Set in the 1930s and published in 1945, Cairo Modern is, by turns, an ironic, satirical, farcical, and, ultimately, cynical morality tale which takes place in a country in which life’s most basic guiding principles are still undetermined. As the novel opens, four college students, all due to graduate that year, are arguing moral principles, one planning to live his life according to “the principles that God Almighty has decreed,” while others argue in favor of science as the new religion, materialism, social liberation, and even love as guiding principles. Among the students, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im is the poorest, living on a pittance, which is all his father and mother can provide him. His father, unable to work, has only enough money to survive for one month after Mahgub graduates on May, so finding a job is truly a matter of the whole family’s survival for Mahgub. When Mahgub contacts a former neighbor, Salim Al-Ikhshidi, for help, Al-Ikhshidi lays out the facts of life regarding government jobs like his own—certain people will help him in exchange for a flat fee or a portion of his salary over several years—unless he can find a wife among the daughters of ministers. Here Mahfouz pens a wicked satire of the lure of wealth, the arrogance of power, and the willingness to sacrifice principle for expediency.
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Posted in 1: 2009 Reviews, Egypt, Experimental on Oct 20th, 2009
Twenty-five years after Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz wrote this novel, it has been released in English by the University of Cairo Press. An unusual book, it is more a catalog of all the rulers of Egypt since the First Kingdom than a novel in the traditional sense. Each ruler has been summoned to appear for his own trial at the celestial Hall of Justice, where Osiris reposes on his golden throne, with Isis and Horus flanking him. Each ruler must present his own case, after which the before the throne covergods and the other Immortals deliberate and assign him to the place where he will spend his afterlife–Paradise, the Inferno, or the Place of Insignificance, between the two, neither Heaven nor Hell. Thoth, Scribe of the Gods, sits at Osiris’s feet, recording the proceedings in the Book of All.
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Always focusing on aspects of Egyptian social and political history in his novels, Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz here depicts three generations of one family as they try to survive the socially tumultuous period between the Six Day War with Israel in 1967 and the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. This tumultuous period was not only a time in which the nation suffered blows to its national self-image, both at home and among its neighboring Arab states, because of its military losses, but also a time of enormous economic hardships. Sadat had turned away from the Soviets, with whom Nasser had had a close association, and had established the Infitah, his attempt to establish a free-market economy in the desperately poor country. Alternating points of view among Muhtashimi Zayed, his grandson Elwan Fawwaz Muhtashimi, and Elwan’s fiancée of eleven years, Mahfouz creates a novel which shows the domestic difficulties faced by educated Egyptian city-dwellers as they try to live their lives under this unpopular, less structured new economic system.
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Naguib Mahfouz is a never-ending source of literary surprises, and in this unusual and often charming novel from 1948, newly translated and republished by the American University of Cairo, Mahfouz writes his only Freudian, psychological study, an analysis of a young Egyptian, Karim Ru’ba Laz. Karim is so dominated by his mother that he is unable to make a single decision or form a single successful relationship with the outside world. When the novel opens, his mother has just died, and Karim, in his mid-twenties, is devastated. Though he believes that “people who write are, generally speaking, people who aren’t alive,” he recognizes that he was not really alive before his mother’s death. He hopes that writing will allow him “to remember her and to recover her life…[so that] I may be able to repair the thread of my life that’s been broken.”
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Set in a ten-story building built in 1934 and located in downtown Cairo, the Yacoubian building was once the ultimate in luxury, located in an area in which the most elegant of European activities took place and where Europhiles gathered to eat, drink and socialize. In the ensuing years, the Yacoubian Building has changed its character, as has the surrounding neighborhood, and it is now a microcosm of life in Egypt. Using a conversational and unpretentious style to create characters that the reader comes to care about, Alaa Al Aswany shows his characters’ home life in the Yacoubian Building, their dreams and goals, the nature of life in the city at large, and the characters’ impediments to success. No one at the Yacoubian Building is fully secure in any aspect of his/her life. Al Aswany’s remarkable study of the conversion of one character into a committed Islamist, though it is not the main plot, will resonate with westerners who read it, as it speaks more clearly than anything else I’ve read on why someone would take this route. Simple in style, beautifully descriptive of daily life, insightful regarding the humanity of his characters, and filled with the kind of detail that enables the very best novels to communicate on an emotional level with readers from other cultures, Alaa Al Aswany’s novel has depicted Egypt with all its variety, its energy, and its hopes within the microcosm of the Yacoubian Building.
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Eleven years after the publication of Fugitive Pieces, her only other novel (and winner of the Orange Prize), Canadian author Anne Michaels has published a monumental philosophical novel which is also exciting to read for its characters and their conflicts. Avery Escher is a young engineer in 1964 when he and his wife Jean travel to Egypt’s Abu Simbel, where he is charged with the task of helping to remove the Great Temple and reconstruct it in the cliff sixty feet higher. Gushing water, which will be released when the Aswan Dam is finished, will flood the area where the temple lies. Avery’s family has also worked on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
A third plot line involves man’s desire to honor and preserve the past, though the present has changed it irrevocably, and takes place in Warsaw, following World War II, after the departure of the German and Russian occupiers. The city decides to rebuild its central historical core to look exactly the way it did before the war, using plans hidden and preserved by polytechnic students during the war and historical artifacts scavenged from the rubble. The reconstructed city, thought “successful” by its builders, never feels real to many of the people who live there, however—its heart is missing.
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In this powerful 1974 novella by Naguib Mafouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, a narrator stops in at the Karnak Café, an off-the-beaten-path café in Cairo run by Qurunfula, a former belly dancer, famous because she raised her craft to the level of true art. Recognizing her immediately, despite the passage of time since her prime, the narrator, a great admirer, stays and visits. He is soon seduced by the atmosphere in the café and by the charm of a small group of regulars–three old men, three young people, and the PR director of a company—who, along with the steward behind the bar, a waiter, and the bootblack, visit each other every day at the café and create their own urban “family” while responding to some key moments in contemporary Egyptian history. The three young people and their fates become the focus of the narrator when the young people inexplicably disappear for several months.
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The last entry in the Cairo series of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, this book, written in 1987, is considered his last novel. But it really is not a novel in the traditional sense. The book has no beginning, middle, and end, and no real plot. There is no standard chronology or strong characters who develop fully during the action. In a bold experiment, Mahfouz uses the traditional Arab biographical dictionary as his structural model for the book. These dictionaries came into use in the ninth century, recording the lives of influential people from all walks of life in single-paragraph entries. Creating sixty-seven individual biographies, Mahfouz arranges them according to the Arab alphabetical order of the characters’ first names, each entry being a personal anecdote which adds life to the book and resembles a short story.
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