The Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany's second novel is a bit of a curate's egg, or maybe a mullah's omelette: on the one hand it's a racy campus novel set among the Egyptian émigré community of the University of Illinois, while on the other it's full of undigested lumps of socio-political commentary that appear to have been cut and pasted from an encyclopedia. But despite the catastrophically ped...