The Cairo House
Page 28
‘I’m afraid tomorrow might be the only time I have available for a while.’
‘All right, tomorrow then.’
Robert hangs up. It was easier than he thought. She hadn’t even asked him how he got her number.
Find Out More
READ…
Similar novels such as Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits, Ahdaf Soueif’s Map of Love and Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent.
VISIT…
Samia Serageldin’s favourite places in Cairo and Alexandria
Any visit to Cairo begins with the Pyramids of Giza, where, in The Cairo House, Gigi and Luc go for a horseback ride and Tamer has his accident in the desert. Souvenir hunters never miss the Khan-al-Khalili Souk or bazaar, the setting for another chapter in the book, the one where Gigi and Tamer watch the whirling dervish at the Naguib Mahfouz Café. Order mint tea and an apple-flavoured nargileh, just for fun. Be sure to visit the grand Hussein Mosque at the entrance to the souk; tourists can visit outside of prayer times, but remember to take your shoes off at the door. Bring along thick socks or knit booties if you’d rather not walk barefoot on the carpeted marble floors. After your tour of the mosque and the souk, visit the lovely new Azhar Gardens just up the hill, overlooking the mosque and the thousand-year-old Azhar University. Take in the view of Old Cairo while you enjoy French pastries at Alain Le Notre café, or go for a stroll along the terraced walks.
At the other end of town, on the island of Zamalek, one of my favourite restaurants is Le Pacha, a houseboat on the Nile converted into a restaurant. I used it as the backdrop for one of the scenes in my novel. It is a stationary houseboat, permanently moored near the Marriott Hotel, but cross the bridge to Garden City if you’d like to take a cruise. The grand hotels along the Corniche all have pleasure-boat restaurants that you can take for a two-hour cruise down the Nile and back. Work up an appetite by going for a stroll along the tree-shaded Nile Corniche and go off the beaten path to tour the lovely turn-of-the-century villas in Garden City. Be sure to keep an eye out for the real Cairo House at No. 10, Ahmed Basha St, and for Fuad Serageldin St, named after my late uncle.
If you have the time, a side-trip to Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast is well worth the two-hour trip by train. The ambitious new library is a marvel of architecture, with its futuristic hemisphere looming low like a rising sun on the horizon. You can drive along the Corniche from the fifteenth-century Qait Bey Fort at one end of the Bay of Alexandria to Montazah Palace at the other, and with the palm trees swaying in the breeze, and a willing imagination, it can almost remind you of Nice. Be sure to try the refreshing water ices; lemon and mango were Gihan and Tamer’s favourites in the novel. You can go for a walk around the Montazah gardens and grounds, and if you know where to find it the guards will let you see the drowned ruins of Sadat’s summer villa, built below sea level with glass walls, like an aquarium. You can stay at the Salamlek Hotel, which was once a little folly the Khedive built for his Austrian mistress, and relive the heyday of King Faruk.
THE REAL CAIRO HOUSE
I am often asked if the Cairo House really exists. Unlike Isabel Allende, who writes that a Japanese reporter went all the way to Chile to see the real ‘House of the Spirits’ only to find out that there never was such a house, I can answer in the affirmative. In my case the Cairo House certainly does exist, in fact it is still in the family. The history of the real house is a little different, and perhaps even more interesting, than that of the house in my novel. It was originally built as a small palace for Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to use as a residence on his visits to Cairo. The First World War intervened, and the Kaiser never came, but my grandfather Serageldin Pasha bought it and moved there from another mansion nearby. Vestiges of the Kaiser’s taste linger in the library with its stained-glass windows, wood panelling and high-backed ‘Bishop’s chairs’. There are photos of the exterior and interior on my website: www.thecairohouse.com.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep appreciation to Toby Eady for his patience, his whole-hearted support, and his thoughtfulness in ways great and small; to Laetitia Rutherford for her insight and unflagging responsiveness; to Susan Watt for her invaluable guidance and the benefit of her experience. Thanks to Ramy Serageldin for his unstinting help in matters digital and technical; to William Fisher, Jessica Woollard and Amelie Van Wedel. Finally, I am indebted to the friends, family and total strangers who have been so wonderfully supportive of this book and of my writing.
About the Author
Samia Serageldin was born in Cairo, educated in Britain, and now lives in the USA. In addition to writing this novel, she is a columnist, a book editor and a lecturer.
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Praise
From the reviews of The Cairo House:
‘An enchanting novel-as-memoir…what strengthens Ms Serageldin’s book is Gigi’s own personal story’
Economist
‘This book has a lot to offer…Serageldin offers up an intriguing snapshot of contemporary Egypt’
Sunday Business Post
‘An interesting prism through which to observe the shifting status of a complex nation’
Sunday Herald
‘This novel is more about the personal changes – births, growing up, growing old, deaths – that make exiles of us all. Serageldin does a wonderful job of evoking Gigi’s Cairo milieu’
Booklist
‘A beautifully crafted novel…Flawlessly rendered prose’
Choice
‘Serageldin’s perceptive insights into the women who “have more than one skin” enrich this narrative of displaced and out-of-place women – expatriate intellectuals both spiritually and physically’
The Middle East Journal
Copyright
Harper Perennial
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
FIRST EDITION
First published in the USA in 2000
This revised edition first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2004
Copyright © Samia Serageldin 2000, 2004 PS section copyright © Louise Tucker 2005, except ‘Seeing with Bifocal Vision’ and ‘The Alternative Universe of the Imagination’ by Samia Serageldin © Samia Serageldin 2005
Samia Serageldin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-39620-7
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