Book #48: Beer in the Snooker Club by Wagiuh Ghali
Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book's title and subject matter intrigued me, so I decided to read it.
A lot of the book was just about the narrator, Ram, and his friends, visiting a snooker club, drinking beer, and discussing politics, without a lot happening, but the discussions - which occasionally descended into arguments were well written, and made me want to read more. A lot of the discussions were about the Suez Crisis, and characters' involvement in it, letting the reader know when the events were taking place. The discussions seemed like the type that I would expect young pseudo-intellectuals to have with each other. I was interested to see that Ram was apparently also a member of the Communist Party. The action took place in different locations across the world, principally Egypt and London.
The other plot thread running throughout the narrative was Ram's love live, and his relationship with his partner, Edna, and whether they would settle down together. He seemed to have something of an open relationship; at one point he cheated on her, and she didn't seem to mind.
This felt like a challenging book at times, particularly when I found myself presented with long paragraphs with very few breaks, but I perservered with it, and found myself enjoying it a lot. Sometimes the narrative seemed to withhold information from the reader, including Ram's reasons for panicking when his friends knocked on the door and pretended to be the police in one scene, and at times the book seemed to skip whole events, only for Ram to explain what had happened later on to other characters. This didn't detract from my overall enjoyment though, and I would definitely recommend it to others.
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