Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz

(Book Review)

Started: July 23, 2018
Finished: September 14, 2018

This is the 3rd book in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz.  For the first 2 books, see my review of Palace Walk and Palace of Desires.
Now that I'm at the 3rd book, I'm not going to waste any time re-explaining what this trilogy is and what it's about.  (See my previous 2 book reviews for that.)  I'm just going to jump right into the story.
And, because it's hard not to comment on the story without spoiling it, there will be plenty of spoilers.

The Review (*SPOILERS*)
This is the most depressing, and also the most interesting, book in the trilogy.

It's depressing because Naguib Mahfouz really hammers in his point about how time destroys everything.  He is not subtle about this at all.  He just hits the reader on the head over and over and over again with this theme.

In certain literary circles, subtlety is thought to be a virtue.  And if you're of that mindset, Mahfouz's explicitness about his themes is going to be irritating.
But perhaps these things go in and out of style?  In the Arab world in the 1950s, was the writing style more explicit?  I don't know.

Anyway, be prepared for a lot of long descriptions about how miserable aging has made most of the main characters.
Mahfouz really has a depressing view of aging.  His characters start to have problems at 50, and are dying by 65. It can be a bit of a drag to read this book, and think, "Is this what the next 30 years have in store for me? Boy, life really sucks!"
Personally, however, I'm inclined, to reject Mahfouz's extreme pessimism about aging.  The older people I know have continued to be happy and productive into old age.  (Or take Donald Trump.  For all his many many faults, he does seem to be proof that one's ability to be active and participate in society is not over by age 70). 
...I don't know.  Check back on this blog in another 20 or 30 years to see how life is treating me, I guess.

Not all of Mahfouz's characters are destroyed by aging.  Some of them have also been destroyed by tragedy.  Aisha, who was so happy and carefree child at the beginning of this trilogy, has been so completely destroyed by tragedy (the deaths of her husband and children) that she is just a ghost of herself by the end.  She is still technically alive (she still eats and smokes and drinks coffee), but she has completely given up on life.
And there are a lot of characters like this--characters who were once happy at the beginning of the trilogy, but whose fortune has been reversed.  A rich family who lost all their money.  A once respectable girl who ends up working at a disreputable bar.
It's a reminder, I suppose, that although our present happiness always has the illusion of permanency, life is inherently unstable.  Everything we love could be gone tomorrow.

(...did I mention this book was depressing to read?)

But, for all that depressing stuff, this book is also the most interesting in the trilogy.  A lot of things finally happen in this book.
On a societal level, changes in Egyptian society, that have been slowly brewing for the past couple decades, are now finally beginning to happen.
In the first two books, the second generation mildly pushed back against the traditions of their parents.  But in this last book, the grandchildren have full out embraced radical politics.
And on a character level, a lot of the plot points that were set up in the first two books are now finally beginning to pay off.  I used to be confused about what the point of certain characters was, but now that I've read the whole trilogy, I can see what everyone's arc was.

And it is for that second reason that I recommend this book.  And this trilogy. It's a fascinating look on the changes in Egyptian society.  I'll comment on a few of the themes that struck me, and some other odd details, down below.

Conversations With Egyptians
I've had the opportunity to talk to a two different Egyptian friends about these books on two different occasions, so I'll just jot down a few notes here about what they told me.
Both of them told me that these books are tremendously famous in Egypt.  And that Naguib Mahfouz is looked upon as a national treasure.

I was a bit confused, because these books present an image of Egypt getting gradually more liberal over time.  But isn't Egypt well-known nowadays for being a conservative Islamic country?
They both confirmed to me that there had been a period of liberalization, but now the pendulum has indeed swing back the other way. 
"Well, then, how are Naguib Mahfouz's books regarded now?"  I asked.  "Since Naguib Mahfouz shows the gradual introduction of Western ideas into Egypt (like Darwinism and Marxism) and the gradual lessening of the patriarchal power, wouldn't these books be out of favor in a conservative Islamic Egypt?"

(...although, re-thinking it now, I may have exaggerated the liberalism of these books.  The end of the trilogy has shown some changes in Egyptian society, but it's still firmly a traditional Muslim country.  But I got the sense that Mahfouz's sympathy was with the characters who were pushing the intellectual boundaries--the transformation of Kamal into a humanist philosopher in the second book, and the transformation of Kamal's nephew Ahmed into a Marxist revolutionary in the third book--but perhaps that was just me reading in my own sympathies.)

Anyway, both of them confirmed that inspite the changing intellectual climate, Mahfouz is still as popular as ever.
One of them told me that everyone loved Naguib Mahfouz because he is the only Egyptian author who has gotten any sort of broader international recognition.  "In Egypt, the people who read novels tend to be more open minded," he said.  "So the people who actual read Mahfouz's novels aren't offended by it, because they are open minded.  And the people who don't read still love Naguib Mahfouz because he has brought prestige to Egypt.  And because they don't read, they've never discovered what is in his books, so there's no chance of them getting offended."

All of this brings me to my next topic, which is...
Changes in Egyptian Society and the Expansion of Intellectual Boundaries
This book continues the theme of the trilogy which is that every generation pushes the boundaries of progress out a little bit more.
In the first book, the eldest son Fahmy became involved in the Egyptian nationalist revolution against the English. (And he became a martyr to that movement).  In the second book, the youngest son Kamal loses his religious faith and becomes a secular humanist.
By this 3rd book, the nephews of Fahmy and Kamal have fully embraced radical politics. One of them gets involved in the Muslim Brotherhood, the other one joins the communists.  (I suspect it's intentional symbolism that neither Fahmy nor Kamal have any physical offspring.  Fahmy died young, and Kamal remained a bachelor.  But in their nephews, they have intellectual offspring.)

Like most people, I first heard of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 2012 Egyptian revolution.  I had no idea they went back all the way to the 1930s.  But it turns out they do.  (See their Wikipedia Page.  Also one of my Egyptian friends confirmed this to me in conversation--although they only recently got political power, the Muslim Brotherhood have been around for a long time).

I do have one minor complaint, however....
In my original review of Palace Walk, I mentioned that Naguib Mahfouz had a talent for writing realistic 3-dimensional characters, with the exception of Fahmy's political radicalism, which seemed to me more contrived than realistic.
It's true that young people are often attracted to radical politics, but they do not become one note political zealots.  They also have complex emotional needs and insecurities which interact with their political development in all sorts of ways.
The two brothers in Sugar Street are in danger of becoming one-note characters.  One is always talking about Muslim purity, one is always talking about the poor people.
It's also maybe just a bit too contrived to have them be brothers in the same house-hold.  On the one hand, I see what Naguib Mahfouz is going for, and there is some interesting parallelism going on with their different trajectories.  (Each brother chooses a completely different path, but they both end up in the exact same place at the end of the novel.)  But it's also a little bit too neat.  In the first half of the book especially, I had trouble taking them seriously as characters.  They seemed more like plot devices than characters.
They do, however, get more depth as the book continues, so by the time we got to the end of the book, I felt like they had been a bit more fleshed out into full characters.
Both brothers do get a bit more humanized when they encounter romantic obstacles. And, interestingly enough, both end up falling in love in ways which is challenging to their respective ideology.  (The Muslim brother falls in love with a girl who he regards as a sexual temptation.  The Communist brother falls in love with a girl who is looking for a rich husband.)

That complaint aside, I like a lot of other things about this plot.
I like the interaction between the nephews and their uncle Kamal.  Kamal had been the radical intellectual in the previous book, but now he's finding himself outflanked by his nephews.

It's also interesting to see that the radicalism of the first novel (the Egyptian nationalist revolution) has now become regarded as conservative by the younger generation:

Ahmed, the communist nephew, says at one point: "It's not unlikely that in the future we'll come to regard martyrs of the nationalist movement as we now do victims of foolish battles between tribes and clans."
At which point his Uncle Kamal reacts by thinking "Foolish battles! You fool!" Kamal thought. "Fahmy did not die in a foolish battle. But how can you be certain?" (p.30-31)

By the end of the novel, both brothers are in jail.
The family members had suspected all along that the godless communist would end up in trouble, but it's a surprise that the brother obsessed with Muslim purity also ends up in jail.
When Kamal relates the news to his friend, his friend asks: "The one who worships God and the one who doesn't?"
Kamal answers "You must worship the government first and foremost if you wish your life to be free of problems." (p.328)
So true!

The interrogating police officer, it turns out, was a friend of Fahmy's 30 years ago.  (This was actually set up back in the first book.  Fahmy did have a police officer friend who was a minor character in Palace Walk.)
The officer says: "Your lamented uncle Fahmy was a dear friend of mine.  I assume you know that he died in the spring of his life and that those of his comrades who survived now hold some of the most important [government] posts."
The police officer means this as an admonishment for the young people to respect the government their martyred uncle helped to create.  But the communist nephew Ahmad sees it instead as a call to perpetual revolution, and replies, "Allow me to ask you, sir, what condition Egypt would be in if my uncle and others like him had not sacrificed their lives." (p.320)

(Professor Grant Voth, in his analysis of this trilogy, says that Mahfouz is showing how individuals die, but society progresses.  Fahmy sacrifices his life to the nationalist revolution, but by doing so he helps create the conditions that allows his nephews to push society further.  In effect, Fahmy willed his remaining lifespan over to the next generation.)

Other Notes
* Some interesting historical details in here about life in Cairo during World War II.
I had vaguely known that there was a North Africa campaign during World War II, but I hadn't quite realized that the inhabitants of Cairo experienced bombing raids.
Naguib Mahfouz does a good job of showing how the War directly affected everyday life in Cairo.

* I suspect most readers of this book identify most with Kamal.  At least this was true of me.  (I'd be flattering myself if I called myself an "intellectual", but I am at least more inclined to books than to sports.  And I think in general the type of person who would read a trilogy like this is most likely to be the type of person who would identify with the bookish Kamal.)
So I was most invested in Kamal's progression.
There's a frustrating moment in the trilogy when Kamal is on the verge of finding love, but throws it away through hesitation and failure to act.  It's frustrating for the reader.  (You want to slap Kamal.)  But at the same time, I identified with it.  I have been there many times in my own past.
Kamal had spent the whole 2nd book in the trilogy obsessed with a girl he could not possess.  By this book, he is no longer in love with her.  But he's still fascinated with his past obsession as something that had taken on a life of its own independent of the actual girl.

The truth was that he no longer wanted Aida.  But he still wished to learn her secret, which might at least convince him that the best years of his life had not been wasted. (p.257)

This, I also felt, was something I could identify with.
At the end, we get somewhat of a conclusion to Kamal's progression.  He leaves the book with at least some sort of purpose in his life.

Kamal had long wondered what was true and what was false, but perhaps doubt was as much of an evasion of responsibility as mysticism or a passive belief in science.
"Could you be a model teacher, an exemplary husband, and a lifelong revolutionary?" he asked himself. (p.330)

But the book ends before we find out if Kamal succeeds in his new purpose.  Or if this is just one of the many phases he goes through.  (Kamal has gone through several phases before.)

Connections with Other Books I've Read
I don't know exactly what Naguib Mahfouz's politics are, but he's obviously done his research on Marxism.  (According to Wikipedia, he had some sympathies with socialist ideas).
He knows about the romance between Karl Marx and the aristocrat Jenny Von Wesphalen, and makes references to this.  (Something that I had also picked up from the biographies - of  - Karl Marx I read).  And he seems well-versed in socialist history, name dropping figures like Louis Blanc (who was prominent in the 1848 Revolution).

Links
* Fellow blogger Blogging the Canon reviews this same book here.   His takeaway?

the genius of Mahfouz is that he makes his characters so familiar and so human that they transcend the foreignness of the culture and become instantly relate-able.  Whether we speak English or Arabic or German, we all have the same emotions, and we all grow old and have the same frustrations.  I highly recommend these books, they're some of the best I've read for this blog.  

* I mentioned this book briefly before in the vlog: The Books on My Shelf Part 3: The Books I Haven't Even Started.

Video Review
Video Review HERE and embedded below:



Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky | How Come we Live in Open Society with a lot of Information and yet we Know so Little?

Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz

Subtitle: The Cairo Trilogy Volume 2
(Book Review)

Started: January 25, 2018
Finished: June 20, 2018

This is the second book in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz.
I reviewed the first book in this trilogy--Palace Walk-- last September.  In that review I talked about the history behind this trilogy, and how I got interested in it.  So I suppose that there's no point in re-hashing all of that again.  If you want more background, see my original review of Palace Walk.  Or read the Wikipedia page on the Cairo Trilogy HERE.

The key points are:
1) This trilogy was originally published in Egypt in the 1950s, and is a huge classic in Egypt and the Arab world.  (I have an Egyptian friend who confirmed this for me.)
2) I first heard about this trilogy via Grant Voth's lectures on The History of World Literature in the "The Great Courses" series (A--recommended, by the way), and my own analysis is heavily indebted to Grant Voth.

I'm also going to try to avoid repeating myself too much from my review of Palace Walk about the tone and general tenor of the trilogy.  Much of the what I said about Palace Walk in terms of the general reading experience and pacing is true for the sequel as well.  I'm going to try to contain myself to talking about what is unique about the sequel.
And I'll also be giving away a few spoilers.

The Review
This book starts out 5 years after the end of Palace Walk, and continues the chronicle of the life of a middle-class Egyptian family for several years during the 1920s.

This was a politically turbulent time in Egypt's history.  (Egypt was still trying to secure independence from Britain, but also within Egypt itself factions were beginning to fight for control.)

One of the reasons I was interested in this series in the first place was because, as a history geek, I thought I'd pick up some history from it. But unfortunately I picked up very little.  The characters make a lot of passing references to political figures and events, but it's not really explained.  (I suppose Naguib Mahfouz was not originally writing for an American audience--he was writing for Egyptians who already knew the history).  You get some sense of the turbulence happening during this period, but you don't get any details, and it doesn't really impact the plot all that much.
The good news is, you don't need any of the history to understand the plot.  Although history geeks (like myself) will be disappointed that the book doesn't give a better history lesson, all you really need to understand the story is how the current events affects the emotional state of the characters,  and this is always narrated directly.

Much more relevant than the politics is the changing of Egyptian society which is happening here.  Although it's still happening slowly.  (There are hints that the younger generation is getting new ideas, but the old generation is still firmly in control).

Another big theme of the book is aging, and how time gradually destroys people.
Grant Voth had mentioned this in his lecture.  So I had known to look out for this theme.  But actually, it's so obvious you really can't miss it.  Right from the first chapter the narration pretty much hits you over the head with this.  Characters are thinking about how they are getting old, and how they are slowing down.

The patriarch of the family, Al-Sayyid Ahmad, is 55 at the start of the book, so he's right at that age where he is transitioning from middle-aged to old age.  And his body is catching up with him.  In the previous book, he had been infamous for his romantic affairs, and for his constant partying.  But now it is harder for him to attract women, and the partying is beginning to take its toll.
It's sad to see such a strong vibrant man beginning to lose his strength.  But at the same time, the reader knows that it is useless to lament this too much, because this is only natural.  (Or maybe it's more tragic precisely because it's natural? I don't know.)
Fellow blogger Blogging the Canon opens up his own review of this book with a long lament on his own aging.  And I almost feel obligated to launch into a similar lament.   It seems almost hypocritical to talk about aging as if it were something that only affected other people.   (I'm 40 now, but the way time is rushing by, I'm worried 55 will be here before I know it.  After all, it seems like only yesterday I was writing this blog post lamenting that I was turning 27, and those past 13 years just sped by.)

But actually, that's the thing, isn't it?  The reason books like this are noteworthy is that aging happens in real life more than it does in fiction.  We age in real-life, but fictional characters usually don't age.  For example Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes stories for 40 years in real life (1187-1927) but although the writer and the readers aged during this time, the character never did.  (Okay, if you want to be technical there is one story with an elderly Sherlock Holmes, but that is the exception--you get my point).
Of course Naguib Mahfouz is not the only writer to deal with aging and the passage of time.  There's a long literary history of documenting changes in families over time.  (Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann just off the top of my head.  And I'm sure a million other books)   But I'd still argue that it is comparatively rare.

Meanwhile, while one generation is fading out in Palace of Desire, another one is rising to take it's place.  The eldest son Yasin, now 28, is taking up his father's mantle with a vengeance, and doing all the womanizing and partying that his father once did.  (The individual decays, but society progresses--Grant Voth had highlighted this as another theme of the trilogy).

But the biggest change is the youngest son, Kamal.
In the previous book, Kamal was just a little kid, and the least interesting member of the family.

At the start of the second book, however, Kamal is 17.  And he's an intellectual now.  He's suddenly gone from a little kid who only got into mischief to a young intellectual with goals and desires.  (Kamal is roughly the same age that the author Naguib Mahfouz was during this same period of history.  So I suspected--even before I read it on Wikipedia--that Kamal was somewhat based off of Naguib Mahfouz's own youth).
As Kamal advances in age from 17, 18 and 19, Palace of Desire also perfectly captures what it is to be around this age.  Because of the stream of consciousness narration style, the reader is able to get intimately into Kamal's head.
On the one hand, Kamal's obsession with philosophy and ideal love make him seem pretentious and arrogant.  He is so full of himself that occasionally he is almost unbearable.  And yet on the other hand, his portrayal evoked a nostalgia in me for my own time at 17, 18 and 19--a time when life seemed to be about pure ideals that were big and important, and these ideals made me also feel big and important purely because of my attachment to them.  Somewhere in adulthood, I lost this feeling, and life just became about the day-to-day grind.
Kamal's romantic obsession is the same way.  He is obsessed with a girl.  The reader realizes very early on that Kamal has elevated this girl to such a pedestal that he could never possibly possess her in real life.  She has become such an object of reverence and worship to him that it is impossible to imagine him actually making a move on her.
(And, boy oh boy, does this ever characterize my own adolescence to a tea!)
Then the inevitable happens, and she winds up marrying another boy.  Leaving Kamal to wallow in self-pity for several pages on end.
On the one hand, it makes Kamal a very pathetic character.  And yet at the same time, once again, it made me nostalgic for the time in my life when I had these big emotions--when this idealization of romantic love seemed real, and there were emotions and ideas in the world which were pure and bigger than yourself.

A significant portion of this book (several chapters) is dedicated to Kamal's romantic obsession.  Since the ending is entirely predictable, some readers find this frustrating or boring.  (I read a couple reviews of this opinion.)
I personally thought that these sections could get a little tedious at times, but overall I was charmed enough by Kamal's young romanticism to forgive it.

Kamal's idealism also causes a crisis of faith, and by the end of the book he has lost his faith in religion (although he still believes in God).
There's an irony here, in that Kamal was one of the few members of the family who ever took religion seriously to begin with.  His father and older brother pay lip service to Islam, but they also don't think to seriously about it, and break the rules every night with drinking and adultery.  They are culturally Muslim, but don't take the tenants of the faith seriously.  And so consequently they are never bothered by the intellectual contradictions of the faith
But it is precisely because Kamal takes the faith so seriously that he can't handle learning about the contradictions.  When he finds out that the famous Muslim saint al-Husayn is not actually buried at the local Mosque (as he had been told all his life) he is devastated.

One of the more interesting parts of the book is when the father finds out about an article on Darwin that Kamal had published.  (Grant Voth highlights this part as an illustration of how the generation clash, and how the ideas of the younger Egyptians were conflicting with their elders.)  His father asks angrily "What sect does this Darwin belong to? He's an atheist, his words are blasphemous, and reporting his theory's a reckless act. Tell me: is he one of your professors at college." (p.357)

**********************

This book is a classic.  (At least in the Arab World it's considered a classic.  And among university literary types like Grant Voth.  So I'm counting it as a classic).  But it also has all the appeals of a trashy soap opera.  So you can satisfy your high-brow and your low-brow cravings at the same time.
There's a lot of household quarrels that escalate into really big drama.

But there's also some interesting plot twists in the father and son relationship.  Both Yasin and his father end up falling in love with, and sleeping with, the same girls.
I initially read this as just cheap trashy sexual drama that somehow snuck its way into classic literature.  (And to give credit where it's due, it did make the story very interesting).
But The Washington Post review (LINK HERE) points out that this is an echo of The Brothers Karamazov, and that's probably not an accident.
Now I'm embarrassed that I didn't catch that on my own.  I read The Brothers Karamazov just last year, and should have remembered that.

...actually now that The Washington Post got me thinking about it, I'm beginning to realize there are a lot of echos of The Brothers Karamazov.  
Just like in The Brothers Karamazov, this family originally had 3 sons.  Just like in The Brothers Karamazov, each son has a different personality.  And, just like in The Brothers Karamazov, the father is a sensualist, and one of the sons is also a sensualist, and it is precisely the sensualist son that ends up competing with the father for the same women.
That, plus Kamal, as the intellectual son who also becomes the religious doubter, is a parallel for Ivan Karamazov.
All of this is probably deliberate on the part of Naguib Mahfouz.
(Of course, the parallels don't go all the way.  There's no exact parallel for Alexei Karamazov, and in the Cairo Trilogy, one of the sons is already dead.  But there's enough parallels to detect an influence).

***************

There's actually a lot more themes in this book that I haven't gotten around to, but I think I'll end this review here.  I think I've hit on the things that struck me the most.
See Blogging the Canon's review of this book here.
I had also talked about this book briefly before back in April in the vlog: The Books I'm Currently Reading .

Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below:



Link of the Day
Chomsky on Moral Relativism & Progress

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Subtitle: The Cairo Trilogy: Volume 1

(Book Review)

Finished: August 30, 2017

Why I Read This Book
I had never heard of this book until a few years ago.  But when I was in graduate school, a friend loaned me a copy of the Great Courses Series: History of World Literature by Grant L. Voth.  I used to listen to that series in the background while I did my exercise.

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz was lecture number 44 in that series, and although I had never heard of Naguib Mahfouz or the Cairo Trilogy before, Grant Voth's description of it sounded absolutely fascinating.

(Although it's technically copyrighted material, at the moment of this writing the lecture is freely available on Youtube.  You can listen to it yourself here.  Be warned, there are some spoilers).



This trilogy has been on my list of "books-to-read" ever since then.

It got a boost to the top of that list after I saw the rave review that "Blogging the Canon" gave to this book.  (His review also contains spoilers).
(Blogging the Canon is a blog I stumbled upon a few years ago.  The blogger is on a mission to read through all the great works of literature, and then blog about it.)
Blogging the Canon made comments like:

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time, hands down.  I mean, I really loved this book, almost as much as I'm loving this third, very delicious and refreshing artisan gin and tonic.  This book is brilliant.

I've been pushing for my bookclub to read this book for several months now (as I've previously related here and here).

The other bookclub members were not opposed to this book, but they wanted to wait a bit before tackling it.  The Cairo Trilogy takes place during the British occupation of Egypt, and some people felt that after we finished A Passage to India, they wanted a short break from books about British Imperialism.

...but eventually everyone came around, and we decided to do this book for Book Club.  And here I am with my review.

Sidenote:
Although I had already listened to Grant Voth's lecture on the trilogy, by the time I actually got around to reading this book, the lecture was not fresh in my mind.  (I had some vague idea that this trilogy was going to show changes in Egypt, and that it would deal with the struggle against British rule, but that was pretty much all I remembered).  So I was able to enjoy this book pretty much unspoiled. I did, however, re-listen to his lecture after I finished the book, so I'm going to borrow from some of his analysis in my review.

Background
If you didn't listen to Grant Voth's lecture, here's the quick background.  This book was originally published in Arabic in 1956, and is the first book of the Cairo Trilogy.  It was hugely influential in Egypt and Arabian literature, but it wasn't discovered in the West until Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.  Then this trilogy was translated into English.

The Review
I had wanted to read this trilogy in part because I was attracted to the historical elements of it.  I was interested in the British Empire, Egypt's struggle for independence, and the 1919 revolution (W).

As it turns out, however, this is not the focus of the book.

The main focus of the book is to document in minute detail the daily life of a middle-class Egyptian family.

Grant Voth, in his lecture, takes the historical literary perspective and identifies this novel as being part of the realist tradition and influenced by the realist writers of the late 19th century.
Personally, I was reminded of War and Peace.
When I started War and Peace, I thought I would be reading an epic tale about the Napoleonic Wars.  Instead, I found that Tolstoy's real purpose in War and Peace was to fully document everything about daily life of the upper-class in Russia at the turn of the century.  The big historical events do eventually intrude in on the novel, but not until you've gotten to know every detail about the daily lives of these characters.

It's the same with Palace Walk.
According to Grant Voth's lecture, Naguib Mahfouz was intent on documenting everything about the daily life of a time and culture which no longer existed.
By the time Naguib Mahfouz published this novel in 1956, Egypt had changed so much that the traditional conservative Egyptian family lifestyle he describes in Palace Walk no longer existed.
And (again according to Grant Voth) there are some customs and habits of Egyptian daily life during 1917 that would have been completely forgotten had they not been preserved in Mahfouz's novel.

So that was the major adjustment in expectations that I had to make as a reader.  I had to realize that this was not an epic book about war and revolution, but instead a quiet book about the daily life of a middle-class family.

The good news is that once you realize this is what you're in for, and settle yourself down for it, it's very well written.

At our bookclub, we met up once at the halfway point of this novel to discuss our thoughts so far.
Tom said he thought the book was well written, but it was moving very slowly, and going into much more detail than he wanted.  And I sympathized with that.

At the same time, we both remarked on how interesting it was to see a middle-class Islamic family from the inside.

In our discussion Tom mentioned an interesting quote from somebody or other: "A reader lives a thousand lives.  The man who never reads lives only one."*
Tom said (and I agreed with him) that this book was a perfect example of that quote.  By reading it, we have intimate access to a long ago time and a far-away culture.
I will never grow up in a Muslim country, but after having read this book, I feel like I have some idea of what it must have been like for people who did.

At the meeting, I predicted to Tom that the action would take off in the second half of the novel.  I suspected that, like War and Peace, the first half of the novel was going to be all about getting intimately so that when the big historical events finally did intrude in on the novel, they have a much bigger emotional impact because you know these characters so well.

....and that prediction turned out to be correct.

To say more would be to spoil the novel.  So I'll just leave that here for now, but I'll get into spoiler territory in my musings down below.

Various Musings (and SPOILERS warning)

On Islam
It's interesting to see Naguib Mahfouz's portrayal of a Muslim community.
Many of the traditions are different and yet... I was struck by how many more things were the same.
People who grow up in Christian communities will recognize many of the same things in this book.  Change the names from "Allah" to "Jesus", and change the "Quran" to "The Bible", and all of the religious platitudes that these characters express would be equally at home in a Christian community.
The dedication with which these characters studied the Quran, and the way they used selected verses from the Quran to debate every issue in life, reminded me of the way in Protestant schools every ideological belief is supposed to be supported by a Bible verse.
But what struck me most was the blind faith that whatever happened was part of God's ultimate plan. No misfortune or tragedy ever occurred in this community without someone asserting that it must be the will of God, and that they should trust God.
It echoed perfectly the same belief in the Christian community I grew up in, and which I still see parroted frequently by old Christian school friends on Facebook.
I don't know what Naguib Mahfouz's own religious beliefs are, but I got the sense that he was subtlety mocking this blind faith.  But perhaps that's just me reading my own agnostic biases into the book.

On Hypocrisy
A major theme of this book (one that's been commented on by every other review) is that of hypocrisy.
The father in this book holds his family to a very strict standard of Islamic morality, but he himself goes out every night to drink and have love affairs.

This got me thinking about the nature of hypocrisy.

My initial reaction was to think of all the people I knew who were similar.  I've had several Muslim friends who also regularly broke Islamic rules.
And come to that, I've known several Christian friends who regularly broke Christian rules.

In fact, as I've become an adult, I've noticed something interesting: among my former Christian school classmates, the ones who now take the most conservative views of Church doctrine often have the least concern with their own personal morality.

"Well," I thought, "Maybe this is a personality difference.  I tend to over-intellectualize everything, so I'm concerned about the connection between intellectual ideas and actions.  But not everyone is as concerned about intellectual consistency."

But then I thought about it some more, and I wondered if I wasn't being too kind to myself.  I remembered in college I used to have a roommate who was constantly accusing me of hypocrisy, because (in his view) there was a big disconnect between my altruistic liberal worldview, and my selfish middle-class lifestyle.

Maybe, when it comes down to it, we're all hypocrites, because we all have ideologies we can't possibly live up to, whether we're liberal or conservatives.

...I don't know.  I'm just thinking out-loud here.  But the point is, hypocrisy is a major theme in this book, and so it forces the reader to think about it.

On Political Evolution and Fahmy's Character
As I mentioned above, this is one of those books where the plot moves very slowly, but where you get to know the characters intimately.

Although I don't know anything about Egyptian culture in 1917, the characters all "felt" real and authentic to me.

...with one misstep.
Fahmy's political obsession comes out of nowhere.

I realize that students Fahmy's age are naturally idealistic and are naturally attracted to idealistic causes.  But nonetheless, these things do not come out of nowhere.  There is a gradually process of becoming aware of the outside political world, and forming opinions on it.
None of this was shown with Fahmy.  He was politically apathetic one day, and a political zealot the next.

It wouldn't have bothered me, except that this book is so dedicated to realism, that this one false note seemed especially out of place.

Connections With Other Books I've Read
Urabi Pasha is mentioned a few times in this book.  He was long dead by 1917, but he was mentioned as an Egyptian nationalist that the Egyptians still revered.
The story of Urabi Pasha was covered in two books that I've read: Three Empires on the Nile  by Dominic Green and The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham.
Also, the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, as it's described in Palace Walk, sounds like it was a really big deal.  In the book, daily massacres and shootings by the British troops are reported.
There may be some exaggeration going on here, but I got the impression that in 1919 there was an Amritsar happening in Egypt every day.
It seemed suspicious that I had never heard of this before, so I went back to The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997 by Piers Brendon.  And sure enough, Piers Brendon had actually covered all of this, and I had just forgotten about it.  (In my defense, there was a LOT of material in Piers Brendon's book, so I can't be expected to hold it all in active memory 3 years later.)  But the relevant pages are available on Google books HERE.
If you read those pages, Piers Brendon presents a view of atrocities on both sides--the Egyptian mob (at least according to British reports) was violent and bloodthirsty.
Naguib Mahfouz presents no such balance.  In Naguib Mahfouz's book, the Egyptians were protesting peacefully, and the British were shooting peaceful demonstrators.

Changes to Come
Because I've listened to Grant Voth's lecture, I feel like I have somewhat an idea of where this trilogy is going.  And I think that part of the reason Naguib Mahfouz documented traditional Islamic culture in such detail is because the next two books are going to show how that culture changed over time.
...But I'll have to hold off comments on that until I actually read those books.

Footnotes
* I just googled this quote, and it appears to come from George R.R. Martin of all people.  See here.

Book Club Notes

For whatever it may or may not be worth, here are some of the posts from our bookclub Facebook page.

July 27, 2017--I posted
The next book is Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. Tom has once again generously provided the book club with a PDF copy (see his post below). I'll be going to the print shop on Monday July 31. Anyone who wants a paper copy, let me know by then.
Tenative plan is to hold the first meeting on Monday, August 21. Aim to have the first 35 chapters read by that point.

July 27, 2017--I posted
Some notes about the new book (for anyone who has never heard of it before).
As always when one is suggesting books for book club, one is going off of the reputation of the book, and not one's own personal experience with the book. So it's always dangerous to recommend books one hasn't read yet. (Sorry again about Lady Chatterley's Lover).
But, for whatever it is worth, this book comes highly recommended, and sounds like it will be really cool.
I first heard of this book from the History of World Literature lectures (produced by the great courses series). Lecture 44 was devoted to The Cairo Trilogy. (Of which "Palace Walk" is the first book).
It sounded really interesting to me. But don't take my word for it. Listen for yourself and see what you think. (Or don't, if you're worried about spoilers. He does kind of summarize the plot of the book as he discusses it, so bewarned).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvwTizWQy2I&t=4s
I also saw this book highly praised on the blog: "Blogging the Canon"
http://bloggingthecanon.blogspot.com/2017/03/book-65-part-1-palace-walk-naguib.html
(Blogging the Canon isn't anyone famous. It's just a blog I stumbled across a few years ago, some guy blogging his journey to read all the books in the canon of classic literature. But for whatever it's worth, Blogging the Canon gives the book high praise.)
And lastly, The Guardian includes this book in their list of "The non-western books that every student should read"
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/nov/26/the-non-western-books-that-every-student-should-read
They say of this book ***quote***
The first part of Naguib Mahfouz’s epic Cairo Trilogy, which traces the story of the al-Jawad family over three decades to the end of World War II. Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize, lived his entire life in modest circumstances in the Egyptian capital, but was influenced both by nineteenth-century realists such as Balzac and Zola and twentieth-century modernism.
Palace Walk is set in 1917–19. The al-Jawad family is ruled over by the strict patriarch and merchant Ahmad, who keeps his wife and daughters in seclusion, while taking full advantage of the pleasures offered by the sleazier backstreets of Cairo. His five children are, in one way or another, engaged in a struggle to find their own identities, while labouring under the twin regimes of their father and the British colonial authorities. But the novel is very far from schematic. It’s at once a tremendously readable family saga and a novel of adolescent and political awakening. The characters are fully realised and the book teems with the sights, sounds, aromas and bustle of the city. The climactic chapters, which unfold against the backdrop of a demonstration against the British authorities, successfully interweave the personal and social themes of the book. It’s a novel that achieves the rare feat of being deeply satisfying on both a political and an emotional level.
***End quote***
And that's all I know about this book. (If you follow those 3 links, you'll know as much as me.) But hopefully it will be good

August 17, 2017--Tom Posted
Okay, I have to admit that Mahfouz's use of figurative language is wearing me down. There's a simile or metaphor every other paragraph at this rate. It's always "so and so resembled such and such," "similarly blah and blah," "it was like when a bleh bleh did bleh".
He's done a great job giving depth to his characters. I just wish he would trust in his readers to understand the emotions and situations without resorting to needless imagery.

August 30, 2017--I posted
So apparently there was a 1964 movie of this book. Just watched this clip on youtube. Can't understand a word of the arabic, but having read this part of the book I at least have a rough idea of what is going on.
The production values actually look pretty good considering this was a foreign film from the 1960s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00esOM4I6qg



Tom Commented:
Oh, guess I should have mentioned that I have the film. We could watch it. I totally forgot I downloaded it.
I Replied:
 Subtitles?
Tom Replied:
Yeah, but i haven't checked to see if they sync up well. I'll get back to you on that. If not, I can always edit them.
I Replied:
If we have a watchable copy with subtitles on our hands, I'd totally be up for watching it. Maybe at the next meeting we can make a plan for a movie night
I Later Replied:
Found the whole movie on Youtube. It has subtitles, but unfortunately the subtitles don't show up well on the screen and are hard to read:
https://youtu.be/Ias1l5nAQNA


Apparently the movie is one of the most important movies in Egyptian cinema history:
https://lsa.umich.edu/neareast/news-events/all-events/archived-events/2013/04/egypt-movie-night---featuring-palace-walk.html?fref=gc&dti=860238697452630


August 31, 2017--I posted
Okay, after getting to that really depressing ending, I needed something to lighten me up a bit. And this video helped:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ITL-VnfoE



August 31, 2017--I posted
Okay, confession time. I re-watched this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvwTizWQy2I&t=34s
I had seen it before, but I didn't remember the details of it well, and it was all a bit hazy in my mind, so it didn't really spoil the book for me.
Now that I know who the characters are, however, it sticks in my mind more, and I'm afraid by re-watching it I've gone ahead and spoiled major details of the 2nd and 3rd novel.
I couldn't help myself though. After that ending to the first novel, I felt like I just had to know what was going to happen to this family.
So, the bad news is I've now gone and spoiled plot points of the 2nd and 3rd novel for myself.
The good news is, though, I feel like after watching this video, I absolutely have to keep reading this trilogy. The way he describes it, it sounds like everything in the first novel is just set up so the reader can see the changes in the 2nd and 3rd novel. And it sounds like there will be some real interesting changes coming up in the next novel

August 31, 2017--I posted
I've been finding what appear to be more modern movie versions of Palace Walk. (I can't understand Arabic, but these scenes are definitely straight out of the novel). It looks like there might have been a TV miniseries based on Palace Walk in the 1980s or something? But I can't find any information on it when I search Google. Anyone know anything?
https://youtu.be/Xq-PVFkm94g

 It looks like the mini-series ran for a total of 17 episodes. More or less faithful to the book as far as I can make out by just dipping into episodes here and there:
https://youtu.be/B7x1GE0Rekw



September 5, 2017--I posted
Possible fodder for discussion tomorrow: How well does this account match of the 1919 revolution match what was described in the novel? (Click on the link for what is hopefully the relevant pages of this book on Google Books preview)
https://books.google.com.vn/books?id=NnSn4TwzubsC&pg=PA328&lpg=PA328&dq=The+Decline+and+Fall+of+the+British+Empire%3A+1781-1997+by+Piers+Brendon+Egypt+1919&source=bl&ots=Ypi91zsgng&sig=WMg0O6eg7hlPWgNwQIP3sOrlQmo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjtz6bblY3WAhXEMo8KHatnDvoQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&q=The%20Decline%20and%20Fall%20of%20the%20British%20Empire%3A%201781-1997%20by%20Piers%20Brendon%20Egypt%201919&f=false

Tom Commented:

Well, i definitely don't remember a part in the book where a british soldier gets murdered, danced on, and covered in urine. Jeez.

Video Review
Video Review here and embedded below:



Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky (September 07, 2017) - The American Dream