The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street (Everyman's Library)

My husband tookA second wifeWhen weddinghenna stillWas freshUpon my hands.The day he broughtHer home, herPresenceSeared myFlesh.Characters in Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy (1956-58) sometimes sing popular songs like that. The Egyptian Nobel Prize winning author’s work is a semi-autobiographical look at vivid and intense moments in the lives of the members of a Cairene family living in the old part of the city in the first half of the 20th century, when Egypt was struggling for independence from England.The middle-aged patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawad is a terrifying tyrant at home. He makes his sons wait to eat till he leaves the table, refuses to let his wife Amina leave the house, and decides who his children marry: “I’m a man. I’m the one who commands and forbids. I will not accept any criticism of my behavior. All I ask of you is to obey me. Don’t force me to discipline you.” Although Al-Sayyid is a humorless, pious Muslim man at home, when out partying with his cronies he is a pleasure seeking, joke telling, tambourine playing, song singing, alcohol abusing, womanizing playboy. Amina, who when not cooking and cleaning and supporting her children stands in her rooftop garden gazing longingly at the minarets of the mosques she can never visit, is the heart of the family. Eldest son Yasin has inherited his father’s sensual appetites without any of his self-control; middle son Fahmy is a naive law student devoted to Egyptian nationalist-independence; youngest son Kamal (based partly on Mahfouz) is a lively, loving, imaginative boy. Eldest daughter Khadija has an acerbic tongue that often makes fun of people. Youngest daughter Aisha is fair, beautiful, and unworldly.The trilogy depicts the family aging as their country changes. In the first book, Palace Walk (1956), which covers the years 1917-19, Al-Sayyid rules at home and plays outside, Amina takes care of her family while trying to visit the mosque of Al-Husayn, Yasin fails to control his lusts and discovers his father’s dual nature, Aisha and Khadija get involved in matrimony, Fahmy gets involved in revolution, and Kamal tries to understand his changing family.The second book, Palace of Desire (1957), taking place from 1924 to 1927, focuses on the now teenaged Kamal, particularly on his quest to find truth, goodness, and beauty by studying world philosophy while doubting everything in life and on his one-sided idealized love for Aida, an older girl from a wealthy family. “It seemed he had fallen in love in order to master the dictionary of pain.” Acting as a foil to Kamal’s love are the comical sexual misadventures of Yasin, who marries the wrong women for the wrong reasons, and of Al-Sayyid, who gets back in the adultery game after a five-year hiatus.Though just as funny as the first two, the third novel, Sugar Street (1958), covering 1935-44, is sadder than the first two. Here the family is really aging, especially the once vigorous patriarch and his long-suffering wife, and there is much death. “It was sad to watch a family age.” The story centers on Kamal’s “infernal vacillation” as to whether or not to marry, on his new friendship with a kindred-spirit writer, and on his his nephews, Abd, who joins the new Muslim Brotherhood, grows a beard, and becomes quite the fundamentalist, and Ahmad, who joins a Marxist magazine and becomes quite the atheist.Throughout the trilogy Mahfouz writes interesting details about Egyptian family life in the big city in the first half of the 20th century, as well as about the education and class systems, wedding, marriage, divorce, death, funeral, and religious customs, café and brothel culture, gender roles, and politics. He relishes the Egyptian tendency to spice up life and defuse stress with irony. “If our houses are destroyed [in an air raid], they’ll have the honor of being demolished by the most advanced inventions of modern science.” And the Egyptian (or Arabic?) tendency whenever too happy or proud or sad etc. to say something like, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” (The translation of the trilogy is fine, though I sometimes wished the translator would have rendered “God” and “Lord” as Allah.)In addition to particular details of Egyptian culture, Mahfouz writes about universal aspects of human nature, as in the following quotable lines: “Patriotism’s a virtue, if it’s not tainted by xenophobia”; and “People need confidential advice, consolation, joy, guidance, light, and journeys to all regions of the inhabited world and of the soul. That’s what art is.”He leads us into the heads and hearts of his characters, as in the following emotional lines: “In this manner he was afforded an opportunity to feel what a dead man might if still conscious,” “His secret flowed out of him like blood from a wound,” and “Watching her eat pastries was even sweeter than eating them himself.”He also writes wonderful similes with original, surprising, and perfectly apt vehicles, like: “His eyes ran over her body as quickly and greedily as a mouse on a sack of rice looking for a place to get in,” “There were pure white billows resembling pools of light over the Qala’un and Barquq minarets,” and “She was nothing but a symbol, like a deserted ruin that evokes exalted historic memories.”He also writes many humorously cynical lines, like “Ridwan was so proud they were there that his pride almost obscured his grief,” and “But life is full of prostitutes of various types. Some are cabinet ministers and others authors.”The Cairo Trilogy is 1323 pages long. Sometimes my attention waned. But it is full of great scenes, fine writing, authentic people, Cairene culture, human nature, ironic humor, devastating tragedy, and all sorts of interesting ideas about love, families, religion, politics, philosophy, life, and death. Readers fond of classic world literature should like it.**I read the Kindle version and noticed no typos**

Whichever way a critic chooses to assess the three books that comprise The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) one arrives at a similar conclusion: this is a magisterial work. At the level of sheer storytelling, the narrative is amazing in its depth and scope of chronicling various individuals over three generations in the al-Jawad family. For me, the most satisfying aspect of the three books is the cerebral insight in which Mahfouz investigates each major character throughout successive generations. The result is a family saga immensely rich in its range of personalities. Readers feel as though they are experiencing emotions through a kaleidoscope. Mahfouz astonishes with his ability to channel the intimate thoughts of each character in order to unveil their deepest secrets. He probes his characters' minds like a psychiatrist performing clinical evaluations to determine the source of their actions and behavior. Moreover, Mahfouz penetrates the tantalizing matters of the heart. He gives us characters in their most human form: in both their pain and joy, through their hopes and despairs, and during their perils of love and loss.The central figure spanning all three volumes is the imposing patriarch, Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. He dominates over his household with the authority of a tyrannical king. He presents himself as a man living up to the highest standards of religion and morality. By day, among his family he acts like a man of stern principles and devout prayer. Yet his hypocrisy is dually noted early on in the narrative, as he is also a man of uninhibited indulgence. By night, he carouses, drinks, and engages in adultery. He represents Mahfouz's quintessential literary focus on allegory, which is prevalent throughout most of the trilogy. Al-Sayyid Ahmad embodies someone who thinks he is free to do anything he wants without consequence, while at the same time he forbids others from the same behavior. In other words, Ahmad portrays himself as everything he is not, just as the historical backdrop of the trilogy shows how the free reign of British colonialism to do whatever it wants is anything but free of guilt.Palace Walk, volume 1 of the trilogy, shifts gears from a family saga to a historical drama when Mahfouz begins to highlight the forces and events surrounding the Egyptian revolution against the British occupation. With extraordinary realism and visceral affect, he brings to life the sights, sounds, and motives of the populace to confront the injustices of colonialism. He inserts the al-Jawad family in the hub of this maelstrom. Of the five children of al-Sayyid Ahmad, it is the middle son, the idealist and erudite Fahmy, who falls victim to martyrdom, even as his father defies him not to pledge the rebellion of 1919. The oldest son, Yasin, is from Ahmad's first marriage, and he portrays the second generation figure whose misguidance perpetuates the same sins of debauchery as his father. Ahmad's two daughters are diametrical opposites both in appearance and demeanor. The older daughter, Khadjia, has unflattering features, yet she is full of energy and seemingly cursed with a flair for sarcasm and cheekiness. Her younger sister, Aisha, is a radiant blonde with a voice like a songbird, yet she is prone to languishing and reverie. The most compelling child is the youngest, Kamal. Prone to playfulness and lies, he is mischievous with inquiry about the world and fascinated with religious studies. Like all the siblings, Kamal is terrified of his father. Then there is the matriarch, Amina, a paragon of nurturing and caring. She does for her family what any ideal mother would do, and yet she suffers the duality of pretending to turn a blind eye on her husband's transgressions. Palace Walk takes readers through the daily struggles and joys of the family up until the 1919 nationalist revolution in which Fahmy loses his life.In volume 2, Palace of Desire, the saga of the al-Jawad family recommences in 1924 with the British reaching a rapprochement with the widely popular Wafd leader, Sa'dZaghlul. In this second volume, the fate of the next generation plays out. After several affairs and scandals, Yasin attempts to find monogamy with his second wife Zaynab, but again he fails to do so. Although she is the younger sister, Aisha is wed off to Khalil Shawkat, and shortly thereafter her older sister Khadija follows suit by having her marriage arranged to Khalil's much older brother, Ibrahim. The children of both these couples are in their infancy as this novel proceeds, but the most compelling figure in volume 2 is Kamal, the youngest sibling of al-Sayyid Ahmad and Amina. Now seventeen, Kamal has passed his exams to earn his baccalaureate. Against the wishes of his father, he insists on purposing philosophical truths and the search for meaning in an existential world. Kamal's disavowal of religion places him in conflict with his father, who pledges the fundamentalist tenets of Islam. As a free thinker catapulted into the field of modern science's quest for meaning and understanding, Kamal falls victim to despondency after he suffers from the agony of unrequited love. Palace of Desire focuses on Kamal's plight as the central figure of the second generation. His modernist vision of the world, as reliant on science and reason, reflects the Wafd Party's nationalist ideology of governing the nation free from the constraints of Islam as a political system. When the second book ends with the passing of the leader Sa'd, one sees the parallel between the painful end of an era and the pain Kamal feels with his own lofty hopes for love shattering around him.By volume 3, Sugar Street, it is now 1935, and the third generation has become the focal point. This generation is most aptly depicted through the two polarizing figures of Abd al-Muni'm and Ahmad, the two headstrong sons of Khadija and Ibrahim. Abd al Muni'm grafts himself to the fanaticism preached by Shaykh Ali al-Munufi, a religious zealot devoted to the budding philosophy that the Quran's teachings should be implemented as a political system and code, even in the modern world. As leader of the Muslim Brethren, al-Munufi ensnares vulnerable young minds such as Abd al-Muni'm during a time in Egypt's history when the country's political turmoil continues to consume everyday society. On the opposing side of ideologies, Ahmad finds solace in following AdliKarim, the open-minded Editor-in-Chief of The New Man magazine. Karim views the Wafdists as the starting point of Egypt's national movement towards independence and democracy. He, however, believes the nation must go beyond developing social freedom. Ahmad latches onto Karim's ideas and supports the mission of The New Man to confront the fanatics while at the same time promoting scientific mentality. Both brothers heed the patriotic call for revolution and independence, yet both see entirely different ways of achieving liberation from British rule. With a host of other family characters, friends, and acquaintances to supplement this diversion of the brothers' philosophies, Mahfouz ultimately brings this grand trilogy to a summation with the government's mass crackdown on political activists on each side of the divide. The arrests of both Abd al Muni'm and Ahmad bring this monumental work to a close.In its totality, Mahfouz uses the three novels of The Cairo Trilogy to chart Egypt's tumultuous history through the meditations of various family members with distinctively different perceptions on life. He achieves this by also exposing and confronting the ideologies of both repressive colonialism and radical Islam. What he creates in the process is a breathtaking work of vivacity and bustle. The trilogy is allegorical and literal in his depictions of the al-Jawad family as a microcosm for the subsequent historical eras that three generations of the family endure. What stands out to me in everything that Mahfouz accomplishes is that he offers us a vast array of characters that go beyond giving us insight to the emotional chambers of their hearts. He reveals to us the essence of their souls so that we might seek to turn a mirror on ourselves and examine what it is in each of us that yearns for a better understanding of humanity and what it means to be human.Having read the trilogy as a singular work, I believe in order to gain full appreciation of the novels, it is important to read them together as one book. So much transpires and reading the books separately or out of sequence may prevent one from experiencing the significance Mahfouz assigns to certain characters in each generation. For example, the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad, is unyielding in his authority over his family from the beginning of volume 1, Palace Walk. However, with his aging and with the influence of modernity on his beliefs, he is shown as capable of changing. What is uniquely notable is that his grandson Ahmad (one of the prominent figures of volume 3, Sugar Street) clearly symbolizes tolerance and open-mindedness. To gain the full effect of this fascinating generational dichotomy requires an understanding of Ahmad the grandfather from Palace Walk. This type of symbolic contrast between characters occurs throughout the three novels, but without knowledge of what certain characters are like early in their lives, the effect of who they are in different volumes is not as impactful.

I like the Everyman version of books. The bindings are solid, the attached bookmark ribbon is useful and the print is easy to read. This book is 3 stories about the daily lives of a family that is living in Cairo in the 1920's. It is easy to read. It gives an insight into the muslim mindset. There is plenty of graphic sex and use of drugs like cocaine and opium. This is 3 stories in one book but they are all related. It is the same characters in all the stories.