Waguih Ghali

A plainspoken writer of consummate wryness, grace and humor, the Egyptian author chronicles the lives of a polyglot Cairene upper crust, shortly after the fall of King Farouk and thoroughly unprepared to change its neo-feudal ways...This is the best book to date about post-Farouk Egypt. --Los Angeles Times

Beer in the Snooker Club

Marion

It was Edna who introduced me to Egyptian people. It is rare, in the milieu in which I was born, to know Egyptians.

She explained to me that the Sporting Club and the race meetings and the villa-owners and the European-dressed and - travelled people I met, were not Egyptians. Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan not so much because they contained foreigners, but because the Egyptian born in them is himself a stranger to his land.

During tea we listened to Steve talking about life in suez.

He came out with such things as: 'The natives'll fleece you if you're not careful,' and 'not safe after dark . . . you know what the wogs are like.' 

He was giving us information he considered useful; in fact he was telling us to be careful when there. 

It never for an instant occurred to him we were the very natives he was talking about. Dirty Arabs and wogs were as much a menace to us as they had been to his beloved regiment.

' Are you coloured?' she asked. I looked at my hands to see whether I was coloured. Although I had read so much about this in Egypt, I had never encountered it in actual life. I had never wondered whether I was coloured or not (later I went to a library and learnt that I was white).

She was a fat woman with a mop in her hand.

'It's nothing to do with me, dear. They've told me if you were coloured I was to say the room was already let.

You look white enough to me, but you never know.?

In spite of all the books we had read demonstrating the slyness and cruelty of England's foreign policy, it took the Suez war to make us believe it. 

Of course the Africans and the Asians had had their Suezes a long time before us ... over and over again.

I like Dr Hamza; as a matter of fact I'd like to be like him: well-dressed and soberly aristocratic and having been imprisoned for socialist views. I would not like to go to prison, but I'd like to have been.

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