Palace Walk: The Cairo Trilogy, Volume 1

Twelve years ago, I spent several months living in Egypt. I am an American woman, and at that time, I found much of the culture and behavior of Egyptians to be confusing. Since that time, I have married a Moroccan, and have lived in Morocco for the past ten years. I now feel that I understand much about Arab culture. Just recently, a friend recommended I read the Cairo trilogy. I began with Palace Walk, and haven't yet read the others. This book is SUPERB. Westerners have trouble understanding how Middle Easterners THINK. This book is so wonderful because it takes you inside the mind of each of the characters, in turn, chapter-by-chapter, showing you how each one of them thinks, and allowing you to see their motivations for their behavior. One person commmented in their book review that the majority of the book concentrated on the male characters. There is a reason for this. Egyptian society is mostly about men, not about women. Even as the society modernizes, the THINKING stays the same. Mahfuz has done a masterful character study of each character in the book, as they go therough their daily lives. Without yet having read the two subsequent books, I expect that I will get more in depth into the women's lives in Sugar Street, because this is the house to which the two female daughters have moved upon their marriages to two brothers.In the past, I have tried to read some other books by this author, and just couldn't get into them. These books are different. They really do merit the Nobel Prize. Reading them now, after being immersed in the Arab culture for 12 years, I see so many more things than I would have noticed had I read the books first. But living in this culture, I can see how accurate they are, and how the men really DO behave and think like the characters in these books! Aside from the all this, the story line is wonderful, too. I had trouble putting the book down after having read the first few pages. I recommend these books to anyone who would really like to understand the Middle Eastern culture.

In this first volume of the Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz reconstructs in great detail the everyday life of pre-independence Egypt through the story of one extended family. In many ways it's like an Egyptian version of those 19th century English novels by Eliot and Dickens that are filled with detail, description, a multitude of characters and social types (although I in no way intend some kind of neo/proto-colonial comparison here -- that's just what it reminded me of) I found it a little hard to get into at first, but once I got in I couldn't put it down and read the entire trilogy straight through. This is the kind of book that immerses you in a total world, and the trilogy a series of books that you can live in and live with over the course of a week or two. I also found I learned a lot about Egyptian history and culture and the city of Cairo during this period just by reading these books.

I first read this book in Kuwait. My dog-eared copy still has sand in the pages, so they make a desert noise when I turn them. It always takes me straight back...Mahfouz is not easy for an American reader. We like to know what's about to happen, and we like the story to "get there" in a few strokes (witness Tom Clancy.) The language is beautiful--too beautiful for many Americans-- and the setting is so real, so evocative that I can smell Egypt when I'm reading this trilogy (or is that the sand again?)If you feel like you need to warm up to this series, I suggest that you start with "Miramar" or, better yet, "Arabian Nights and Days." Mahfouz's work is always allegorical; characters reflect the passage of their era, and the language is part of that reflection. Many other reviewers have complained that they "don't get the language"-- well, I can read Arabic as well, and I have stabbed at the original text before, so I can safely tell you that (like anything in the Middle East) language is *everything.* Once you understand that, you can start understanding the people who live there.This book begins the saga of a family in crisis. It isn't a single event, but a slow evolution brought on by the irrepressible challenge of modernity. Young people want to shake off old traditions...Adults misbehave in secret...And in Cairo, the home becomes a place where secrets are kept hidden from those within while it protects secrets on the outside. It is an allegory of the Egyptian soul in the age of independence. The trilogy metes these secrets out one by one, until the walls that "protect" inside and outside begin to crumble. People must make new lives and develop new self-identities.This is all the more important whan you consider that Mahfouz is something of a prisoner in his own home--radical Jihadists have threatened his life. He has lived a VERY long time, and seen everything Egypt has gone through, so no one is better qualified to write about his country's experience in the 20th century.

"Doesn't function like a Western novel"? Does the reviewer who wrote that think that all novels need function like Western ones?The novel is not an indigenous form to Arabic literature, and the first Arabic novel was published in the 1910's or 1920's in Egypt. Yet Middle Eastern writers, with Mahfouz at their head, have taken this foreign form and appropriated it, infusing their own cultural values and linguistic lyricism. How is literature to evolve if everyone must write in the same way? We owe thanks to the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis for this wonderful translation of "Palace Walk"; she read it in French and enjoyed it so much that she set the wheels in motion to get an English translation onto American bookshelves. Since then many of Mahfouz's novels and novellas have been published by Doubleday. I own most if not all of them, and they are fantastic. I'd like to add something about the difficulties of translation. Mahfouz's Arabic is too poetic and complex for me to understand, but the fact that the English translation is so lyrical and can stand on its own is testament to the greatness of the original work.Reading literature from other cultures should open our minds and help us to come closer to global understanding. It's true that I have a far more intense bond with Mahfouz's work than a non-Egyptian or non-Middle Easterner would have, but he is such a consummate genius that he moves me as well, deeply.In addition, the reviewer's opinion that the characters have not changed strikes me as either misinformed or born of bias. The characters do change, but you have to read the whole Trilogy to see just how much. You also have to understand that change does take time, and in Egypt things usually move pretty slowly, though they are punctuated with political events and social upheavals such as Mahfouz describes.Read the Cairo Trilogy, and then read it again after a year or so. Read Mahfouz's other books, especially the controversial "Children of the Alley" (a.k.a. "Children of Gebelawi"), and "The Harafish," "Midaq Alley" and the novellas. He is poetry mixed with philosophy and his work should open your eyes to the beauty and pain of the world.

Naguib Mahfouz's wonderful novel Palace Walk was originally published in Arabic in 1956, and not translated to English until 1990. Why the publisher waited so long to make this beautiful and sad novel available to a wider audience is beyond me. At least, better late than never!! In broad outline, this is the story of Al-Sayyid Ahmad, a shopkeeper in Cairo during and after World War I, his wife, Amina, and the lives and courtships of their several children. The novel offers profound insight into a different culture and religion. Al-Sayyid has literally a dual personality -- petty tyrant at home, with his wife and children; bon vivant and man-about-town with his friends. Because of the harsh sexual segregation in his traditional Arab home, his wife is none the wiser, but his older sons learn of first hand then come to emulate their father's lifestyle. Although the subject matter is "small" -- a middle-class family's domestic issues -- this is unquestionably a "big" book, raising issues of religion, class, gender, and integrity. Mahfouz is also a wonderful writer, and conveys his characters with humor, insight, and clarity. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and it is easy to see why.