What Do Egypt's Writers Do Now?

The Egyptian revolution is over, the army wields power and the new government is in disarray. Tensions between Christians and Muslims are ascendant and members of the elite are leaving the country in droves while those who remain bemoan the masses as ignorant ideologues. This is the Egypt of Waguih Ghaliâ??s â??Beer in the Snooker Club,â? a coming-of-age novel set in 1952 that, much like â??The Catcher in the Ryeâ? in America, articulated the identity crisis of a generation. Ghaliâ??s characters â?? young, precocious, cosmopolitan â?? are lost in the bewildering aftermath of the military coup that overthrew the pliant boy-king Farouk. They pine for the easeful gambling, womanizing and drinking of the past even as they scorn both the ancien régimeâ??s sordid pretensions and the new regimeâ??s inability to deliver on its vaulted promises; â??We have the worst of both systems,â? one of them declares, exasperated. Ghali, who published his novel in 1964 and committed suicide five years later in the bathtub of his British editorâ??s Primrose Hill apartment, took the fall of the monarchy as his subject. Still, his tale presents uncanny parallels to todayâ??s Egypt, where artists, intellectuals and youth at large are beginning to fashion a new cultural republic of sorts even as they also struggle to find their bearings.