Recently, I've been consumed by trilogies, finishing up first the Maddaddam trilogy and now Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. I enjoy that in my unemployment I have the luxury of more time to read and am excited about maintaining reading for pleasure when I start working. As a teacher I always had something to reread for school, which would always take precedence over pleasure reading, but now I have the complete freedom to read what I want when I want.
Prior to reading these books, I had read some of Mahfouz's short stories and taught one of them, "Half a Day," but I happened to pick Palace Walk from a shelf in my classroom and then continued with Palace of Desire and Sugar Street more out of a desire to continue to follow the lives of Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family than out of a love for the first novel. In reading all of them, I was struck by the same feeling: while feeling an increasing love for the characters and their unique challenges, I always wondered when something was going to happen. What was the point of these novels at all? Yet, something did happen time and time again. People died, others mourned for them. People married, babies soon followed. War and revolution were a consistent backdrop. Yet, I never shook the feeling that nothing ever happened. That life just continued.
I believe that in this apparent contradiction lies the power of these novels, the reason that Mahfouz is a Nobel Prize winning writer and not just some guy writing about people in Cairo. The rhythm of The Cairo Trilogy captures the rhythm of life itself. Change comes on suddenly and then fades into the background. When Amina visits the mosque of al-Husayn for the first time and breaks her collarbone, Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's discovery of this fact rattles the family. Yet, years later Amina is free to come and go as she pleases, and Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's wrath is the stuff of legend not the present reality. His grandchildren cannot even imagine what life was like under his oppressive regime, a regime that felt completely inescapable to his children during their own youths. Fahmy's death shakes everyone to the core, but they must move on, Yasin even marrying Fahmy's infatuation Maryam for a time.
Not everyone moves on quickly from tragedy. Aisha is the greatest example of what happens when we cling too strongly to the past. Her physical beauty is destroyed and replaced by anxiety and depression. She fades into the background of the narrative almost as if she is no longer living. Ahmad Abd al-Jawad himself also fades from the center of the narrative as he is confined to his home before his death. While he reveled in his extravagant lifestyle during his youth, we see the toll that too much food and drink can take on a person in his and his friends' deaths. Even Kamal, whose turmoil over Aida forms much of the conflict of Palace of Desire, loses the vitality that informed his desire to become a philosopher and to try and answer the big questions of existence. Both he and his nephew Ahmad come to the realization that he has not been successful in his quest to understand existence. Ahmad must admit that his "uncle does not pay enough attention to these matters [the class struggle/need for a socialist revolution]," that in his attempts to understand the world Kamal has distanced himself from it and rejected any responsibility to change it. Kamal himself feels helpless, having lost chances with Aida and then Budur and opportunities for success and notoriety.
Ahmad, Abd al Muni'm, and Ridwan exemplify the plurality of possibilities for young people in a society where there is no longer just one way to exist. Ahmad, a Marxist, wants to destroy capitalist oppression and finds a partner who is intellectually his superior and pushes him to think and act in new ways. Abd al Muni'm, a member of the Muslim Brethren, clings to a traditional society that has never really existed and signals the beginning of the fundamentalist movement. Ridwan is idealized by his father Yasin because of his success but struggles with hiding his homosexuality and the question of why others suggest he must get married to do so. Each of these young men represents an extreme divergent path, and each is punished by society for the path he chooses. While in some ways they point to a more a meaningful way of living as they embrace and develop their own identities, there seems to be little hope for the future as the freedom to be oneself does not exist.
Where these novels are so successful is in the way that Mahfouz so expertly captures the ebb and flow of life and how our experiences impact us differently to form who we are. We see warnings everywhere around us about the paths we take, yet we often do not heed these warnings as we are drawn down paths through some combination of our physical needs and experiences. Mahfouz allows us to see many possible means of existence and their effects over the course of generations.
Prior to reading these books, I had read some of Mahfouz's short stories and taught one of them, "Half a Day," but I happened to pick Palace Walk from a shelf in my classroom and then continued with Palace of Desire and Sugar Street more out of a desire to continue to follow the lives of Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family than out of a love for the first novel. In reading all of them, I was struck by the same feeling: while feeling an increasing love for the characters and their unique challenges, I always wondered when something was going to happen. What was the point of these novels at all? Yet, something did happen time and time again. People died, others mourned for them. People married, babies soon followed. War and revolution were a consistent backdrop. Yet, I never shook the feeling that nothing ever happened. That life just continued.
I believe that in this apparent contradiction lies the power of these novels, the reason that Mahfouz is a Nobel Prize winning writer and not just some guy writing about people in Cairo. The rhythm of The Cairo Trilogy captures the rhythm of life itself. Change comes on suddenly and then fades into the background. When Amina visits the mosque of al-Husayn for the first time and breaks her collarbone, Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's discovery of this fact rattles the family. Yet, years later Amina is free to come and go as she pleases, and Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's wrath is the stuff of legend not the present reality. His grandchildren cannot even imagine what life was like under his oppressive regime, a regime that felt completely inescapable to his children during their own youths. Fahmy's death shakes everyone to the core, but they must move on, Yasin even marrying Fahmy's infatuation Maryam for a time.
Not everyone moves on quickly from tragedy. Aisha is the greatest example of what happens when we cling too strongly to the past. Her physical beauty is destroyed and replaced by anxiety and depression. She fades into the background of the narrative almost as if she is no longer living. Ahmad Abd al-Jawad himself also fades from the center of the narrative as he is confined to his home before his death. While he reveled in his extravagant lifestyle during his youth, we see the toll that too much food and drink can take on a person in his and his friends' deaths. Even Kamal, whose turmoil over Aida forms much of the conflict of Palace of Desire, loses the vitality that informed his desire to become a philosopher and to try and answer the big questions of existence. Both he and his nephew Ahmad come to the realization that he has not been successful in his quest to understand existence. Ahmad must admit that his "uncle does not pay enough attention to these matters [the class struggle/need for a socialist revolution]," that in his attempts to understand the world Kamal has distanced himself from it and rejected any responsibility to change it. Kamal himself feels helpless, having lost chances with Aida and then Budur and opportunities for success and notoriety.
Ahmad, Abd al Muni'm, and Ridwan exemplify the plurality of possibilities for young people in a society where there is no longer just one way to exist. Ahmad, a Marxist, wants to destroy capitalist oppression and finds a partner who is intellectually his superior and pushes him to think and act in new ways. Abd al Muni'm, a member of the Muslim Brethren, clings to a traditional society that has never really existed and signals the beginning of the fundamentalist movement. Ridwan is idealized by his father Yasin because of his success but struggles with hiding his homosexuality and the question of why others suggest he must get married to do so. Each of these young men represents an extreme divergent path, and each is punished by society for the path he chooses. While in some ways they point to a more a meaningful way of living as they embrace and develop their own identities, there seems to be little hope for the future as the freedom to be oneself does not exist.
Where these novels are so successful is in the way that Mahfouz so expertly captures the ebb and flow of life and how our experiences impact us differently to form who we are. We see warnings everywhere around us about the paths we take, yet we often do not heed these warnings as we are drawn down paths through some combination of our physical needs and experiences. Mahfouz allows us to see many possible means of existence and their effects over the course of generations.
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