Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), is a novel-length reflection on the processes at work behind our understanding ourselves as possessing a particular, nation-state based identity. The novel is set in the 1950s Cairo, the speaker is Ram (a nickname for Ramos) a twenty-something Egyptian living in Cairo in the time of Nasser's Egypt, "a young and 'poor' aristocrat turned communist through a liberal education, disillusionment with his own class, and a realisation of its moral bankruptcy and social injustice." A critical and dissatisfied citizen of the regime; his voyage to England occupies a crucial section of the novel and firmly places it in the ranks of novels that depict the experiences and repercussions of travel, displacement and estrangement. Displacement in this novel is legible not only in the characters' geographical shift from Egypt to England, but also in large measure as the ways in which the protagonists are "out of place" in space of a new, Egyptian nation. The characters' multiple displacements from their native Egypt and their social classes form the narrative scaffolding for the exploration of issues surrounding identity, sincerity vs. authenticity, class, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, leftist politics and Marxism. The poetics of displacement lead to the exploration of an "authentic" - a polyvalent concept that includes the notion of authentic self-expression and an authentic Egyptian identity. While Beer in the Snooker Club has a number of commonalities with Arabic novels of the twentieth century, it is not only the fact that it is written in English that makes it stand out: its dual orientation toward both Europe and Egypt is fundamental to our understanding Ghali's complex attitude. Rather than the putative novelistic setting in which the trajectory of the characters' movement is a one-way movement from East to West for the purpose of education (e.g., Haqqr's Umm Heshim's Lamp, Al-Hakqm's A Bird from the East) or as economic migrants (Kanaf nh's Men in the Sun or cAbd Al-Maj(d's The Other Place) Ghali limns a scene in which West is always and already bound up with - even constitutive of - the East, and complicates the culture gap between the two from the outset. These characters carry with them certain notions and expectations of England that are exploded upon their encounter with England as an experience, as the unitary image of a national, Egyptian identity is rendered problematic from the outset.