Word: novelize
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Despite its seemingly incongruous title, Alaa Al Aswany's novel Chicago is filled with characters who reflect the conflicting political and social currents churning through Egypt today. There is Nagi, an idealistic medical student who is passionate for democratic change - and for his blonde American girlfriend. In league with him is Dr. Muhammad Salah, a university professor questioning the meaning of his life and nostalgic for a simpler past. Almost another world away is Shaymaa, a sweet, veiled young woman from the Nile Delta who finds herself struggling to cope with modern life in the big city...
After the huge success in 2002 of his first novel, The Yacoubian Building - another scathing examination of Egypt's malaise - Al Aswany is already drawing comparisons to the nation's Nobel literature laureate, Naguib Mahfouz. Such high praise may be a little premature: Mahfouz founded modern Arabic literature and wrote almost 50 novels over half a century. But Al Aswany - who continues to work on the side as a dentist in Cairo - does share the legendary author's talent for constructing simple stories about Egyptian life that convey universal truths in defense of human dignity. His writing tackles the most...
...also being accessible to Egyptians who normally have more time for Al-Ahly, their favorite football team. "He is read everywhere," says Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, editor of Al-Mulhaq, the Arab world's leading literary supplement. "The importance of Al Aswany is that he reinvented the popular Egyptian novel, which had died. Literature cannot live without different levels of literary work...
...pragmatic." He was Vice Premier in Prodi's first government from 1996 to 1998, before moving over to run the capital. Pale and bespectacled, next to the ever-tan, ever-spiffy Berlusconi, the Rome mayor has high-culture tendencies and a book-writing hobby; he has written an earnest novel and a biography of a little-known jazz musician. Veltroni even gets a mention in Ian McEwan's best-selling novel Saturday...
...Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down...