Palace Walk (Cairo Trilogy)

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Summary: A tale of affection, humour and sensitivity
Review: The first volume in Mr Mahfouz's trilogy - Bayn al-quasrayn is its original title in Arabic - is set in Cairo a few months before the beginning of the revolution that ultimately lead to the independence of Egypt from the British Rule on April 7, 1919 (incidentally the year Mr Mahfouz was born). This magnificent tale tells the story of the Abd al-Jawad family who live in Palace Walk. Ahmed Abd al-Jawad and his wife Amina have two daughters, Khadija and Aisha, and three sons: Yasin is a secretary at al-Nashin school and the son of his father's previous marriage to Haniya, Fahmy is a law student and Kamal, a 10 year old boy.
As the reader follows the joys, sorrows and temptations of each member of the Abd al-Jawad family, he discovers what life used to be like in Cairo at the beginning of the last century. Mr Mahfouz's prose is full of psychological insight, both cultural and social observations and the tale is told with great affection, humour and sensitivity. It is also worth praising William Maynard Hutchinsons's achievement as a translator in this edition.

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Summary: Amazing, and really informative as well
Review: This is the first novel in the trilogy of books that was a major reason that Mahfouz managed to win the Nobel Prize in literature. It is great at taking you inside the life of a Egyptian family whose father owns a profitable shop. It works great as a novel, with fascinating characters, many memorable scenes, and a slowly unfolding plot, but it is also enormously valuable for the light it shines on the concerns and interests of everyday Egyptians. It is set at the end of WW I, after which the winning allies broke up the Ottoman Empire and therefore gave Egyptian a degree of independence, but one that relies heavily on European influences.

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Summary: He writes of us all.
Review: This novel is the 4th Mahfouz that I have read and though I've loved them all, this one stands out as a masterpiece. At one level it is an historical interplay of the resistance to the subjugation of the Egyptian nation by the British at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Then there is the story of a family of powerfully drawn characters whose destinies are the subject of this first book- indeed all three books of this trilogy. Their lives, naturally are played out within the historical events and behind those cloistered doors where the matriarch, Amina, must stay overlong and dare not leave without permission. The daughters must never be seen, and yet one is so bold to attempt it. Hypocrisy and rigidity seem to be the ruling traits of the all-powerful father whom the children both worship and dread. Ironically, by the end of the novel, privy to his inner thoughts, my Western mind could accomodate this absolute tyrant whose equal in life or literature I have not met. Indeed, I never felt that I could not understand these otherwise historical, unfamiliar people, they were all well within my grasp. The author wrote them to be lived with.
But the most breathtaking moments in this book came with Mahfouz writing about the universal conditions of life without psychology or intellectualization. He uses Islam for description- yes- but he uses his soul and experience far more. When a child has a fright for instance- a mother says- it isn't transitory- but like a kind of halo where bats congregate- where the jinn enter and where evil spirits damage a life. Isn't this PTSD? Without the psychobabble that erases the true meaning of how pain keeps on leaving you open to more of it? The man can truly transcend cultures- he writes of all of us.

Rating:
Summary: A family saga, the first in the Cairo Trilogy
Review: Wow. Wow, wow, wow, what a masterpiece. Nagib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize (the first Arab author so honored), popularized the craft of the novel in the Arab world, and gained worldwide fame - and it all started with Palace Walk, a good old-fashioned family saga that follows 3 generations in the extended middle-class al-Sayyid Ahmad family in Cairo at the end of WWI.
Palace Walk was the first introduction many of us in the Western World had to what it was/is like for women living in the Arab nations, their cloistered, uneducated, persecuted, and insular existence - but it also points up the power they are able to wield from their miniscule pedestals.
Best portrayed, however, is al-Sayyid himself, a man who lives by conflicting tenets: he gives voice to living by the Koran, but he is a bon vivant man-about-town in Cairo's night clubs every night, rules the women of his family with an iron fist, and terrorizes his sons.
Start with this one, and if you like it, then move on to Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. Especially with the current focus on the Middle East, readers will come away with a solid understanding of how some of the present situations in that most foreign of regions came to pass.