The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk / Palace of Desire / Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Egyptian Culture, Human Nature, Comedy and Tragedy, Politics and Art, and Great Writing My husband took A second wife When wedding henna still Was fresh Upon my hands. The day he brought Her home, her Presence Seared my Flesh. Characters in Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy (1956-58) sometimes sing popular songs like that. The Egyptian Nobel Prize winning author’s work is a semi-autobiographical look at vivid and intense moments in the lives of the members of a Cairene family living in the old part of the city in the first half of the 20th century, when Egypt was struggling for independence from England. The middle-aged patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawad is a terrifying tyrant at home. He makes his sons wait to eat till he leaves the table, refuses to let his wife Amina leave the house, and decides who his children marry: “I’m a man. I’m the one who commands and forbids. I will not accept any criticism of my behavior. All I ask of you is to obey me. Don’t force me to discipline you.” Although Al-Sayyid is a humorless, pious Muslim man at home, when out partying with his cronies he is a pleasure seeking, joke telling, tambourine playing, song singing, alcohol abusing, womanizing playboy. Amina, who when not cooking and cleaning and supporting her children stands in her rooftop garden gazing longingly at the minarets of the mosques she can never visit, is the heart of the family. Eldest son Yasin has inherited his father’s sensual appetites without any of his self-control; middle son Fahmy is a naive law student devoted to Egyptian nationalist-independence; youngest son Kamal (based partly on Mahfouz) is a lively, loving, imaginative boy. Eldest daughter Khadija has an acerbic tongue that often makes fun of people. Youngest daughter Aisha is fair, beautiful, and unworldly. The trilogy depicts the family aging as their country changes. In the first book, Palace Walk (1956), which covers the years 1917-19, Al-Sayyid rules at home and plays outside, Amina takes care of her family while trying to visit the mosque of Al-Husayn, Yasin fails to control his lusts and discovers his father’s dual nature, Aisha and Khadija get involved in matrimony, Fahmy gets involved in revolution, and Kamal tries to understand his changing family. The second book, Palace of Desire (1957), taking place from 1924 to 1927, focuses on the now teenaged Kamal, particularly on his quest to find truth, goodness, and beauty by studying world philosophy while doubting everything in life and on his one-sided idealized love for Aida, an older girl from a wealthy family. “It seemed he had fallen in love in order to master the dictionary of pain.” Acting as a foil to Kamal’s love are the comical sexual misadventures of Yasin, who marries the wrong women for the wrong reasons, and of Al-Sayyid, who gets back in the adultery game after a five-year hiatus. Though just as funny as the first two, the third novel, Sugar Street (1958), covering 1935-44, is sadder than the first two. Here the family is really aging, especially the once vigorous patriarch and his long-suffering wife, and there is much death. “It was sad to watch a family age.” The story centers on Kamal’s “infernal vacillation” as to whether or not to marry, on his new friendship with a kindred-spirit writer, and on his his nephews, Abd, who joins the new Muslim Brotherhood, grows a beard, and becomes quite the fundamentalist, and Ahmad, who joins a Marxist magazine and becomes quite the atheist. Throughout the trilogy Mahfouz writes interesting details about Egyptian family life in the big city in the first half of the 20th century, as well as about the education and class systems, wedding, marriage, divorce, death, funeral, and religious customs, café and brothel culture, gender roles, and politics. He relishes the Egyptian tendency to spice up life and defuse stress with irony. “If our houses are destroyed [in an air raid], they’ll have the honor of being demolished by the most advanced inventions of modern science.” And the Egyptian (or Arabic?) tendency whenever too happy or proud or sad etc. to say something like, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” (The translation of the trilogy is fine, though I sometimes wished the translator would have rendered “God” and “Lord” as Allah.) In addition to particular details of Egyptian culture, Mahfouz writes about universal aspects of human nature, as in the following quotable lines: “Patriotism’s a virtue, if it’s not tainted by xenophobia”; and “People need confidential advice, consolation, joy, guidance, light, and journeys to all regions of the inhabited world and of the soul. That’s what art is.” He leads us into the heads and hearts of his characters, as in the following emotional lines: “In this manner he was afforded an opportunity to feel what a dead man might if still conscious,” “His secret flowed out of him like blood from a wound,” and “Watching her eat pastries was even sweeter than eating them himself.” He also writes wonderful similes with original, surprising, and perfectly apt vehicles, like: “His eyes ran over her body as quickly and greedily as a mouse on a sack of rice looking for a place to get in,” “There were pure white billows resembling pools of light over the Qala’un and Barquq minarets,” and “She was nothing but a symbol, like a deserted ruin that evokes exalted historic memories.” He also writes many humorously cynical lines, like “Ridwan was so proud they were there that his pride almost obscured his grief,” and “But life is full of prostitutes of various types. Some are cabinet ministers and others authors.” The Cairo Trilogy is 1323 pages long. Sometimes my attention waned. But it is full of great scenes, fine writing, authentic people, Cairene culture, human nature, ironic humor, devastating tragedy, and all sorts of interesting ideas about love, families, religion, politics, philosophy, life, and death. Readers fond of classic world literature should like it. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University