2009, The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 21 selections, 268 pages

Yusuf Idris [1927-91]was a medical student who gave up the pursuit of medicine to write. Along the way he wrote in support and defiance for various politicians and ended up serving prison time for his views. Yusuf wrote in ‘colloquial’ rather than ‘classical’ Arabic.

The Essential Yusuf Idris is a selection of 21 tales translated from the Arabic by Johnson-Davies and two others. These tales, for me, have something of the parable underpinning them, though the narrative most often comes off as retrospective biography on a tiny episodic scale. This book was leant to me by a reader who is following my Fruit of The Deceiver serial. I am truly grateful for the loan, as the subtitle’s invocation of the word masterpieces was apt.

No author I have read equals Idris in the character sketch. His characters are not always commendable, are rarely beautiful, and are never great. They are regular people of the working sort sketched so insightfully with the narrative word that you can smell them—and they don’t always smell pleasant. The setting is deeply wrought as well; the physical surroundings, the time of year, the qualities of the sky, are there, looming. Idris did not do scenery like the long version favored by American romancers. This is more like reading scenery by a pulp writer who suddenly cared. Oddly I find similarities with Robert E. Howard.

Hard Up is a story about what it is like to be poor through an equal mix of stupidity, circumstance and pride. Finally, in a bid to keep his wife Nefissa and himself housed and fed, Abdou begins selling blood a liter at a time to the hospital. This is a view of life from ‘the abyss of’ Abou’s ‘degradation.’

The Funeral Ceremony takes the reader on a sorrowful journey along with a singularly unsympathetic protagonist, an undertaker who takes dead babies to a holy man to solicit prayers on behalf of the bereaved parents. ‘Epidemic season’ is coming and things are looking up. The author offers a view of life through ‘the mist that veiled’ a compromised man’s ‘eyes’.

The Cheapest Nights takes the reader alongside a man for a cold miserable walk home after being pick pocketed while taking tea from ‘Tantawi’ of the ‘fiendish smile’, the type of ‘friend’ known to many an American alcoholic and drug addict. The large ugly man walks home broke on this winter night cursing the ‘swarms of brats littering the lanes’ and in his misery, returning to his fat wife with mud-caked feet where she lays on the floor with their many children. Ironically he only has one way to drive the shadows momentarily from his mind, a fleeting solution to his woe that will only add to the numbers of children he so detests…

It’s Not Fair is a stoner’s tale of class favoritism, as a hash-smoking doctor and a high policeman, conspire to pump the stomach of a man caught in a hash house, eventually recovering a chunk of hash they are both well qualified to evaluate.

House of Flesh is the tale of a widower and her daughters arranging a marriage between the mother and a blind man who recites passages from the Koran for a living. I am tempted to wonder if this short was the basis for Clint Eastwood’s civil war movie about feminism titled The Beguiled.

All in a Summer’s Night is a story about the ‘joy and bewilderment’ of youth, which follows the antics of a group of farm boys bonding through their dreams in the cool Egyptian night for a single night taken to its brutal conclusion.

Yusuf Idris wrote so that the reader could be transported to a place they’d rather not remain, making his peculiar kind of tale perfect for the short story.