The House of Jasmine - Interlink World Fiction Novel | Historical Fiction Book for Adults | Perfect for Book Clubs & Literary Enthusiasts

The story is focused on four disillusioned young men bumming around in Alexandria, Egypt mostly in the 1970’s. It’s a very political novel and the four men give us hints about national political sentiment in Egypt during traumatic times.The story starts with the Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel in 1973 and some of these young men fought in the Egyptian army. The background story goes through demonstrations and rioting against price increases, visits from Nixon and Kissinger, the Camp David peace accords led by Jimmy Carter, and the transitions in Egyptian leadership from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak.The young man who is the narrator and main character has a first-hand view of the politics. He works for a big shipyard and part of his job is to organize buses and signs (and pay workers) to go to demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria in support of various presidents and to line parade routes for visiting dignitaries. It’s a source of extra income for him because often he just pays the workers half of the official amount, pays the bus drivers to be quiet, and pockets the rest. Like a day off from school, everyone is happy with this arrangement. It is fitting that the main character scams the systems because, as we are told in an Afterword from the translator, one theme of the book is deception and fraudulence of the system. (The main character also gets ripped off by a real estate agent, for example.)In their spare time the four young men hang out in a cafe playing backgammon. I say cafe but it appears they only drink tea. They talk about the wars, about women, about getting married. They talk about leaving the country to get a better job working in the Gulf States.Oddly, they are not at all fast friends. They know little about each other’s families. Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don’t. One of the four disappears for months and no one knows or seems to care where he is. One goes into the army and writes to each of them – not one writes back to him.The main character wants to – feels he needs to - get married to give his life some focus. He sees a beautiful woman in the shadows of a local house known as the Jasmine House, but the house and the people in it have a reputation for being cursed.Young men aimlessly hanging out during war or waiting for war could almost be a genre. I think of other books structured around this theme: Sandor Marai’s The Rebels (Hungary during WW I), Gunter Grass’ Cat and Mouse (Danzig in WWII), and Vladmir Jokanovic’s Made in Yugoslavia about the disintegration of that nation.There is some good writing:“Many people like to stick to smooth roads, even if they don’t lead anywhere.”“I was sitting in my office thinking of how women lived longer than men because God wanted them to suffer longer.”All in all an interesting story with some local color of Alexandria but I found it hard to empathize with this aimless, often clueless guy.The author (b. 1946) has written around ten novels, only four of which have been translated into English.