Taxi [Paperback]

In conversations with 58 Cairo cab drivers, this entertaining novel is a street-level and street-smart portrait of the City on the Nile. Each chapter is a character sketch, no two alike, though there is a theme that runs through most of them - the near impossibility of making a living driving a taxi in this crowded and chaotic metropolis. Each man has a story to tell, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious. Taken together they are a lament for the country's economic problems, the undependability of government, and the frustrations of dealing with law enforcement and a vast bureaucracy that seems unable to operate without the payment of bribes at every turn.

The quality of life, as observed by the men behind the wheel, is on a steady trend downward, and often their personal lives are cause for a yet additional string of grievances. Wives complain; children are intractable. The narrator encounters, cynicism, despair, rage, fatalism, faith finally in a just and protecting God. Meanwhile, relief from chagrin comes in the form of humor, as we listen in on an exchange of political and sexual jokes while drivers wait in a long queue at a petrol station. And on rare occasions there's a man who has achieved a kind of beatific peace with it all. If social and political realities are to be found beyond the limited vision of news coverage, this is the place to look.

Taxi is an interesting patchwork of a novel by the freshly-minted Egyptian journalist-commentator-filmmaker cum writer Khaled al-Khamissi. The fifty-eight chapters that comprise this unusual book represent fifty-eight separate taxi rides taken by the narrator, who is merely the guise of a thinly-veiled al-Khamissi. This work is, in some sense, an ethnographic novel in that it attempts to portray the working lives of Cairo's 80,000+ taxi drivers through punctuated scenes (chapters) which are a cross-section of that part of society.

Al-Khamissi's portrayal of the Cairene cabby is definitely sympathetic though not patronizing. While giving due credence to the unique social and political perspectives that taxi drivers maintain by virtue of their near-constant physical presence on the maddening city streets, he does not shy away from revealing some of the wackier encounters with those drivers who spout conspiracy theories, conservatism and tales of faux poverty.

There are moments of knowing and astute political irony in Taxi. An example of the meta-critique of Egyptian government that pervades the book occurs in chapter seven, where the driver laments Egypt's arcane statutes regarding seatbelts and the myriad laws and tariffs and cost of it all to be borne by the poor taxi driver. At the end of that particular encounter after mentioning how he skirts the law by only installing a decorative rather than functional seat belt to appease the authorities, the driver tells the narrator: "We live a lie and believe it. The government's only role is to check that we believe the lie, don't you think?"

Mr. al-Khamissi works hard at being representational of the whole of Egyptian society through the work of the commentary and dialogue offered by his characters. Yet in his desire for a complete cross-section of Cairo taxi culture all of the offstage laboring by the author began to seep into the text. The first twenty-five episodes are interesting and insightful but they eventually began to feel like a gimmick and came perilously close to monotony. If it were a television series it would have been canceled after half a season.

But it is not episodic television, it is is a book, and its annoyances do not detract from its originality as an interesting new voice in pop-Arab fiction. The chapters provide often captivating nuggets of insight into the concerns and ebbs and flows of daily life in one of the world's largest cities, and most important countries. A helpful glossary in the back is included for readers less familiar with details of the culture.

Jonathan Wright's English translation of the colloquial Egyptian Arabic is good though a bit uneven. Yet Wright is to be commended for taking a frenetic text and rendering it into something readable and perhaps appealing for an English-speaking audience. We ought to have more popular fiction in translation and not just higher-brow literary novels (Taxi has been on Arabic language bestsellers lists for more than a year).

Tired of reading about the Middle East through big, traumatic news stories? "Taxi" is a great portrait of contemporary Egyptian culture--on political and personal levels. It's simply narratives by taxi drivers (the ones lazy journalists usually take their man-on-the-street quotes from anyway!), and it explains a lot about the various frustrations of living in Cairo today.

And if you've ever ridden in a Cairo taxi, you know the experience can be incredibly aggravating. Amazingly, this book makes the drivers sympathetic, though hardly saintly.

My only small frustration with this book is that the translation is occasionally a tiny bit stilted, but in general it's a million times better than most books translated from Arabic.

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