The Cheapest Nights reveals the vicious circle of life in an Egyptian village. Without money and unable to sleep because of the cup of tea he just drank, Abdel Kerim turns to his wife and their bed for the only entertainment he can afford, and as a result one more unwanted child is born into poverty, doomed to die of disease or starvation.
You Are Everything to Me tells of Ramadan, a traffic cop who feels his life is ending when he develops erectile dysfunction. Just as he suggests divorce to his wife, he escapes his self-centered gloom: he finds new life by devoting himself to his son again.
In The Errand, El Shabrawi the policeman escorts a crazy woman to Cairo in hopes of having a fun day on the town. Everything goes wrong because of her fits and his poor planning, but in the end he realizes she’s not to blame and develops charity for her.
Abdou adds “blood donor” to the list of odd jobs he has worked to support himself and his wife, Nefissa, in Hard Up. Anemia soon puts an end to his brief stint in that field.
The Queue explains why an iron fence has only one piece of cement wall in it. The wall was part of a landowner’s stubborn war with peasants who refused to use the proper entrance to the market place on his property. They foiled all his attempts to block their illegal queue – including the wall – and the government seized it from him anyway.
The Funeral Ceremony is a portrait of Abou’l Metwalli who haggles with an undertaker over fees and the number of dead children he has buried for Abou’l.
A group of village boys foresee their dead-end destiny after beating up their ringleader for making fools of them in All on a Summer’s Night.
The Caller in the Night tells of a boastful medical student who refuses to pay a poor, honest fellah for bringing him the corpse he had boastingly asked for.
In The Dregs of the City, Judge Abdallah shows his callousness by forcing a poor married woman into prostitution then shaming her publicly for stealing his watch.
“Did You Have to Turn on the Light, Li-Li?” asks a good-Sheikh-gone-bad before leaving his hung-over congregation prostrate in prayer to rendezvous with Li-Li, the seductress next door. Having ruined his religiosity, she rejects him at the threshold.
Dr. Khaled sees charity amid the rampant corruption of Cairo’s death certification system in Death from Old Age. Though doubtful at first, he gives Am Mohamed, one of the middlemen’s laborers, this most merciful notation possible on his death certificate.
In Bringing in the Bride, Sheikh Ragab turns the tables on false hospitality by surprisingly accepting every homestead’s malicious invitation to a marriage feast.
The Shame tells of Fatma’s loss of innocence when she and Gharib are falsely accused of fornication. Life goes on, but Fatma is no longer innocently beautiful: she seems to understand the effect she has on men after the incident.
Borham can’t help shamefully obsessing over his mother’s extramarital sex life when he sleeps under the bed in Because the Day of Judgement [sic] Never Comes.
The Freak is a deformed and mentally retarded boy who lives in a village where everyone assumes he’s harmless, but no one seems to know his origin. Rumors circulate and worsen until no one trusts him any more. Eventually, someone murders him and only his mother, Na’asa, mourns his death.
The medium of the short story seems particularly suited to giving me a wide sample of the topics and settings important to Arabs. I found recurring themes in Idris’s many short stories: the marital relationship; infidelity; sexual immorality; male dominance through violence; poverty; religious devotion; desperation; drug abuse; mental health; death; bureaucratic corruption; rumors; class conflict; and disease. Idris’s only topic unusual to most of the Arabic authors I have read was homosexuality, and he portrayed that dilemma relatively evenhandedly. I suppose the aforementioned themes are common to all humanity, but Idris approaches them in a distinctly Egyptian way. He exposes his characters’ weaknesses, fears, and prejudices satirically. Many of the characters are all gravely serious and earnestly concerned about the dilemmas in which they find themselves, yet Idris usually portrays their situations as ironic and even laughable. Some of the characters even recognize contradiction and corruption in their culture but often choose to shrug it off. Those characters that chose to fight these contradictions almost inevitably end up wearing themselves out in the process.
I had never observed the sarcastic side of the Arab sense of humor before reading Idris’s short stories. I enjoyed the irony to a degree, but the overwhelming majority of his stories employed irony whereas I might have enjoyed seeing more than four of them end with positive changes in the main characters. Even so, I liked Idris’s style enough that, aside from the generational histories of Naguib Mahfouz, I read Yusuf Idris most.