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. (more…)

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