MAHFOUZ'S RICH 'CAIRO TRILOGY' CONCLUDES
Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff
Date: Tuesday, January 28, 1992
Page: 27
Section: LIVING
With "Sugar Street," Naguib Mahfouz completed his 1,200-page "Cairo
Trilogy," the work that established and confirmed his reputation as the first
and finest novelist in the Arabic world.
"Sugar Street" was published in 1957, when its author was 46; more than
three decades later, in 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In the aftermath of that prize, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis secured the rights
to his work and arranged for the first translation into English of "The Cairo
Trilogy," as well as Mahfouz's subsequent works, eight of which have also been
published so far.
"The Cairo Trilogy" may have the widest popular appeal because its manner is
familiar to Western readers. The trilogy is the result of Mahfouz's systematic
study of the major novels of England, France and Russia, and the application
of the methods he learned there to the subject matter of his own very
different life and times -- the period that saw Egypt's painful emergence
from changeless centuries into the modern world.
The trilogy indirectly traces a panorama of a nation's history through
close attention to the detail of a family's history. In "Sugar Street," two of
the principal figures of the first volume, "Palace Walk," die; their
grandchildren are now leading their own lives and building their own future.
One is a fundamentalist Muslim, another a communist ("The one who worships God
and the one who doesn't," someone remarks, and the reply comes back, ''You
must worship the government first and foremost if you wish your life to be
free of problems"). Still another grandchild is a homosexual who uses his
beauty to advance himself and his family in the civil service.
One principal interest of the trilogy, and it is also a measure of
Mahfouz's masterly achievement, is what things change, and what things do not.
Each of the novels has a different focus. "Palace Walk," like the prologue
to Wagner's "Ring" Cycle, sets up the underlying rhythms of birth, marriage,
children and the interruption of those rhythms by death, which itself becomes
another rhythm. The momentum of the second volume, "Palace of Desire," is the
momentum of sex farce, which came as a surprise. The concerns of the book are
largely personal as the first new generation of characters assumes the
freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood -- sexual freedoms they can
exercise more openly than their fathers could.
At the close of the first volume, an idealistic young character was shot
dead in a political riot, and politics becomes the dominant theme of "Sugar
Street." Mahfouz devotes page after page to Egyptian and world politics at
the time of World War II, and at least in translation not all of this
discussion seems in character. Maybe it is better to say that some of the
characters become mouthpieces for various historical points of view. The
terms of discussion become those of debate rather than those of drama and it
is sometimes difficult for a nonspecialist reader to maintain an interest in
them. Also, Mahfouz has speeded up the leisurely pace of his narrative,
sometimes jerking ahead a few years in a sentence or two; it's almost as if he
has gotten himself into a hurry to finish (this third volume is 200 pages
shorter than the first).
Nevertheless there are wonderful things in "Sugar Street." Patterns of
image and symbol find their fulfillment -- hands, the family brazier, the
telling of stories -- and the narrative voice continues alert to every paradox
of living. "But life is full of prostitutes of various types. Some are
cabinet ministers and others authors." Characters, too, say wise and
memorable things. "In our country there are men over sixty who have youthful
minds and young people in the spring of life with a mentality as antiquated as
if they had lived a thousand years or more. This is the malady of the east."
Mahfouz's rich but uneasy social comedy continues. There are few things as
amusing, subtle and disturbing as the seduction of young Ridwan by an older
Pasha -- and who would have expected a realistic and reasonably sympathetic
portrayal of homosexuality in an Arabic novel? And there is perhaps nothing as
moving as the chapter-long internal monologue of the matriarch Amina after the
death of her husband, the dominant figure of the trilogy. Not the least of
Mahfouz's accomplishments is that his women are as complex, tragic, puzzled
and triumphant as his men, again something one would not expect from a writer
based in a culture that denied so much to women.
Ultimately that is the highest achievement of "The Cairo Trilogy" -- the
creation of memorable characters whose circumstances of life are unimaginably
remote from our own, but whose aspirations are the same. "The Cairo Trilogy"
extends our knowledge of life; it also confirms it.
DYER ;01/26 NIGRO ;01/28,11:05 BOOK28
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