The Jokers - Albert Cossery [2]
As the French are the wittiest race in Europe, so are the Egyptians in Africa. Cossery’s comedy derives from the contraposition of exquisite French and an exceptionally squalid setting. His is not the French I learned at school, let alone that spoken nowadays
in metropolitan France, but he writes sentences of which Balzac would have been proud. His style depends for its effect on precise and outlandish adjectives, as in the description here of the terrace of the Globe Café. That is not the very best style in English, which likes verbs and nouns, and presents a challenge to his translator.
Cossery has his faults. There is a certain rigidity of posture, which is open to parody, and, most notably in Proud Beggars, a daft nihilism. There is not the slightest inquiry as to why the poor of Egypt are poor nor, in a country that passed in Cossery’s lifetime from British protectorate, to parliamentary monarchy, then to military junta, nationalist autocracy, and dynastic republic, any sense of history or process in the affairs of humanity. To nobody’s surprise but Cossery’s, the Arab world has chosen not derision but violence.
Cossery has a superstitious terror of family life and makes no attempt to penetrate it. Females shed all interest at puberty, or, as with Soad in this novel, at the moment they put up their hair. Thenceforth, Cossery’s women are commères, acariâtres, mégères— gossips, old bags, shrews.
Cossery writes in French not just because he needs the urbanity and distance of a foreign language to display his Cairo and Alexandria but because God writes in Arabic, which brings all kinds of entanglements. Cossery’s achievement, substantial as it is, lacks the audacity and toughness of the Egyptian novelists in Arabic such
as Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Haqqi, or Taha Husain. Yet Mahfouz has many more readers in French and English translation than in his native Arabic, so perhaps Cossery has the last laugh.
—JAMES BUCHAN
The Jokers
1
THE DAY promised to be exceptionally torrid. The policeman, who had just taken up his position at the city’s most distinguished intersection, suddenly felt that he had fallen prey to a mirage. It had to be the sweat pouring down his gloomy features, making him resemble a designated mourner in the midst of a funeral service, that was interfering with his vision; he blinked several times, as if to remedy his defective eyesight and get a sharper perspective on things, but this feeble effort was to no avail. So he pulled a red-and-white-checkered handkerchief—as coarse and dirty as a dishrag—from his pocket and mopped his face vigorously. Having thus clarified his view of the world (at least for a moment), he turned his gaze on the mirage—and received a shock. For what he saw—insofar as he could make out anything distinctly—was a beggar, a finer specimen than he’d seen in a long time, lounging comfortably at the corner of a brand-new, quite splendid building, one that contained a bank and a jeweler, no less: two aspects, in other words, of a universal metaphysical order that demanded immediate protection from the rabble. As if driven by murderous rage, the policeman shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket and, blinking continually so as not to lose the benefit of his newfound sight, lunged straight at the impudent wretch. Orders had gone out a month ago: the city must be liberated from the lowlifes that had taken to swarming like ants at a picnic in even the most respectable streets. This was one of many directives that the new governor—a man bursting with bold initiatives—had issued, and admittedly, it was the most difficult to carry out. The new governor’s ambition was to clean up the streets and protect them from any further blots upon their honor; he talked about streets as if they were people. So, after the prostitutes, the street vendors, the cigarette-butt collectors, and other minor scofflaws, he had set his sights on the beggars, a peaceful race with such deep roots