no one can fathom, becoming a metaphor for the dark, unfathomable human soul; or is it rather "that dark mass stretching into infinity"?

That foolish water, for millions of years, knew nothing but low tide and high tide, alone, with itself, never anyone sharing anything with it

. Just as the house of jasmine is demolished to make way for a hideous real estate speculation that destroys the splendor and allure of the ancient city, so nothing remains for us but to be annihilated in a bleak existence, shackled to petty bourgeois routines.

Where is God, how could he have abandoned us? He gave us a paradise; how is it possible that it all vanished in such a short time? What a fool I am! So much time has passed and I didn't even notice

Of this splendid novel, one could say anything: surreal, realistic, cruel, and ironic. Undoubtedly, the author chronicles the transformation of Alexandria in the wake of Sadat's savage, uneven modernization—a man lauded by the West, yet bereft of charisma and utterly estranged from the "religious heart" of the Egyptian people. And yet, the novel rises above historical contingency, developing in an admirable and captivating manner a discourse that is at once social and intimate: social, because it reveals how deeply the detachment of a cosmopolitan ruling class wounds a people, only to resort—after so many lofty proclamations—to the heaviest repression (and thus ends Alexandria's great uprising); intimate, because through the metaphor of the house of jasmine and the boundless sea, it speaks to our impenetrable inner world and urges us not to lose ourselves in the mundane, nor in futile invocations of God. Only understanding ourselves can save us from indifference.

Reading this novel was an intense pleasure, an immersion into fantasy and sublime impressions, rendered through incisive prose characterized by brief sentences woven into an articulate, fluid syntax.

Why read it? To afford oneself pure aesthetic pleasure.

The House of Jasmine