MAHFOUZ'S 'ADRIFT ON THE NILE' CAPTURES A DISENCHANTED CLASS
Author: By Robert Taylor, Special to the Globe
Date: Wednesday, February 17, 1993
Page: 29
Section: LIVING
The plot of "Adrift on the Nile," the latest novel by the Egyptian writer
and Nobel prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz, follows a classic and effective
pattern.
A group of people gather in a specific setting and form a minisociety of
their own, like the young aristocrats of "The Decameron," or the tubercular
patients of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain." Mahfouz introduces his readers
to a cross-section of friends, upper-class Cairenes who gather night after
night on a houseboat moored along the banks of the Nile. They are educated,
intelligent and creative; they are also brittle, alienated and neurotic, and
indeed the operative word for their behavior lies in the title's ''adrift."
The time is the late 1960s. Middle-aged products of a bourgeois class
displaced by Nasser, Mahfouz's characters spend their evenings around a water
pipe smoking the hallucinatory drug kef, practicing mild flirtations, mocking
convention and reflecting on the futility of doing anything at all.
The owner of the houseboat, Anis Zaki, is a reluctant civil servant
enslaved by kef. Because of his torpid unreliability, his superiors are
docking his salary; when he turns in a report that he imagines is thorough and
detailed, he's astounded to discover it consists of a single line. In danger
of losing his post, he doesn't care. A drowsy numbness fills his senses while
he forgets the wife and child he has lost.
Mahfouz's opening lines establish Anis' petulant mood:
"April. Month of dust and lies. The long, high-ceilinged office a gloomy
storeroom for cigarette smoke. On the shelves the files enjoy an easeful
death. How diverting they must find the civil servant at work, carrying out,
with utterly serious mien, utterly trivial tasks. Recording the arrival of
registered post. Filing. Incoming mail. Outgoing mail. Ants, cockroaches, and
spiders, and the smell of dust stealing in through the closed windows."
Opposed to the drudgery of the office is the illusory world of the
houseboat. The night watchman Amm Amduh, a gigantic old man whose piety and
poise contrast with the superficiality of the kef smokers, not only guards the
boat but serves as a kind of general factotum for Anis Zaki. Their master-
servant relationship, the disillusioned cynic weighted against the timeless
verities of an ascetic believer, is an important narrative thread. After all,
it is hard to sustain interest in so passive and drug-besotted a figure as
Anis, but Mahfouz manages to work up considerable tension by flanking him with
more active, robust characters.
Chief among these is a representative of the new professional woman, a
young journalist and aspiring playright named Samara. Extremely purposeful,
she is fascinated by the group as an emotional laboratory, and perhaps she
herself feels the allure of the forbidden, but at length bursts out, "Shame on
you all! None of you can tell the difference between seriousness and
frivolity!" To which Anis replies: "Seriousness and frivolity are two names
for the same thing."
This sophistry is put to the test on a festival night, when everybody piles
into a car for a reckless ride to the Pyramids. The drive ends in tragedy and
provides the only true complication in Mahfouz's spare design. "Adrift on the
Nile" is not a story in which much happens outwardly; rather, its subtle
portrayal of class alienation evokes the author's major achievement, the Cairo
trilogy of "Palace Walk," "Palace of Desire" and "Sugar Street." The theme of
a man blinded by kef-soaked escapism to the changing environment around him
suggests not only Anis' problem, but also the problem of a disenchanted
bourgeois class in a traditional culture, confronting the slippery relativity
of the modern world.
JAHIGG;02/13 NKELLY;02/17,15:48 BOOK17
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