Beer in the Snooker Club

By Waguih Ghali

Book Overview

Set amidst the turbulence of 1950s Cairo, Beer in the Snooker Club is the story of Ram Bey, an over-educated, under-ambitious young Egyptian struggling to find out where he fits in. Ram's favorite haunt is the fashionable Cairo Snooker Club, whose members strive to emulate English gentility; but his best friends are young intellectuals who devour the works of Sartre and engage in dangerous revolutionary activities to support Egyptian independence. By turns biting and comic, Beer in the Snooker Club -- the first and only book by Waguih Ghali -- became a cult classic when it was first published and remains a timeless portrait of a loveable rogue coming of age in turbulent times.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804170746
• ISBN13: 9780804170741
• Release Date: June 2014
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Great novel

This book is the best Egyptian novel of the 20th century, and anyone interested in the country should read it. The story itself is entertaining and well-written and it is incredibly useful in understanding the cosmopolitan Egypt of the early 20th century and its slow decline. The English-educated, socialist offspring of a very wealthy and well-connected Coptic Christian family in love with a Jewish girl is the protagonist and that alone indicates how the book itself is an extension of Ram's own internal conflicts.

One of the best obscure novels I know

BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB depicts Egypt in the tumultuous 1950's through the eyes of Ram, who is one of the more distinctive and conflicted characters I have recently encountered in fiction. Ram is an educated, well-connected Copt, probably in his mid-twenties. His best friend is Font, another Copt. Ram and Font spent four years in England and are obsessed with English civilization and culture, but they also despise British colonialism and hypocrisy and they participated in guerilla fighting against the British during the Suez War. Ram's long-time girlfriend is Edna, who is from a Jewish family that has lived in Egypt for five generations. Ram empathizes with the fellaheen and is intellectually outraged on their behalf, but he also mingles with the vapid dandies who play croquet and bridge and his favorite pastime is beer in the snooker club. Political activism or a comfortable life? I leave that for the reader to find out. BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB was published in 1964. It was the first novel by Waguih Ghali, and when he committed suicide in 1968, it became his only novel. It surely is one of the finest "single-work" novels there is. It is difficult to tidily characterize BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB. It is as ambiguous as the life it so clearly depicts. While scathing in its denunciation of the British in Egypt, it is equally condemnatory of Nasser, his betrayal of socialism, and his concentration camps and atrocities of political oppression. Egypt has not yet become Islamicized, but for Ram and Font (two Copts) and for Edna the handwriting on the wall is pretty clear. Several of the political sentiments of Ram (or Ghali, as I suspect they are the same) are interesting in retrospect. For one thing, the novel has no truck whatsoever with pan-Arabism. And it also voices a "let-live" attitude towards Israel: "Imagine a third of our income being pumped into an army to fight a miserable two million Jews who were massacred something terrible in the last war." The Egypt of BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB is at a stage of political, economic, and religious uncertainty or indecision. One of the central issues of the novel is, "What is an Egyptian?" And the same uncertainty or indecision extends to Ram's personal life: what to do with himself, whether or not to live attached to the purse strings of his rich aunt, whether or not to marry, and who? There are a few missteps, but by and large the narrative technique and writing are accomplished. The novel is alternately comic and bitter, satirical and angry. Ghali is quite worldly and knowledgeable about all sorts of Western historical, political, and cultural matters, which are liberally sprinkled throughout the novel. He also is empathetic and politically astute. Consider this excerpt, which is representative of the depths this superficially light and breezy novel at times plumbs: "If someone has read an enormous amount of literature, and has a thorough knowledge of contemporary history, from

A fantastic read-world literature at its best

Waguih Ghali, a member of the extended family of the former UN Secretary General, wrote this book in English, a language in which he was entirely at ease. In that, and in many other ways, this book is autobiographical. It traces the lives of several characters, but especially a couple of young men of the Egyptian upper class, at a time of great change in the 1950s. England is leaving Egypt, finally, in 1954. The Egyptian army has overthrown the royal family and instituted a republican system that both embodies the nationalistic and progressive hope of many Egyptians, and also becomes increasingly repressive. The characters, Ram and Font, are Egyptians who are Anglophone and upper class, and so are out of touch with the new order. How they deal with that order, with their identities, and their coming of age is the story of book. At some level, this book is about Egypt, and it is a useful book in that sense. But it is also a wise, funny and beautiful read: a book that most readers will devour in one sitting and be left wanting more. This was Ghali's only book, but it is a real memorial to him.

If you like Camus...

Ram is a 20-something Coptic Egyptian without much direction, yet an opinion on just about everything. Ghali writes very much in the style of Albert Camus (i.e. existentialism; meandering plot) and at times is quite humorous ("It's better to have loved and had a venereal, then never to have loved at all.") The story has a little of everything: politics, love, drama. However, you have to know a little about 20th century Egyptian history/politics to get some of the references (Nasser, Aswan Dam, etc.) It's pretty easy to get through other than that.