Cairo House

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Summary: Evocative Exploration of the Expatriate Experience
Review: As a Frenchwoman living in the States for much of my adult life, I found The Cairo House an evocative exploration of the expatriate experience. Its appeal is universal in the evocation of the ambiguity and chameleon-like quality of the truly bi-cultural individual, an experience that the author renders with sensitivity and honesty.
The book originally appealed to me because I am very familiar with Cairo and Egyptian culture, having lived there for many years as the child of diplomats. The description rings true in the smallest details.

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Summary: The Cairo House Fiction
Review: I found this book a very enjoyable read. It taught me a great deal about Egypt and made me curious to know more about the country. It is a beautifully written and crafted novel, which held my attention from start to finish. In fact I was so fascinated by it, I couldn't put it down, and I read it in two days over the weekend. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Evocative and Entertaining
Review: Samia Serageldin wrote an easy-to-read compelling and evocative book detailing the life of the priviliged in Cairo during a transitional period in the history of modern Egypt. Her flawless prose was based on first-hand experience of life at that time.

This is a very evocative and entertaining book.

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Summary: The cairo House
Review: The Cairo House is a book I recommend everyone to read, it's a book that brings up memories, about the good and the bad in Cairo, it makes you dream of the past were life seemed so easy and nothing seemed to matter, it gives a clear view about the big gap between social standards in Cairo. As an Egyptian living in Canada, I felt connected to this book, by how hard it is to feel home again.

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Summary: Easy to read, but lacking...
Review: The Cairo House is a nice easy to read book. Unlike the several other excellent Arab American autobiographies published over the last few years, Cairo House falls short in offering balanced look at the author's life story, identity and life across three continents.

Cairo House comes across short in intellectual maturity with minimal retrospective analysis of events and relationships. Glimpses of the maturity and honesty come across in the later phases of the book, but much of the earlier phases are full of cardboard like characters.

Most disturbing for an Arab American is the author failure to move beyond colonial era thinking and rhetoric. Serageldin's attempt at defending Egypt's ruling classes of 30's and 40's is weak, thousands of miles away and several decades do not seem to have open her eyes to the failure of Egypt's elite to move beyond resisting British occupation to building a modern democratic society with some form of upward mobility.

The Cairo House however is entertaining, full of interesting tidbits about Egypt and does occasionally shed some light on Serageldin's confusion and loss of identity in an interesting and personable fashion.

For me Leila Ahmed's Border Passage, another autobiography of an Egyptian American woman of privileged upbringing is a masterpiece. In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Souif, an Egyptian British woman is another masterpiece in semi fictional work. Nadia, Captive of Hope by Fay Afaf Kanfani is also an excellent work by an Arab American woman and so is Out of Place by Edward Said. Perhaps it takes more than 10 years away to gain enough maturity to be able to offer a true thought provoking autobiography that examines issues of identity and the struggle of belonging as well as a true look at one's own family, shortcomings and indeed life

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Summary: Unfortunately
Review: The Cairo House is a third class novel. It leaves a lot to be desired in terms of writing technique and style. The thread throughout the novel is weak and tangled. The writing is of very poor quality. I couldn't even describe it as stream of consciousness as it is too abrupt and confused for that. It is also quite repetitive with underdeveloped characters, setting and plot. The digressions, descriptions and imagery throughout the novel in most cases are misplaced, unnecessary and do not integrate well into the context of the novel. Regarding content, the story is very weak, and sadly superficial. It is mostly unnecessary fluff that serves nothing but filling in the pages. If it weren't for the author's picture on the back of the book, which clearly shows that she is at least fifty, I would have mistaken it as the writing of a high schooler who watches too much television. If you intend to read The Cairo House, I strongly recommend you precede your reading with two strong cups of coffee.

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Summary: A Beautiful Story of Three Cultures
Review: The story of Gihan (Gigi), the daughter of a well-to-do Egyptian family, brings to life the richness, complexities and perplexities of leaving one's birth culture to live in foreign lands. It is upon her return to Cairo as an adult that Gigi begins telling her life in snapshot flashbacks. Through these portraits, the reader pieces together her happy life as a little girl, the less-happy changes that come under Nasser, and her two marriages -- the first to Egyptian Yussef, the second to frenchman Luc -- that take her from Egypt to England to France and finally to the United States. Throughout her narrative, Gigi moves easily from one culture to another, all too easily in a way, since her return to Cairo prompts her to reexamine her life and to wonder whether she hasn't just drifted along without much resistance. Her one possible true love from her childhood, Tamer, reproaches her precisely for being too dutiful, too ready to do what was expected of her. In the end, she does not seize the possibility of his love but continues to do what is expected of her, to move downstream like a leaf borne along by the water.

Beautifully written, haunting and evocative, THE CAIRO HOUSE is a fictional treatment of recent Egyptian history and cultural change in Egyptian life as well as a bittersweet reflection on the ability to feel comfortable in many cultures but at home in none. Serageldin's command of the cultural and linguistic layers of her narrative is masterful. The passages of transition -- the coming and going in the international airport -- ring particularly true. A rewarding read.

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Summary: Step Into The Cairo House
Review: This autobiographical novel about an Egyption girl growing up in Nasser's Egypt is like an antique gold necklace. It offers a glimpse of an age that by now has passed, the gracious but patriarchal and conservative world of traditional Egyptian aristocracy. The heroine, Gigi, niece of a former Prime Minister out of favor with Nasser's regime, comes of age as her family's social world is under siege. Through her eyes, the reader witnesses Egypt's lurch into modernity, and some will value this novel for the insight it gives into the Egypt of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Others will read it as an example of the literature of exile. Gigi lives much of her life outside Egypt, in part to escape the expectations Cairo society has of Moslem women of her background. She disengages herself from an arranged marriage and leaves a son behind in order to secure a measure of freedom. Like other expatriots, though, she eventually finds that she belongs neither to her homeland nor to the cultures where she resides. Another way in which The Cairo House is like antique gold is that it is a beautifully crafted book that in its technique harks back to novels of another day. Avoiding postmodern showiness, Serageldin relies on accessible language and understated structuring devices. The novel is organized around a series of early morning scenes, as Gigi moves from awakening to awakening and finally to defeat. And Serageldin artfully hints at a parallel between the son she leaves behind and a cousin, a potential lover whom she must abjure. But these devices do not look like devices; they modestly appear as part of an account whose naturalness is its most important trait. Early in the novel Gigi notes that courtesy, for Egyptians, means making others feel comfortable. It is as if Serageldin had lavished this solicitude on her reader, for her modest style at once puts the reader at ease and offers him the pleasures of genuine literary art.

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Summary: Through the eyes of an Egyptian
Review: When I first went to Egypt in 1993 on a "Cook's Tour" of museums and ancient monuments, I had no idea the trip would change my life. It was just one of many foreign trips that my husband and I were taking in retirement. My experiences on that trip, and seven subsequent ones, led me to a second career studying ancient Egypt and to a growing affection for modern Egypt and Egyptians. To feed my interests, I read every novel set in Egypt I can find. When I heard about "Cairo House," I rushed out a bought a copy.

What I found was a deeply moving story--part memoir, part novel--of a young woman's life in the turbulent Cairo of the 1950's and 60's. Like any good historical novelist, Samia Sarageldin illuminates the general by making it specific and illustrates the specific by making it personal. Thus we see and feel the effects of Egypt's overthrow of King Farouk, which really meant throwing off the yoke of British domination, in terms of its effect on one prominent family. And we witness the family's disruption from the perspective of Gihan,the small daughter who wonders if her misbehavior was the cause of the family's distress. This lack of comprehension of the larger scene continues when the young girl cannot understand why her marriage does not conform to her girlish expectations. The reader is therefore amazed and pleased when Gihan takes the courageous step of abandoning her unhappy marriage and relinquishing her son in order to gain her own freedom. Courage, not passiveness, turns out to be a characteristic of many Egyptian women.

In following Gihan's odyssey we learn a great deal about Egyptian society, Moslem customs, and Eastern views of the West--details I found intriguing--but these never overshadow the personal narrative. The book is constructed as a series of flashbacks as Gihan, now an adult, returns to Egypt to see if she can recover her son and find a place in society. She learns that maturity brings understanding of past events and motives but not an ability to change them or to alter the consequences that past actions set in motion. I was hoping for a happier ending, but life doesn't always provide these. Perhaps there will be a sequel in which Gihan learns to seize happiness at a price, as she found the courage to seize freedom.

This is a beautifully crafted first novel by a very talented writer. I look forward to her next book.

Rating:
Summary: Through the eyes of an Egyptian
Review: When I first went to Egypt in 1993 on a "Cook's Tour" of museums and ancient monuments, I had no idea the trip would change my life. It was just one of many foreign trips that my husband and I were taking in retirement. My experiences on that trip, and seven subsequent ones, led me to a second career studying ancient Egypt and to a growing affection for modern Egypt and Egyptians. To feed my interests, I read every novel set in Egypt I can find. When I heard about "Cairo House," I rushed out a bought a copy.

What I found was a deeply moving story--part memoir, part novel--of a young woman's life in the turbulent Cairo of the 1950's and 60's. Like any good historical novelist, Samia Sarageldin illuminates the general by making it specific and illustrates the specific by making it personal. Thus we see and feel the effects of Egypt's overthrow of King Farouk, which really meant throwing off the yoke of British domination, in terms of its effect on one prominent family. And we witness the family's disruption from the perspective of Gihan,the small daughter who wonders if her misbehavior was the cause of the family's distress. This lack of comprehension of the larger scene continues when the young girl cannot understand why her marriage does not conform to her girlish expectations. The reader is therefore amazed and pleased when Gihan takes the courageous step of abandoning her unhappy marriage and relinquishing her son in order to gain her own freedom. Courage, not passiveness, turns out to be a characteristic of many Egyptian women.

In following Gihan's odyssey we learn a great deal about Egyptian society, Moslem customs, and Eastern views of the West--details I found intriguing--but these never overshadow the personal narrative. The book is constructed as a series of flashbacks as Gihan, now an adult, returns to Egypt to see if she can recover her son and find a place in society. She learns that maturity brings understanding of past events and motives but not an ability to change them or to alter the consequences that past actions set in motion. I was hoping for a happier ending, but life doesn't always provide these. Perhaps there will be a sequel in which Gihan learns to seize happiness at a price, as she found the courage to seize freedom.

This is a beautifully crafted first novel by a very talented writer. I look forward to her next book.