45. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (Fiction) 498 p.

World Lit Challenge: Egypt

This first book in Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy tells the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, a Cairo shopkeeper, his wife Amina, his sons Yasin, Fahmy, and Kamal, and his daughters Khadija and Aisha. Al-Sayyid Ahmad is a genial, charming, humorous man, but only outside the house. In his home, he is harshly strict and unfailingly critical, and his whole family fears him only a little less than they love and adore him.

Palace Walk is set at the conclusion of the First World War. Egypt is still a British Protectorate, and British and Australian soldiers are all over the city, but the Nationalist movement is growing stronger all the time.

The only quarrel I have with the book is the almost total focus on the men in the second half of the book. Khadija and Aisha’s stories are well-told in the first half of the book, but after that they almost disappear from the narrative. I would have liked to hear more about them, and I’m hoping that they (or perhaps some new female characters) will appear in the next two volumes.

The use of language in Palace Walk can be a little awkward at times, though I’m not sure how much of it can be attributed to the translation, and how much to difficulties in translating Arabic into English. Some of the odd phrasings in the novel sounded very much like English when it’s translated from Ancient Greek, so maybe Arabic has a similar structure.

Either way, the book was entertaining and interesting. It was a nice contrast to The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet, which I read just a few weeks ago, and which is set in Cairo only a few years before Palace Walk.

Books read: 45/100
Pages read: 12,948/25,000

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, World Lit Challenge