The Other Place

The Other Place portrays the shallowness of the petrodollar culture and the price one pays for quick money. The protagonist of this prize-winning novel, an educated middle-class Egyptian from Alexandria, describes his experiences and those of migrant workers and professionals in one of the Gulf states, and their interaction with the oil-rich country's local elite and with agents of western businesses. The book pictures rather than states the desolation brought about when market values take over and the ravages that such an order causes to all who partake in it. Ibrahim Abdel Meguid succeeds in representing imaginatively the important phenomenon of migration and the barren landscape of the petrodollar culture, and at the same time penetrates the rationalizing mechanisms of the migrants and their psychological make-up. The Other Place was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996.