Canter Bridge

Evocative of the immigrant-to-America writing of Jhumpa Lahiri, Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago is a montage of personal stories that takes as its protagonists Egyptian university students in a Chicago department of histology. The writing, at least in the English translation provided, is inelegant and the character development is without nuance. Yet Chicago draws this reader in by the sheer force of personal drama as glimpsed in the lives of men and women for whom emigration—rather in search of a degree or a new life—fails to erase the hold of the old country on one’s soul and fortune. It seems an adaptation of the proverb is apt: you can take the Egyptian out of Egypt but you can’t take Egypt out of the Egyptian. If we are well-rooted, the observation is just as true—mutantis mutandi—of the book’s readers.

If the sex lives of Al Aswany’s characters are not precisely ribald, they are front-and-center in a disproportionate manner for a novel that might have reallocated some of its pages to other pursuits.

The author flirts repeatedly with caricature. Yet this literary sin takes venal rather than cardinal form, restrained as it is by his knowledge of his fictional academics’ lives and his evident delight in telling their tales.

Chicago is a good novel, not a great one. Its weakness—wooden English—is compensated in part by the heroic effort required for a novelist to write in a second language or a translator to perform his craft in the same direction. Its strength—the endless fascination of the human adventure multiplied by the doubling effect of the immigrant experience—saves the day.