A-Z 2021 I: The Cheapest Nights (Yusuf Idris, 1954-1978)

I think I've mentioned the idea of a curate's egg before.  I have to say, at least from my perspective, Egyptian writer Yusuf Idris's short fiction definitely falls into that category.  I loved the writing style, the way that he captures the world that his characters live in, the descriptions that make places I don't know if I would ever go come alive in my mind.

And yet, I can't really bring myself to say that I enjoyed my time reading The Cheapest Nights.

So, what's the problem here?  There's a lot to unpack in this short volume.  First, it's worth noting that collection this is not the same as Idris's identically-titled first collection, أرخص ليالى, which I don't believe has ever been released in English in its original form.  This collection does, however, include six of the stories from that earlier one, along with nine from his later collections.

There's a throughline here, of people trying to find their ways out of poverty and dealing with the societal problems that prevent that escape.  Sexuality is almost omnipresent, but it's dealt with in a very matter-of-fact way, never graphic.  The title story, for example, deals with a man who made the mistake of drinking black tea in the evening being unable to sleep, wandering his village that has too many youth, but unable to find anything to fill the time with that doesn't cost the money he doesn't have due to having six children, so he goes home, wakes his wife, and they pursue the least expensive entertainment available... nine months later, he now has seven children, and still wonders where all the youth running around in town are coming from.

Everything is that simple, matter-of-fact, straight-forward.  A man who can't hold a job discovers that he can sell his blood at the hospital, allowing him to make ends meet for a time, only to be told eventually that he's sold too much and has anemia, and to come back when he's stronger.  A landowner attempting to charge tolls to get into a marketplace on his land is stymied by the merchants' refusal to go around to the one entrance he wants them to traverse, and instead make their own way through the fence where it's more convenient for them.  An old tradition in a slowly-failing rural farming region regarding offers of hospitality to a wedding party traveling down the road goes awry when one particularly large example of such a party decides to take everyone up on their offers.  The word selection is surgical in its precision, leaving no doubt as to what's going on.

That said, I can't say that the stories on display here are even remotely pleasant for the most part.  Especially when Idris is trying to point out a particular social ill, there are rarely anything like positive conclusions (of the fifteen stories, I would only argue that three have particularly happy endings), and more often than not, the protagonists are left in worse states than they began the stories with.

I think the most frustrating thing, though, is that the two longest stories in the collection are driven largely by sexual assault.  The first of these, "The Dregs of the City," starts out looking like it's going to be about a judge looking for his missing wristwatch, and indeed that's the top-level narrative, but much more of the story is about the judge taking advantage of a married cleaning woman whom he has hired and pushing her into eventually becoming a prostitute; the second, "The Shame," is about how an entire village decides that an innocent girl has had sex with one of the young men in town, and virtually frog-marches her to have the one "trustworthy" woman in the village inspect her, a test that apparently involves several women holding her down while she's stripped, with the potential result of a failed "inspection" directly stated to be an honor killing.

And... I mean, this isn't pleasant stuff to read about.  We've got a guy taking advantage of a woman who lives in abject poverty and can't effectively say 'no', and a whole village working as a mob to rob a girl of her innocence, despite her (truthful) pleas that nothing happened.  Elsewhere, we have religious leaders giving in to sinful behaviors, anonymous murders of physically-and-mentally-disabled people, and bureaucratic red tape hindering even those who are trying to do something resembling good work within the system.  Frankly, it's not surprising that Idris wound up jailed for the political views in some of his writings, given how much of a focus his writing places on the realities of poverty in Egypt.  It's very well-written, very powerful stuff, of a kind with Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or John Steinbeck.

But powerful doesn't mean pleasant.  And like I said before, I can't say I enjoyed reading this.

Doesn't mean it doesn't belong on my shelf, though.  Or that I would pass up reading more of Idris's writings.