Albert Cossery

Cairo gave Albert Cossery his subject and Paris gave him his address. Born in the Egyptian capital in 1913 to a Greek Orthodox family of Syrian origin, he left for France at seventeen after reading Balzac, settled there for good in 1945, and spent the next sixty-three years in one room at the Hôtel La Louisiane in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He wrote only in French and set almost everything in Egypt or an unnamed Arab city. Eight novels in sixty years was the entire output, which suited a man who treated idleness as a form of thought rather than a failing. Laziness in the Fertile Valley, from 1948, watches a household of brothers compete at doing nothing; William Goyen translated it in 1952 and Henry Miller wrote the foreword. Proud Beggars turns a killing in Cairo into a comedy of poverty, in Thomas W. Cushing's translation. Anna Moschovakis translated The Jokers, in which plotters bring down a city governor by praising him without limit, and Alyson Waters translated The Colors of Infamy. He took the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 1990 and died in Paris in 2008, aged 94.