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    Chicago: A Novel
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    Chicago: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Chicago: A Novel
    Ebook424 pages8 hours

    Chicago: A Novel

    By Alaa Al Aswany

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The author of the highly acclaimed The Yacoubian Building returns with a story of love, sex, friendship, hatred, and ambition set in Chicago, with a cast of American and Arab characters achingly human in their desires and needs.

    Egyptian and American lives collide on a college campus in post-9/11 Chicago, and crises of identity abound in this extraordinary and eagerly anticipated new novel from Alaa Al Aswany. Among the players are a sixties-style anti-establishment professor whose relationship with a younger African-American woman becomes a moving target for intolerance; a veiled PhD candidate whose belief in the principles of her traditional upbringing is shaken by her exposure to American society; an émigré whose fervent desire to embrace his American identity is tested when he is faced with the issue of his daughter's "honor"; an Egyptian informant who spouts religious doctrines while hankering after money and power; and a dissident student poet who comes to America to finance his literary aspirations but whose experience in Chicago turns out to be more than he bargained for.

    Populated by a cast of intriguing, true-to-life characters, Chicago offers an illuminating portrait of America—a complex, often contradictory land in which triumph and failure, opportunity and oppression, licentiousness and tender love, small dramas and big dreams, coexist. Beautifully rendered, Chicago is a powerfully engrossing novel of culture and individuality from one of the most original voices in contemporary world literature.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061981883
    Unavailable
    Chicago: A Novel
    Author

    Alaa Al Aswany

    Alaa Al Aswany is the internationally bestselling author of The Yacoubian Building and Chicago. A journalist who writes a controversial opposition column, Al Aswany makes his living as a dentist in Cairo.

    Read more from Alaa Al Aswany

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    Reviews for Chicago

    2.5/5

    38 ratings10 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I have to say I really dislike Alaa al-Aswany's writing. In both Chicago and The Yacoubian Building his characters are simplistic archetypes. One senses that he is trying to imitate the style of Naguib Mahfouz but Mahfouz left us with so much material that why does anyone need to try to replicate his work. Al-Aswany's recent comments giving the Egyptian military carte blanche to kill opposition protesters in the street makes me wish he would retire from writing and public life entirely.
    • 4/5
      There were so many times I put this book aside that it took about three weeks to read 116 pages. It was slow and meandering. When asked what it was about, I couldn’t answer. It was mostly boring. However, by the end of page 116 I could have answered and the story became focused. I read to the end (p.117 to p. 332) in less than eight hours straight, fully absorbed in the story and characters.I’d recommend readers to persevere through the first 116 pages as information presented there, though seemingly disconnected, does help develop the main character (and introduce others) and will be useful. It’s really a good story once you get through them.One thing I especially liked was that I did not guess the resolution at all, but it clearly fit both the story and the character.
    • 2/5
      I am not a big reader of novels and this was a reminder of why. The book cover touts David Mamet I guess that is the bigger draw then the title, "Chicago." What interested me originally when I came across it was excitement of reading about the real "gansta" era of this city. I also started my career with the newspaper feature within but not as a reporter.The book is about the experiences and musings of a couple of Tribune reporters who brush up against the gangster element from this time period late 1920's I believe. That is about as much as a I got out of the story. It was not very exciting or entertaining but just kind of droned on with the dialogue of these reporters. To me a real yawner, back to my nonfiction.
    • 1/5
      The publisher’s blurb on the cover of this book announced that it was David Mamet’s first novel for more than twenty years. Let’s hope it is at least another twenty years before he troubles the book reading public again, because I can’t remember when I last found a novel so utterly impenetrable.
    • 3/5
      I liked this novel in the end, but I wasn't sure at first if I would. The characters do not at first appear to be connected, and it is at first difficult to imagine where the novel is going. What's great about it is that the novel is written and structured so that you want to keep reading and find out what happens to them- after the first half of the book. I put it down for nearly a week about a third of the way through. This novel is much more political than I anticipated, and the characters are almost universally unlikeable. To be fair, everyone has an ugly side, and not everyone reacts to stress and pressure with grace. That said, I also found the American characters strange. They seemed flat, not like real people- it was something about the dialog that made them seem like cardboard cut-outs and not real people. They don't talk like any of the Americans I know. It's about Egypt more than Chicago, really. I liked the novel in the end, but only after I thought about it for a day and a half.
    • 3/5
      Great dialog; colorful language; but a bit over engineered! I thought i was reading a play rather than a novel.
    • 1/5
      Weirdly anachronistic dialogue combined with deceptive marketingMamet can usually be counted on for memorable tough-guy dialogue laced with a liberal use of profanity and the breaking of all rules of grammar ("There is nothing that I will not do" - Spartan; "Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only." - Glengarry Glen Ross; "Don't you want to hear my last words?" "I just did." - Heist; etc.). The dialogue in this latest novel (not his usual genre, so one wonders whether an abandoned screenplay or theatrical work was recycled) uses an odd out-of-period Elizabethan or Victorian English in the mouths of the supposed 1920's Prohibition era Chicago characters. At one point after a character jumps into a grave (à la "Hamlet") I though the plot might continue with Shakespearean allusions but that didn't come to pass. Although the Thompson machine gun depicted on the cover does make a late cameo appearance in the plot, the story has actually very little to do with the gangsters and the Chicago bootlegging wars between the O'Banion and Capone gangs that one would expect in a book promoted as "A Novel of Prohibition." Instead we mostly have two newspapermen fumbling their way through an investigation of a series of homicides that turn out to have nothing to do with the illegal alcohol trade. #ThereIsAlwaysOneI listened to the Audible audiobook and was startled to hear about a character's "late demise by lead" with "lead" pronounced to rhyme with "heed" instead of "led."
    • 3/5
      Chicago Tribune reporter Mike Hodge is an aviator who survived the Great War. He’s covered many stories, written about politicians, gangsters, drug addicts. He knows jazz musician, prostitutes, and bootleggers. He’s also in love with Annie Walsh. And when she falls victim to a killer, Mike sets out to find the murderer . . . and exact revenge.Set during prohibition in 1920s Chicago, this is a story peopled with a variety of characters: reporters, murderers, and the mob . . . all in a sweeping portrait of Chicago’s underworld. As might be expected for a mob-heavy tale set during the prohibition, there is a great deal of violence and corruption. Readers will find minimal exposition; the story unfolds through dialogue. The weaving of real characters and events into the fictional storyline is a strength of the tale; many readers are likely to find this a creative and interesting page-turner.
    • 4/5
      This book as noted is not about Chicago but rather about Egypt.It is unsparing in its criticism of the modern dictatorship and the corrupt " police " state with its dependence on American aid and goodwill.The hypocrisy of muslim devoutness is contrasted well with the support religion provides for the faithful.The undecurrents of Egyptian sectarian strife are touched upon and the author's disenchantment with capitalism is portayed against a background of "60s left-wing idealism --- the noblest charecter is an American vietnam era idealist.I felt the exploration of the Egyptian psyche and the muslim subjugation of women was handled very well.This novel was written 4 years before the fall of Hosni Moubarak and has many similarities in narrative with Aswani's first important work the " Yakobian Building".The book will be very much appreciated by Egyptian immigrants to the US.VM
    • 3/5
      Chicago excels when the characters fume, debate, shout, scheme, and fight. The novel is brilliant when characters soliloquize their guilt about leaving Egypt for the Midwestern United States. Unfortunately, the book fails on too many other fronts to truly be a successful novel.Chicago is unrecognizable as the story's setting. Though Aswany begins the novel with a brief, but dramatic sweep of Chicago's history, the rest of the story might as well be anywhere. Actually, the story feels like it is set in some alternate universe which is not quite the United States but strangely similar; the story simply feels like Aswany doesn't *get* the United States. This is most pronounced when he explores Racism (with a capital R) while following Carol, the novel's only black character. Ultimately, the novel feels rootless, which is so strange as the novel is all about rootings and uprootings.For all of its faults, this book leaves me curious about Aswany. Even though I didn't love Chicago, I look forward to reading more by him.