Not quite hyperbole...but still very literary and important!

Hyperbole: an over-exaggeration (like the fact that I used "over" to quantify exaggeration, kind of overkill)

This is not quite a literary feature entry, because in all technicality, hyperbole is not really being used.

As anyone who has actually read the non-prose chapters will have noticed, for the most part, the news-clippings are all very, very extreme. Examples include:

(124) "Two plumbers compete in an auction to buy a palace belonging to the former queen of Egypt, valued at two and a half million pounds."

(133) "The public sector loses 790 million pounds every year in joint public and private sectors."

(163) "A Central Security trooper: 'We get paid six pounds a month, the price of one load of foreign bread in the Jolie Ville.'"

 

These are extreme events! The news clippings are nothing short of shocking, and the sheer volume of the clippings in the novel is overwhelming. So many of the news clippings are groundbreaking news that we begin to wonder whether all Egyptian news is really this insane, or whether Ibrahim just chose the most extreme clippings to illustrate a point. Regardless, the absurd content of the clippings, and the frequency at which bad news appears to happen clearly illustrates Ibrahim's point: corruption in Egypt is so prevalent, it occurs daily, that is begins to seem almost commonplace, and expected.