The Lady of Zamalek
In 1920s Cairo, ambitious young Abbas rises to power in the shadowy underworlds of prostitution and construction. After getting involved in the murder of a wealthy businessman—an actual historical event for which four men were arrested—he flees to his home village and plots how to find and take advantage of the untold wealth the man had hidden away.
Abbas’s life becomes intertwined with the murdered man’s widow and even more with his estate in the affluent suburb of Zamalek. His sister Zeinab soon joins him there and becomes his sometime partner and eventual nemesis. Through the next decades, they amass fortune and gain prestige through violence and manipulation. While Zeinab longs to be accepted by the women of the social world she aspires to, Abbas ruthlessly cuts his way through competition.
The story is told first in the alternating voices of the brother and sister, and then also of his daughter Nadia, her high-ranking military husband, and a neighbor who was Nadia’s first love. When it works well, the jumps in narration, as well as back and forth in time, nicely fill in pieces of a puzzle, but in other instances, it is a challenge to sort through names and the sequence of events. Even in revelations at the end, several matters are not satisfyingly concluded. It is unclear why Nadia’s first husband wanted to marry her—or what exactly was intended by naming her after the murdered man’s daughter. Jewels that were arbitrarily lost are never found. The original Nadia never shows up.
The sweep of Egyptian history and the portrait of class, social norms, and values are fascinating, though the movement of the plot is somewhat mechanical. Abbas’s casual brutality and Zeinab’s more hidden machinations seem to have little motivation beyond greed and desire for status.
