Being Abbas el Abd

"What is madness?" asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy's jittery, funny, and angry novel. Assuring readers that they are about to find out, the narrator takes us on a journey through the insanity of present-day Cairo - in and out of minibuses, malls, and crash pads. Assaulted on all sides by buxom but inaccessible co-eds, traffic cops, and minibus touts drumming belly-dance rhythms on the paneling of their vehicles, the narrator navigates the city's pinball machine of social life with tolerable efficiency, and is ever ready with a withering response. But lurking under the rocks in his grouchy, chain-smoking, pharmaceutically-oriented, twenty-something life are characters like his elusive psychiatrist uncle with a disturbing professional interest in phobias. And then there's Abbas, the narrator's best friend, who delivers mordant homilies on life and society ("We will survive only when we've turned our museums into public lavatories") and surfaces at critical moments to drive our hero into uncontrollably multiplying difficulties. For instance, there's the ticklish situation with the simultaneous blind dates Abbas has set up for him on different levels of a coffee-shop in a Cairo mall with two girls both named Hind. With friends like Abbas, what paranoiac needs enemies?