Beer in the Snooker Club: (Serpent's Tail Classics)

Behind the bar at Jameel's in Cairo hang two mugs engraved with the names of Ram and Font. During their years together in London, they drank many a pint of Bass from these mugs. But there is no Bass in Nasser's Egypt, so Ram and Font have to make do with a heady mixture of beer, vodka and whisky. Yearning for Bass they long to be far from a revolution that neither serves the people nor allows their rich aunts to live the life of leisure they are accustomed to. Stranded between two cultures, Ram and Font must choose between dangerous political opposition and reluctant acquiescence. First published in 1964, Beer in the Snooker Club is a classic of the literature of emigration.

About the Author :
Born and brought up in Cairo, Waguih Ghali spent much of his adult life in Europe. His stay in London and his suicide in 1969 were described by his friend Diana Athill in After a Funeral (Cape, 1986). Beer in the Snooker Club is his only novel.

Review :
Beer in the Snooker Club is one of the best novels about Egypt ever written. In the protagonist, Ram, a passionate nationalist who is nonetheless an anglophile, Waguih Ghali creates a hero who is tragic, funny and sympathetic. Through him we are presented with an authentic and acutely observed account of Egyptian society at a time of great upheaval -- Ahdaf Soueif This is a wonderful book. Quiet, understated, seemingly without any artistic or formal pretentions. Yet quite devastating in its human and political insights... if you want to convey to someone what Egypt was like in the forties and fifties, and why it is impossible for Europeans or Americans to understand, give them this book. It makes The Alexandria Quartet look like the travel brochure it is -- Gabriel Josipovici A plainspoken writer of consummate wryness, grace and humor, the Egyptian author chronicles the lives of a polyglot Cairene upper crust, shortly after the fall of King Farouk and thoroughly unprepared to change its neo-feudal ways...This is the best book to date about post-Farouk Egypt Los Angeles Times I sat on a terrace overlooking the Nile and began to read. I was so captivated that I stayed up late into the night, reading the book in one sitting. Yet while the words were quickly consumed, the world they conjured and the issues they raised - of exile and belonging - have stayed with me through the years ... When I first read Beer in the Snooker Club I was struck by how different it was from any other Egyptian novel I knew. While Ghali was at work on this fresh, bright novel that wears its seriousness so lightly, Naguib Mahfouz, just a couple of years off being elected a Nobel laureate, was still trying to recreate the great nineteenth century English novel, dressed up in Egyptian clothes ... When I first appeared in Cairo with my copy, an Egyptian writer begged to buy it and then asked me to find ways of sending him more copies: "Everyone wants to read it, " he explained, "because it is such a sharp portrait of our country." I have just read the book for the fourth time and what now strikes me is not the book's political credentials but the pleasure to be had in the presence of its wonderful hero/narrator. In Ram, Ghali has created a very Egyptian version of a character familiar from Salinger's Catcher in the Rye@ a young man trying to square dreams and idealism with the realities of the world around him. It is impossible not to sympathise with his predicament. It is also impossible, for me at least, not to be swept along by the deceptive ease of the storytelling, by its pace and sheer skill. -- Anthony Sattin Slightly Foxed Ghali's novel reproduces a cultural state of shock with great accuracy and great humor The Nation A fantastic novel of youthful angst set against a backdrop of revolutionary Egypt and literary London. It's the Egyptian Catcher in the Rye Lonely Planet Egypt Beer in the Snooker Club may be angry, but it is also extremely funny. Ghali neatly skewers the pretensions of the Cairene elite along with the hypocrisies of empire... Beer is a funny, tragic memorial to a man and a country at a time of painful transition. -- Rachel Aspden Observer There is a lightness of touch and an engaging self-deprecatory wit in Ghali's writing which carries the reader through what was regrettably his only novel. -- Gordon Parsons Morning Star This novel has certainly passed the test of time: it is as powerfully relevant now as it was half a century ago. Let us hope this third reissue is not the last. -- Andre Naffis-Sahely TLS