Proud Beggars     by Albert Cossery, Translated by T Cushing Original title: Mendiants et orgueilleux Original language: French Published by Black Sparrow Press Pub. Date: 1981 Format: Paperback, 190 pages ISBN: 0876854501 List Price: $12.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 Published by Black Sparrow P Pub. Date: 1983 Pub. Place: UK Format: 206 pages List Price: £6.50 Not available for ordering

Albert Cossery was a wanderer. For several years he served as chief steward on a liner of the Port Said-New York line. He spent time in America and England before settling in Paris. But he was born in Cairo of Egyptian parents and this enables him to portray the Egyptian people with the sympathetic eye and the attention to detail displayed in this book.


Proud Beggars is a Rabelaisian romp through the streets and alleyways of Old Cairo. Its three main characters are philosopher-rakes in flight from the excesses and vacuity of modernity. The ‘master’ of this little group is Gohar, a one time university lecturer who after twenty years of spouting hypocrisy threw it all in to take a squalid room in a tenement in the old town. Renouncing all material goods he now subsists on the few piastres he gets from doing the accounts at Set Amina’s brothel. His room is empty except for the old newspapers he no longer reads but which serve him as a mattress. He has a fairly serious hashish habit and a fantasy of escaping to Syria where, at the time, the drug was still legal. Finances, however, make such a trip impossible.


Yeghen, poet and petty criminal and El Kordi, a young man with a romantic soul who works ‘as a clerk in some Ministry’, are his two disciples, both fatally infected with the eloquence of his world view. It is Gohar’s lust for drugs, however, which serves as the motor for the narrative. In a moment of drug deprived madness Gohar strangles one of the girls at the brothel, which all three men frequent in different capacities. The murder enquiry ushers onto the scene the inspector of police Nour El Dine who immediately concludes that the murder, because it is apparently motiveless, is the work of some criminal mind of genius. In between rows with his young boyfriend, Samir, the policeman pursues the case and the spotlight for the murder falls alternately on our three heroes.


The book shines with comic brilliance, poking merciless fun at all forms of authority. While Nour El Dine may discover the truth about the murder, at the same time he learns some unpalatable truths about himself and he, too, considers resigning his job and living the life of a beggar. But could he achieve the same levels of self-esteem as Gohar and his friends?

‘A moment later he saw the house in the distance and felt a little reassured. Set Amina’s brothel was not a place of easy pleasure for Gohar. He never went there as a client, but only to fulfil an important literary function. Actually, it was an exceptionally diverting job to which he attached a symbolic value. To draw up Set Amina’s business accounts and sometimes the love letters of illiterate whores seemed to him work worthy of human interest. So, despite his evident decay he still preserved the role of a powerful intellectual which had been his glory in the past, when he taught history and literature at the biggest university in the country. However, the academic side of his nature, which was so odious then, here no longer had any excuse for existing.’ p22