This chapter explores the aesthetic, narrative and ideological stakes of the balcony scene in Candy Candy. Oscillating between an eminently traditional representation and a questioning of social and aesthetic conventions, the scene punctuates the narrative progression and is the object of a double repetition: whilst several episodes show the actors’ auditions and then their preparation before the premiere, the characters of Terry and Candy ceaselessly replay the balcony scene, which constitutes a structuring motif of the anime. It also becomes the locus where gender identities are shaped and troubled, but also where theatre and life unfold in a game of mirrors. Candy and Terry’s love story actually never goes beyond the phase of the balcony scene, a sequence that they keep repeating in endless variations that call for decoding.

Because the birth of the Egyptian novel came so late in the Arabic literary tradition (1914) and coincided so closely with the country’s independence from the British, it is no surprise that questions of national identity and authenticity are an overlying preoccupation. What is perhaps surprising is the extent to which these questions are enacted in the arena of courtship and marriage. In the canon—as in the capital—liminal space remains prime real estate in the economy of desire. For those in Cairo who are unwilling or unable to marry at a conventional age, traditional values and familial structures, combined with a culture of surveillance and patriarchy, results in a thorny romantic landscape. All of this is exacerbated by neoliberal policies that stretch the preexistent wealth gap, as well as the increased privatization, militarization and monetization of public space. This chapter will explore possibilities for desire through liminal spaces in a select survey of (mostly) 20thcentury Cairene novels: Tawfiq Hakim’s 1933The Return of the Soul, Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947Midaq Alley, Latifa al-Zayyat’s 1960The Open Door, Enayat al-Zayyat’s 1963Love and Silence, Gamal al-Ghitani’s 1976The Zaafarani Files, Abdel Hakeem Qassem’s 1987An Attempt to Get Out, and Alaa al-Aswany’s 2002The Yacoubian Building.