Name: Sarah Christine Gill's review of Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
Item: Beer in the Snooker Club
Rating: 5
Author: Sarah Christine Gill

Waguih Ghali

Behind the bar at Jameel's in Cairo hang two mugs engraved with the names of Ram and Font. During their years together in London, they drank many a pint of Bass from these mugs. But there is no Bass in Nasser's Egypt, so Ram and Font have to make do with a heady mixture of beer, vodka and whisky. Yearning for Bass they long to be far from a revolution that neither serves the people nor allows their rich aunts to live the life of leisure they are accustomed to. Stranded between two cultures, Ram and Font must choose between dangerous political opposition and reluctant acquiescence. First published in 1964, Beer in the Snooker Club is a classic of the literature of emigration.

Beer in the Snooker Club

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

Marion

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.

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.

' 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.?

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.

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.

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Sarah Christine Gill

My friend Rabea shipped this to me from the US so it means a lot to me. I wouldn’t have found this anywhere in South Africa and what a gem this was.

An Egyptian classic novel on the post colonial elites of newly independent Egypt during the struggle for the Suez Canal.

The introduction by Pankaj Mishra is brilliant.

My friend Rabea shipped this to me from the US so it means a lot to me. I wouldn’t have found this anywhere in South Africa and what a gem this was.

An Egyptian classic novel on the post colonial elites of newly independent Egypt during the struggle for the Suez Canal.

The introduction by Pankaj Mishra is brilliant.

Left Quark

Maddie

Nada Ghanim

Lumpkinspice

Bassel Katamish

Waguih Ghali was raised in Cairo but spent much of his adult life studying and working in Europe. In Beer in the Snooker Club, Ghali chronicles the lives of Cairo's upper crust who, after the fall of King Farouk, are thoroughly unprepared to change its neo-feudal ways. Beer in the Snooker Club was the only book written by Ghali before his suicide in 1968. "Ghali's novel reproduces a cultural state of shock with great accuracy and great humor."–James Marcus of The Nation

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Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali

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Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali