About Proud Beggars:
Early in Proud Beggars, a
brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real
mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery’s wry black comedy is not the cause of
this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the most materially
impoverished life.
Chief among Cossery’s proud beggars
is Gohar, a former professor turned whorehouse accountant, hashish aficionado,
and street philosopher. Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a
small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El
Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a
consumptive prostitute. The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark
secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself
captivated by their warm good humor. How is it that they live amid degrading
poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even the most assiduous forces of
state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all
ambition, hold the secret of contentment? And so this short novel, considered
one of Cossery’s masterpieces, is at once biting social commentary, police
procedural, and a mischievous delight in its own right.
About Albert Cossery:
Albert Cossery (1913–2008) was a
Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who
settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the
rest of his life. The son of an illiterate mother and a newspaper-reading
father with a private income from inherited property, Cossery was educated from
a young age in French schools, where he received his baccalauréat and
developed a love of classical literature. At age seventeen he made a trip to
the French capital with the intention of continuing his studies there. Instead
he joined the Egyptian merchant marine, eventually serving as chief steward on
the Port Said–New York line. When he was twenty-seven his first book, Men
God Forgot, was published in Cairo and, with the help of Henry Miller, in the
United States. In 1945 he returned to Paris to write and live alongside some of
the most influential writers and artists of the last century, including Albert
Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Alberto Giacometti, Lawrence Durrell,
and Jean Genet. He was also, briefly, married to the actress Monique Chaumette.
In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l’Académie
française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la Société des gens de
lettres. In recent years several of his books have been newly translated into
English, including A Splendid Conspiracy, The Colors of Infamy,
and The Jokers (which is available as an NYRB Classic).
Source: NYRB
