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Last year I reviewed Albert Cossery’s 1975 novel A Splendid Conspiracy (my review here). It was one of the Cossery books that sparked a bit of a Cossery rival (at least, among the blogs I follow, if not among the general public). It was published by New Directions at about the same time NYRB Classics published Cossery’s The Jokers (which I have but have not read). This season, both publishing houses are at it again, with NYRB Classics publishing Proud Beggars and New Directions publishing Cossery’s final novel, The Colors of Infamy (Les couleurs de l’infamie, 2000; tr. from the French by Alyson Waters, 2011).
When I read A Splendid Conspiracy, I was thrilled by his fantastic talent as a writer, but I had a bad taste in my mouth due to Cossery’s ”elevation of idleness to an art form” (that’s from The London Times), particularly as that idleness, in order to thrive, seemed to depend chiefly on taking advantage of others, often women. It was funny, and certainly a lot of it was tongue in cheek, but I didn’t feel good joining in on the mirth. Despite my initial feelings toward A Splendid Conspiracy, The Colors of Infamy has convinced me to keep reading Cossery. This little book was fabulous.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Written 25 years later, when Cossery was almost 90 years old, The Colors of Infamy had many of the same ideas floating around that I found in A Splendid Conspiracy – anti-materialism, anti-capitalism, subversion of authority, a deliberate refusal to become another cog in a wheel — but I found the presentation of these ideas much more palatable. For one thing, the central characters, as similar in some ways as they are to Teymour in A Splendid Conspiracy, have some kind of awareness that stretches beyond their self-satisfaction. As before, they feed off of the corrupt system and find their joy in observing the ridiculousness of it all, finding male camaraderie. However, the men in The Colors of Infamy are not held above reproach, which I felt was the case in the earlier novel. Consequently, I was able to enjoy the incredible wit and irony without flinching.
Like most of Cossery’s novels, this one is set in Cairo. As we begin, in fact, our central character, Ossama, is observing, with fascination (and a bit of gusto), the crowd around Tahrir Square, moving around in a strange state.
Resolutely circumventing every obstacle, every pitfall in their path, the people, discouraged by nothing and with no particular goal in mind, continued their journeys through the twists and turns of a city plagued by decrepitude, amid screeching horns, dust, potholes and waste, without showing the least sign of hostility or protest; the awareness of simply being alive seemed to obliterate any other thought. Every now and then the voices of the muezzins at the mosque entrances could be heard emanating from loudspeakers, like a murmuring from the beyond.
Ossama is 23 years old, and, “More than anything, Ossama enjoyed contemplating the chaos.” He grew up incredibly poor. Unfortunately, he had a relatively healthy body with no wounds or malformations, so he could never compete properly with other beggars. One day, as he’s waiting to throw himself under a cart large enough to ensure a quick death, he meets Nimr, the master thief. Nimr is impressed with Ossama and takes him under his wing, training him in the art of theft. At 23, he is excelling at his craft. Here is how Cossery introduces him:
Ossama was a thief; not a legitimate thief, such as a minister, banker, wheeler-dealer, speculator, or real estate developer; he was a modest thief with a variable income, but one whose activities — no doubt because their return was limited — have, always and everywhere, been considered an affront to the moral rules by which the affluent live.
But Ossama has found out a way perform his craft with minimal risk. He has “instinctively grasped the flaw of a society based on appearance.” When we meet him, he is dressed very well because “by dressing with the same elegance as the licensed robbers of the people, he could elude the mistrustful gaze of a police force that found every impoverished-looking individual automatically suspect.” One evening he is at a nice party and he hones in on one particular large guest. Expertly, he gets the man’s crocodile wallet and a letter. As it turns out, the letter is evidence of bribery and corruption in the ministry, and now Ossama just needs to figure out what to do with it.
It’s an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, Ossama (to be a proper Cossery protagonist) isn’t particularly interested in the money he could earn. Furthermore, he understands, with the help of some trusted friends — Nimr and Karamallah, a man who lives in his family mausoleum – that this sort of corruption is expected and forgiven. It’s not like he can actually start a revolution, if such a thing were desirable. No, the real predicament is how he can use the letter to get the best entertainment, which is interrogating and witnessing the absurdities of the system first-hand.
It’s a funny story, full of that wit that has given Cossery the title “the Voltaire of the Nile.” However, in the middle of the comedy there’s a bit of seriousness. Before Ossama has even nicked the fat man’s wallet he is found by Safira, a 17-year-old prostitute who has fallen in love with him. She finds him honorable and considers him a thief like Robin Hood. While he’s had sex with her, and was surprised by how little she charged him, he is not attracted to her and finds her a threat to his trade. Still, as badly as he treats her, a bit of compassion prevents him from being truly cruel, much to his chagrin:
In truth, his compassion for the girl prevented him from viewing her through his usual prism of ridicule and condemned him to seeing a reality whose tragic aspect he normally actively denied.
This was the sort of awareness that I felt A Splendid Conspiracy lacked. I’m still not convinced that Cossery’s ideal world could ever exist, or that it would be all that it’s cracked up to be if we managed it, just as he’s not convinced business can exist without “corrupt networks,” but at least in this novel there was, for me, a bit more heart behind the ideas. Furthermore, it seemed to leave some of the ideas open-ended, giving room for thought. As Ossama, Nimr, and Karamallah, figure out how to best handle the letter, the discussions they have make this a novel of ideas and not a polemic.
Finally, as a piece of entertainment — as someone who advocates not taking life too seriously, Cossery wants us to enjoy his book — it is wonderful. With the relative absence of derision toward the females (which really prompted me to take A Splendid Conspiracy too seriously for its good), I was able to sit back and drift pleasantly along with the prose. In fact, though I said above this is a novel of ideas, the ideas are light and presented mostly for our amusement — which perhaps makes them all the more poignant.
Albert Cossery, according to the write-ups I’ve read of this book, has been called “the Voltaire of the Nile.” Egyptian by birth, he moved to France when he was around seventeen and lived there until his death, in 2008, at the age of ninety-four. Despite the long separation between Cossery and his birthplace, he set most all of his books in Egypt (and all in some Arab country). I knew nothing about the author before seeing this book, but I enjoy Voltaire enough to wonder just what someone with Voltaire’s cynicism and wit might write about Egypt in the twentieth century. So with little background, I began A Splendid Conspiracy (Un Complot de Saltimbanques, 1975; tr. from the French by Alyson Waters, 2010)
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
When the novel begins, we meet the young Teymour, recently returned to his hometown after spending six years in Europe getting a degree. The first line is pretty perfect:
Seated at the café terrace, Teymour felt as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.
Teymour despises his hometown. There is nothing to do. It is completely barren of the things he’s sustained himself with over the past several years. We learn that Teymour has a rich father who sent him to Europe to study almost on a whim:
Nevertheless, somewhat belatedly — perhaps his daily reading of the paper had made him concerned about the transformations taking place in the world — the ludicrous idea had come into his head of seeing his son get a degree; and — the height of ambition! — a degree in chemical engineering, merely because of some stock he owned in the sugar refinery that was the city’s sole industry. This request, so late in coming, would probably have been rejected by the party in question had Teymour not seen his father’s vanity a means of spending a few years abroad where, he knew from reliable sources, fascinating pleasures and lasciviousness reigned supreme.
And Teymour did engage in all forms of lasciviousness, so much that the streets of his hometown seem completely sanitized by the daytime sun. In fact, Teymour engaged in so much lasciviousness that he failed to do any real studying — he never matriculated in any subject, never went to a class, just spent the money sent to him and managed, through some miracle, to spread his education out to six years. Upon his return home, he spent the bulk of his remaining small fortune on a forged diploma, a small one that displeases his father somewhat.
“It isn’t very big,” he said. “I hope you haven’t forgotten everything you’ve learned. This piece of paper cost me a fortune.”
Teymour remained silent; he almost pitied his father. But a mad hope led him to say:
“Father, if you’d like, I can get a bigger one, but I’ll need to go back there for a few more years.”
I think from the above passages that one can see the understated humour and social cynicism of Voltaire. It’s in little bits like this one — “This romance had been going on for some minutes when suddenly the husband appeared at her side and, although not blessed with particularly good eyesight, quickly perceived the danger to which his honor was being exposed.” — that began to solidify, in my mind, Cossery’s reputation as a writer.
However, as entertained as I was by the book, I had a hard time taking in Cossery’s philosophy, particularly as it is presented in this book. Cossery, it turns out, had “elevated idleness to an art form,” according to The London Times. That’s not to say I wasn’t refreshed by the thought of spending six years in Europe on someone else’s dime, and it certainly isn’t to say that I think a degree is the noblest achievement of life — I got along fine with Teymour’s malaise, even if I myself failed long ago to take his path through life. No, my problem comes a bit later, after Teymour’s attitude has had an about-face thanks to a couple of his friends. One friend in particular, Medhat, has never left his hometown, has no desire to, looks down on those who can’t find enough to do:
Medhat refused to forgive the absurdity and madness of people who learned all kinds of foreign tongues simply to grasp the meaning of the same idiotic remarks they could hear at home for free.
In the middle of “this vast universal dupery,” Medhat has taken it upon himself to enjoy life to the fullest because life, “while essentially pointless, is extremely interesting.” I’m still entertained at this point. I can even say that I follow the idea that many of the things we do in this life are pointless, part of a system we pay homage to in order to enjoy a few moments here and there (okay, I’m only that cynical when work is really busy — which it certainly has been lately). I’m enjoying this splendid book. The story and the characters grow in ways that show Cossery was a magnificent talent. It turns out that in the little hometown wealthy men are disappearing. No one knows what has happened to them, but the local police chief suspects Medhat, Teymour, and their friends. Why else wouldn’t they be working? he asks at one point. He assumes they are up to some political mischief and are planning something much larger. His paranoia is entertaining to the reader; it is also entertaining to Medhat and Teymour who do all they can to encourage the poor police chief in his beliefs. After all, this gives their pointless life some desirable color. Teymour completely engages in Medhat’s philosophy and never regrets leaving Europe again.
Besides pulling pranks agains the police chief, though, Medhat and Teymour do other things to keep themselves entertained, at the expense of several of the city’s fools. Again, no real problems from me, except that so often these pranks involved pedophilia, a topic that is often brought up and to no real derision. It’s one thing to have pedophilia in a story — it’s a real topic, a part of this world — it’s another to use it as a way of showing just how interesting (and entertaining) this life can be if we only open our eyes. The fools get just desserts; but it’s not the same for Teymour and Medhat who encourage and probably partake in the behavior. We get the definite sense that they are the real heroes in Cossery’s eyes, that their actions are above reproach because they are simply enjoying this otherwise pointless existence. It certainly rubbed me the wrong way, and it didn’t surprise me afterwards to discover that Cossery is also known as an anarchist.
The tiniest bomb that explodes somewhere should delight us, for behind the noise it makes when it explodes, even if barely audible, lies the laughter of a distant friend.
I found the characters, in the end, repulsive, and the author’s presentation of them fascinating because I feel so very much the opposite. Things happen that should never be laughed at. Cossery wrote an absolutely entertaining and compelling book that shows a different perspective. I’m not sure whether to praise its obvious skill or throw it across the room for its hideous ideas. I see that New Directions is issuing another of his books later this year. I suppose that the fact that I’m very anxious to read it gives you my answer, though it is mostly to see this author’s mind in action again.
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