With help from his friends

Poils de cairote (A Cairene's Messages) Paul Fournel, Paris: Seuil, 2004. pp356

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Appointed director of the French Cultural Centre in Cairo in 2000 following four years spent in a similar post in San Francisco, the French writer Paul Fournel hit on a novel way of recording his impressions of this city, "of which I knew nothing," while keeping in touch with friends abroad.

"Each morning without fail, five times a week, and for more than 500 days, I sent my news to 98 friends. I got up early, wrote by hand and typed what I had written into the computer. Then I sent it off without going back to it or re- reading it. The rest of the day I went about my business as usual, looking out for something seen, heard about or lived through that would provide the next day's Cairo gleaning".

The results of this procedure have now been published as Poils de cairote, a pun on poil de carotte, or redhead, a book of scrapings or gleanings from Fournel's life in Cairo between November 2000 and June 2003.

In keeping with Fournel's procedural rule, which privileges the immediately perceived and restricts such perceptions to what can conveniently be scratched on the back of an envelope, most of Fournel's daily reports, each one dated, are no more than a few paragraphs long. By following them, Fournel's friends would have been able to gain a lively sense of how the city works, not available to non-residents but immediately recognisable to anyone who has spent any length of time in Cairo.

There are the Cairo taxis, of which Fournel comments that since the counter indicating the price invariably does not work, and is in any case wrongly calibrated, the price finally paid is the result of a game of bluff and counter-bluff between driver and passenger. Never ask the price, Fournel advises his anonymous friends, since this will reveal only that you do not already know it, leading at best to long and unnecessary haggling.

"The real Cairene does not bother with all this, simply getting into the taxis and paying at the end of the trip. He knows the right price." Because the driver has long since sized up his passenger, and also knows that he knows it, "he will often not even bother to look at the amount that you eventually give him." Fournel, who looks faintly Lebanese (he says), and therefore can avoid much of the worse inflation suffered by more obvious foreigners, describes the game of the taxis as the first exam to pass on the way to becoming a real Cairene.

Downtown Cairo Fournel describes as a "kind of distressed version of Hausmann's Paris", explaining to his foreign readers that this appearance has something to do with the rent controls that make a casualty of maintenance, and giving them a thumbnail sketch of Cairene geography. Fournel's job takes him regularly from the French Cultural Centre in Mounira to the lycée in Maadi, as well as to Cairo University in Giza to advise on the teaching of French, to the Opera House on Gezira to oversee various French cultural events, and to the airport to collect visiting dignitaries.

Engaging in these activities takes him across the boundaries that delimit the distressed Hausmann areas from the popular areas around Saad Zaghloul, near to the French Cultural Centre and where Fournel sometimes strolls, to the Islamic city at Al-Hussein, where Fournel takes iftar during Ramadan, and up through the new suburbs at the Pyramids, where Fournel goes horse-riding in the desert. The effect is one of a variegated and carefully described and appreciated urban space, particularly valuable to anyone who does not know Cairo.

Fournel's position as, in some sense, an official representative of French culture means that he gets onto diplomatic lists at various official functions and also has to promote and explain goings-on in France to Cairene audiences. This he seems to have done with good humour and a gentle eye for the absurd. Turning up for the inauguration of the Cairo Book Fair by the president he finds that no indication has been given to the assembled ambassadors on how they should rank themselves. Having decided on an a-to-z order in English, the president dutifully shakes all their hands, getting to Zimbabwe and then leaving without having time to open a book.

Later, the opening of the 25th round of the Cairo International Film Festival turns out to be something of a defeat for French culture, even if the American invitees, put off by the attacks on New York and Washington the month before, had not turned up. "A celebrated Egyptian actress of a senior generation was being honoured, a sort of wrinkled Shirley Temple, who arrived on stage through a hydraulic trapdoor amid a shower of confetti. Before the applause had stopped, the minister of culture, 20 bodyguards at his heels, left the stage, causing the audience also to get up and leave. Later, [the French film] Amélie Poulain was shown to the six or so people left in the hall."

Though the book is full of similarly striking vignettes, many of them of considerable charm, one of the casualties of the method might be thought to be the fact that it disallows further reflection, at least on the author's part. The rules demand that each item be brief and self-contained, the report of a particular perception, and this means that though certain themes, or lines of reflection, can be discerned these are usually left tantalisingly underdeveloped in favour of the next Cairo gleaning.

Fournel, for example, several times adverts to the role played by the French Cultural Centre, both in general and in the specific context of Egypt between 2000 and 2003, when much irresponsible discourse in the wake of the events of September 2001 had warmed through the American academic Samuel Huntington's idea of a "clash of civilisations", and when, on a more local level, the trouncing received by the sitting French prime minister at the hands of the extreme- right Front National in the first round of the French presidential elections in April 2002 had left the country's elites, and those representing France abroad, with a lot of explaining to do.

Fournel is never clear as to what image of French culture he hopes to project, and how that might differ from San Francisco to Cairo: on the evidence provided here an occasion on which some French buskers were brought from the Paris metro to play on the Cairo underground, a first according to Fournel, is most fondly described, but one cannot conclude from this that in general terms he sees the role of the centre he directs as one that is demotic and anti- hierarchical. However, if he does see it this way, then this really would be a first for the director of a French cultural centre.

Fournel himself was, and perhaps still is, a member of Oulipo ( l'ouvroir de littérature potentielle ), a group of writers loosely bound by a series of manifestos committing them to novel forms of formal experiment. Perhaps the best-known member of this group was Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition is written entirely without the letter "e", a tour de force when one considers that this is the commonest vowel in French. The idea is to generate "potential literature" from the observance of formal rules, given that such constraints, commonplace before the romantic notion of self-expression, had in the past produced highly imaginative structures having a mathematical appeal and elegance. Could one recapture something of that lost creativity by inventing rules and observing the structures to which they give rise?

Part of this programme lingers in Fournel's latest work, a memoir of Cairo produced by the daily observance of an obligation to 98 friends and reflecting the need to write up events from yesterday before the business of today begins. The interest of Poils de cairote does not stem from the method used to write it, but the resulting work should give much pleasure and a deal of diverting food for thought.

By David Tresilian