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Muhammad Aladdin’s “A Well-Trained Stray ” is a novel comparable to “Gli sdraiati” by Michele Serra, a new way of looking at the Egyptian youth, authors of the Tahrir riots.
A Well-Trained Stray
To make a living, Ahmed works as a pornographic writer for the odesk.com site. Ahmed has two dear friends: El-Loul, a failed television director, who is relaunching his career as a screenwriter and manager of “C-series” belly dancers, and Abdallah, his childhood friend, drug addict, from a wealthy family and indifferent to life. 
Following the lives of these three characters in the intricate and noisy Cairo streets, in the night clubs, in the desert-roads far from the big metropolis, the reader has a look at a part of the Egyptian population: the so-called “mavericks”, young people far from morality traditionalist, free from any constraint of a social nature and used to get by in any situation. They are the young people who gave birth to the street protests and also those who were in the streets in the pay of governments, as thugs and thugs.
The new Egypt
If writers like Nagib Mahfuz and ‘Ala al Aswani are above all representations of the Egyptian twentieth century, Muhammad Aladdin represents the 2000s and the clash between generations. The boys of Aladdin belong to the new millennium and to the disillusionment that has increasingly made its way into Egypt.
This generation is very similar to that of Michele Serra’s “Gli sdraiati”: young people who are more committed to spending their time, preferably in the quietest possible way. Muhammad Aladdin was the one who first unmasked the problems he thought he had hidden before Egypt, exposing them in all their violence.
Mubarak generation
In the novel it is also evident how this lack of perspective has become increasingly evident in recent times, especially affecting the last generations. In fact, if with Nasser Egypt had a real leap as an Arab civilization, this did not happen with his successors.
The Mubarak government in particular focused heavily on stabilizing wealth, creating an ever stronger social desperation which then broke out in Tahrir. A useful novel to understand the new Egypt and its future.
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