FICTION

ANTIQUITY STREET by Sonia Rami (Farrar Straus Giroux: $20; 190 pp.) Fans of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” will read Sonia Rami’s first novel with nostalgic pleasure. Detractors of Durrell will at least experience deja vu, for these two chroniclers of love amid Egyptian decadence commit some of the same excesses.

The narrator of “Antiquity Street” is the daughter of a member of the Turkish aristocracy that ruled Egypt in the 19th Century and later cooperated with the British, only to be shunted aside by Nasser in the 1950s. She has rejected the subservient life of her mother and older sister, divorced her husband and gone off to Harvard to prepare for a career. On a visit home she falls in love with Alex, a “poor Greek” from the slums of Cairo who has become her father’s “orderly.”

Alex is handsome but ill-educated, crude, vain, racist. The narrator isn’t sure why she’s attracted to him--and neither are we, for even more than in Durrell’s novels, the human beings here are secondary; the real characters are the cities of Cairo and Alexandria, whose cruel and sensuous history stimulates and disillusions each succeeding generation of lovers, like a kind of fate.

Still, if Rami is a halting storyteller, she is an eloquent describer. Her catalogues of Egypt’s exotica, like Durrell’s, often seem to exist for their own sake, but in fact they serve a thematic purpose. They lead to the past--a street name recalls the Napoleonic occupation, a peddler’s cry summons up a lost era of Italian tradesmen--and it’s in the past that the narrator finally discovers the source of Alex’s bruised, ambiguous charm.