The Lazy Ones

byAlbert Cossery, William Goyen (Translator)

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‘Serag had heard that men worked, but these were only stories that one told. He never believed them completely.’

Three brothers live with their father, uncle and maid in a dilapidated Cairo suburb, spending as much time as they possibly can doing nothing whatsoever. Galal has been asleep for seven years, occasionally waking to eat; Rafik moves between his bed and attempts to sabotage his father’s planned remarriage. But Serag, the youngest of the three, has started having crazy ideas that threaten to shatter the household’s torpid equilibrium. He wants to find a job. If only he wasn’t so sleepy.

Written in 1953, in the louche Parisian hotel room Albert Cossery lived in for sixty-three years, The Lazy Ones is a playful celebration of Cossery’s belief in the ultimate dignity of indolence in an alienated, materialistic society. As he remarked, ‘the more you are idle, the more you have time to reflect. Laziness is a critical position by which to judge the world.’

Above all Cossery, one of the last and quirkiest links to the postwar glory days of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, elevated idleness to an art form. He lived on his royalties and the generosity of his friends, and he liked to show his hands and say: "They have not worked for 2,000 years."
The Times

About Albert Cossery

Albert Cossery was born in Cairo in 1913. He studied law in Paris before the outbreak of World War II. During the war, Cossery served in the Egyptian merchant Navy before returning to Paris to continue his studies (which he never did) and to devote himself to writing, flirting and friendship with some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Alberto Giacometti, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Genet. He was also, briefly, married to the actress Monique Chaumette. He settled permanently in the French capital in 1945, where he lived in the same hotel room until his death in 2008. In 60 years he wrote eight novels, in accordance with his philosophy of life in which “laziness” is not a vice but a form of contemplation and meditation. He was awarded the Grand Prix de La Francophonie de l’Académie française and the Grand Prix Poncetton de la SGDL.

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