In 2002, the writer Alaa Al-Aswany presented the novel "The Yacoubian Building", which achieved wide spread, especially after it was translated into several languages and sparked a great deal of controversy.
Its events take place in a building built in 1934 by the millionaire Hagob Yacoubian, the dean of the Armenian community in Egypt at the time, and bears his name. of ordinary people.
Journalist Ahmed Shawqi Ali says that the novel had weight on the political level because it was published during a period when the political situation in the country was ambiguous, pointing out that it touched on the collective concern and the ambiguous relationship with politics and the problems of the state during that period.
On the other hand, writer and novelist Ashraf al-Khamaisi believes that "The Yacoubian Building" was daring in its handling of politics and topics that were not covered by human relations, which are the reasons that made the novel active.
He added that the novel found popularity among the simple, and it contained major problems, according to the great critics and the literary community.
As for the art critic Kamal Ramzy, he believes that the novel contains the warmth of the place, the diversity of characters, the diversity of levels and moods, and that its writer did not fail to monitor the social and political changes and their impact on the population.
However, some critics believed that Al-Aswany had copied the characters of his novels and based their construction on previous literary works, which Shawky stresses by saying that the writer benefited greatly from the novelist architecture of the international novelist Naguib Mahfouz.
the movie
With a production budget that was the largest in the history of Egyptian cinema at the time, and with the participation of many first-class stars, the novel turned into a cinematic film that was not spared an attack from several parties that did not like to address the social and political conditions and some sensitive issues at that period.
Art critic Ramzy returned to say that the film is considered one of the bravest films in the history of Egyptian cinema.
The novel and the film revealed the causes of bribery, perversion, extortion, religious extremism and others, which some critics considered an export of a bad image that does not reflect the reality of society, and Shawky says that Al-Aswany’s novel has become the gateway from which the other reads contemporary Egypt, the country that suffers from corruption, which It has problems.