Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel.
When he was twenty-seven his first book, Men God Forgot, was published in Cairo and, with the hel.
Instead he joined the Egyptian merchant marine, eventually serving as chief steward on the Port Said-New York line.
At age seventeen he made a trip to the French capital with the intention of continuing his studiesthere.
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 baccalaur at and developed a love of classical literature.
About the Author: 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.
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.
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.
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.
Chief among Cossery\'s Proud Beggars is Gohar, a former professor turned whorehouse accountant, hashish aficionado, and street philosopher.
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.
Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel
