'PALACE' SKETCHES PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, February 7, 1991
Page: 70
Section: ARTS AND FILM

"Palace of Desire" picks up the story of the family of the prosperous merchant Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad in 1926, three years after the close of the previous volume. Al-Sayyid Ahmad has finished his period of ritual mourning for his son, Fahmy, who was killed in a demonstration against the British, and he has returned to his old licentious ways -- a license he permits to no one else in his family. The two daughters are grown up now and have families and problems of their own. Yasin, the older son from a previous marriage, has his father's vices, but not his strengths.

Kamal, the youngest son, struggles to become a writer; he is caught between two worlds, the world of his upbringing, which he loves and respects, and the world of European culture, which he is learning about through his reading and through his unrequited love for Aida, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy and Europeanized Cairo family. Change is irrevocably coming to a society that has resisted it for hundreds of years; Kamal makes plans to see a Charlie Chaplin film, and major political upheavals are taking place just beyond his horizon. Kamal is both the portrait of the artist as a young man, Naguib Mahfouz
himself, and the representative of a new and uncolonial Egypt. "I ask about your future," his father cries out, "and you reply that you want to know the origin of life and its destiny. What will you do with that? Open a booth as a fortuneteller?"

The second novel, like the first, is leisurely in its progress; it embraces a wide range of tones and stylistic strategies deriving from Mahfouz's systematic study of the major novels of England, Russia and, especially, France. It is richly descriptive of rooms and streets; it is full of incident and suggestive in psychology. Often the quality of the writing can be glimpsed through the distorting scrim of the English language. "She was cloaked in a stillness at times stained by sorrow -- like seawater that during a momentary calm becomes transparent enough to reveal what is beneath the surface." (Just occasionally, as in "Palace Walk," these Egyptians suddenly and disconcertingly speak like Americans; an irate wife scores off her husband as ''buster" and a "dummy.") The tensions of family life become universal and metaphorical because they are so rooted in the rhythms of daily life in a specific time and in a specific place. A quarrel about who found the recipe for Circassian chicken resonates in places far from its source. The dialogue is dodgy: People speak with infinite, formulaic politeness but with unmistakably different intent.

Kamal has the most vivid inner life, so Mahfouz presents him in internal monologue; Yasin, who lives through the senses, is more often presented through the outside because he is generally thinking of one thing only. One major comic scene presents Yasin calling on the mother of the woman he wishes to marry and succumbing to the mother's plump and available charms.

Perhaps a limitation of "Palace of Desire" is its dependence on the
machinery of sex farce -- brothers encountering each other in a brothel, a son marrying his father's mistress, a wife discovering her husband in bed with a whore. Mahfouz doesn't treat these events in a lubricious way; he just tends to fall back on them in order to keep up the momentum.

It's a momentum without a destination, however: There's a sense in which ''Palace of Desire" is a transitional novel. "Palace Walk" arrived at a climax and therefore seemed complete. "Palace of Desire" is less shapely of design. It is chiefly interesting as the record of the incomplete education of Kamal; much of the time Mahfouz seems to be laying the groundwork for the third volume of the trilogy. He does so with sufficient literary skill and insight into human nature to make the reader await its appearance with eagerness.

DYER ;01/31 CORCOR;02/07,18:32 BOOK07