First things first: it is a very funny and perceptive book about the characters occupying a fashionable Cairo apartment block (which really exists) and squatting in hovels on its roof. Like the crumbling “Majestic” hotel in J. G. Farrell’s novel Troubles, about the end of British rule in southern Ireland, the eponymous apartment block was a metaphor for the state, and its inhabitants are figures representative of different aspects of Mubarak’s Egypt.
Mais tout d’abord : ce roman, à la fois subtil et très drôle, raconte la vie des occupants d’un immeuble chic du Caire (qui existe vraiment), squattant des abris de fortune sur le toit.