TIMELESS RHYTHMS OF AN EGYPTIAN FAMILY

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: Wednesday, February 28, 1990
Page: 43
Section: LIVING

Perhaps the most important of these are the three volumes of "The Cairo Trilogy," which the novelist, then 45, began in 1956. Though these are the books that consolidated Mahfouz's reputation as the leading novelist in Arabic, they had never been translated into English. "Palace Walk," the first volume, has just been issued, and the following books will appear over the next two years.

"Palace Walk" is a novel about a traditional Muslim family in the rapidly changing Cairo of the years just before 1919. Al-Sayyid Ahmad is a merchant- grocer and a domestic tyrant. His wife and children have totally surrendered to his will, according to scriptural doctrine -- his idealistic son Fahmy; Yasin, his libertine son from a previous marriage; the child Kamal; and his sequestered women: his wife, Amina, their beautiful daughter, Aisha, and their homely daughter, Khadija.

Much of the novel is devoted to the immemorial rhythms of family life behind the walls of the house on Palace Walk, the morning baking of bread, the coffee-hour conversations of the mother and her children, the teasing and bickering among the siblings, the yearnings each of them feels to escape a tyranny they are bound to by religious law but a tyranny that they also love and respect. Aisha peers through the latticework at a young officer and wishes for marriage -- a prospect that seems distant for her older and plainer sister. The male children are freer to come and go -- Fahmy gets caught up in student demonstrations against the British occupation; Kamal strikes up dangerous friendships with British soldiers; Yasin is a chip off the old block who goes out looking for a good time. Without any sense of self-contradiction Al-Sayyid Ahmad himself leads a life far freer than he permits his family -- a mildly libertine life, in fact, in which he plays the tambourine, drinks wine and makes love to beautiful and acquiescent women from another social class.

For leisurely page after leisurely page nothing much seems to happen, although these same pages are rich in psychological insight and cultural observation. Describing Amina with her mother, Mahfouz writes, "The two women might have been a single person with her image reflected forward to the future or back into the past. In either case, the difference between the original and its reflection revealed the terrible struggle raging between the laws of heredity, attempting to keep things the same, and the law of time, pushing for change and a finale."

But Mahfouz also recounts important and upsetting events. On the domestic scene there are marriages, a divorce, a temporary banishment, childbirth, death, all of which we see in the context of larger political currents and social change that will alter many things in family life but leave others unchanged.

Before embarking on "The Cairo Trilogy," Mahfouz systematically read the major 19th-century novels of England, France and Russia -- Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Balzac, Zola. The solid, slow, painstaking manner of the 19th-century realists is the manner of "Palace Walk"; a streak of humor in the midst of this is a welcome surprise. So is the construction of vivid, almost theatrical scenes such as the one in which Yasin, visiting a house of loose entertainment for the first time, discovers that his upright father is a regular visitor there.

What makes Mahfouz's manner so striking and original is that he is writing about a society and a way of thinking almost unimaginably remote from those of the European novel. For example, dialogue is obviously one of the principal resources of the European novelist and it is for Mahfouz, too, but he must use it in a completely different way. In this world people very seldom say directly what is on their mind, even within the confines of close friendship or the immediate family; their conversation largely consists of ritual formulas of politeness, aphorism ("After a few months as tasty as olive oil, your bride turns into a dose of castor oil") and suitable quotation from the Koran. But these angled conversations, as Mahfouz renders them, are more unmistakable than enigmatic in their content.

Other aspects of Mahfouz's majestic and capacious accomplishment must be viewed through the scrim of a translation that does not seem very satisfactory. A reader who has no Arabic cannot assess the accuracy of the work by William M. Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny, but could legitimately wish that the translators were more familiar with the rhythms, tones and resources of English. In his own language Mahfouz is celebrated for the classical elegance of his style; this English is alternately stodgy, clumsy and jarringly anachronistic. Cloistered Arab maidens in Cairo 75 years ago may have wished for freeer glamorous lives, but it seems unlikely that they would have wished to "doll themselves up"; the sons of Al-Sayyid Ahmad might not describe their father as "one of the great skirt-chasers" in a society without skirts.

dyer4 ;02/26 CORCOR;02/28,15:34 WEDBUK28