Adieu Mahfouz

It turns out that I read Palace Walk at a relevant time. Nobel Prize-winner (the first to write in Arabic) Naguib Mahfouz has passed away. He was 94 and had been ailing since a fall earlier in the summer. His death is a reminder to me that we may be losing a generation of authors that create sweeping, epic views of a place and time. The Latin American magical realist authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez are aging. Young English-language writers like Jonathan Safran Foer maintain the magic and sympathetic voice, but are often gimmickly; other novels, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, show society through a family's life but are harsher and more sarcastic in tone. I personally like empathy.

But back to Mahfouz. He essentially popularized the novel for Arabic audiences and brought Egypt to life at the same time. Some excerpts from the NY Times obit:

Mr. Mahfouz’s city was teeming Cairo, and his characters were its most ordinary people: civil servants and bureaucrats, grocers, shopkeepers, poor retirees, petty thieves and prostitutes, peasants and women brutalized by tradition, a people caught in the upheavals of a nation struggling through the 20th century.

[He] was often called the Egyptian Balzac for his vivid frescoes of Cairenes and their social, political and religious dilemmas. Critics compared his richly detailed Cairo with the London of Charles Dickens, the Paris of Émile Zola and the St. Petersburg of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Peter Theroux, the American translator of several major Arab novelists, wrote about completing a new version of “Children of the Alley” in 1996: “Readers of Mahfouz in any language are in thrall to his magic. The warmth of Mahfouz’s characters, the velocity of his storytelling, his gift for fluent dialogue and telling details are unique in modern Arabic literature.”

update: Here is the LA Times' obit. It's very prettily written.

Generation Gaps

I just reread Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. It's been about 10 years and a whole lot of growing up in the interim, so I was pleased to discover that many of my initial insights still seemed sound: parents and children will always struggle to simultaneously bridge and widen the gap between them; it's tragic when people are so wrapped up with negation that they deny themselves the joy of ever embracing anything; you can enjoy both a simple, sweet love story and a passionate one.

But knowing Russian history and literature enriched the story in so many ways. Reform and revolution were really starting to take hold in younger generations, and the reform had to choose between Europhilism and Slavophilism - learning from the (to be freed) serfs or teaching them, elitism or back-to-the-soil-ism. So after generations of a relatively static caste system, there was about to be room for limited social mobility, and plenty of anxiety about how that would look. The novel was published in 1862 and set in 1859 or '60, and make no mistake - this was a seminal moment in Russian history and book is firmly grounded in it. It is not an explanation of primitive Russian through the ages.

However, what makes it work for a Western audience is that the relationship between fathers and sons (i.e. parents and children) is a universal one, even in harmonious times. And certainly, the generation gaps between Boomers and their parents, and Xers and Boomers are part of the contemporary American consciousness - so we are predisposed to identify with the story of an older generation battling to maintain its hold on society while its children begin their inevitable march to dominance.

I like Turgenev quite a bit. His descriptions and characterizations are vivid, and his attention to detail - finding wonder in the smallest events - lovely. A wonderful introduction to mid-19th century Russia, a place of turmoil and boredom, impoverishment and beauty.

I found the plot

I finished Palace Walk last night and in the last 100 pages or so I found the plot. It is indeed the story of a family, and how external events (the Egyptian independence moving following the Great War) threaten to tear a happy equilibrium apart.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and will definitely read the others in the trilogy. My main quibble with Mahfouz concerns his use of stream-of-consciousness when he enters the heads of his characters. It is a useful tool for showing their internal contradictions and how they rationalize them away - but sometimes the streams are so convoluted as to be almost unreadable. Juxtaposed against the rest of his prose, these passages can be jarring. (*In fairness, this could be the fault of the translation. If anyone reads Arabic and wants to find the book and let me know, I'd be curious to find out.)

Also, if you think you might like Mahfouz but aren't in the mood for a 500 page starter novel, I also recommend the slim Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth. Weighing in at less than 200 pages, you can get a taste of Mahfouz as well as a fascinating fictionalized account of a monotheistic pharoah and his beautiful wife Nefertiti.

Old-timey Cairo

When my dear friends Lisa and Mariam up and moved to Cairo on me, I was envious, albeit not envious enough to drop everything and join them. I am fascinated by Egypt and its loooooong history, and how ancient Egyptian culture, Arab Muslim culture, and international globalism all come together there. (One thing I did learn from my favorite correspondents: there is a class of people who are "recyclers" and in the end virtually all trash ends up reused somehow.)

And yet, instead of reading about modern Egypt, I keep ending up with books that go back almost 100 years. This selection is by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz: Palace Walk, the first in his "Cairo Trilogy." Published in the 1950s, the novel seemed (to me) as though it could have taken place at any time, until the war, a hope for German victory, and Australian occupiers arises. Even then, it took me at least another 100 pages until I realized that this was World War I, not II. And now, sheepish about my lack of knowledge of Mediterranean history during the World Wars, I am grounded in the novel itself.

Palace Walk takes the reader into the lives of an upper-middle class Cairene family. The husband is a tyrant to his family, but hedonistic and charming with his friends and the ladies. One son takes after his father (but doesn't know it), another is a serious law student, and the third a naive and rambunctious youngster. The daughters are sweet, dutiful, and largely reconciled to having their lives sheltered from the outside world. The younger is a ravishing blonde; the elder capable and caustic, but unfortunately plagued with a big nose which may or may not stymie their marriage options.

And then there is the mother, Amina. She suffers with a distant and stern husband, but over the years has forgotten that she is, compared to other Cairene wives, suffering indeed. Her world revolves around custom, routine, and her beloved family.

I'm two-thirds through the book (which is 500 pages long), and haven't quite figured out whether there is a strict plot and upcoming climax. It is in some ways more like the Tolstoyan life-of-a-family epics. But I guess Mahfouz has another 2 volumes to make his narrative arc. Regardless, it's a beautiful book, and very evocative in its depiction of the scenes and sounds of colonial Cairo.

Another Egyptian Mystery

The information hasn't made it onto this blog, but many of my readers will know that I am a sucker for Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries. Peabody is a sassy archeologist in turn-of-the-(20th)century Egypt, and the matriarch of a menagerie of humans and cats. (She is also the mother of Ramses, who over the course of the series proceeds from precocious pest to broodingly romantic hero and a personal favorite fictional character.)

But I digress, as this post is actually about my Maine trip reading, Arthur Phillips' The Archeologist. Set mostly in 1922, the novel is concerned with a young archeologist, Ralph Trilipush, and his drive to discover the tomb of the mysterious early king (not Pharoah, we are instructed) and erotic poet Atum-hadu. The narrative is formed of Trilipush's journal and correspondence from Egypt back to Boston, where his funders and fiancee await, as well as letters from Mr. Ferrell, written three decades later, to the fiancee's nephew, about how he, an Australian private investigator, found himself intangled in the Trilipush case. Which, we eventually find, is filled with intrigue, murder, pretense, and a search for a king that may or may not exist.

I would stretch to make any but the most general comparisons between Phillips work and Peters' series. [On second thought, I am finding more similarities.] Peters has a doctorate in Egyptology, which grounds her works in serious scholarship, but is also aware that she is writing swashbuckling romantic mysteries at the same time. Phillips, googling reveals, was inspired by a scrap of letter to base a novel on the unfamilar topic of Egyptology. (One thing both authors do is integrate famous archeologists such as Howard Carter, discoverer of King Tut's tomb, into their work.)

Phillips' characters are enigmas, appearing through their own or others' writing. And everyone has good reason to misrepresent him or herself. Thus the reader must determine how much to trust, and which lines to read between. This can get tiresome, and I imagine some readers will put the book down rather than do so. However, it does make for an entertaining psychological mystery. To say more would reveal too much.

I was a big fan of Phillips' 2002 novel, Prague (set in Budapest, of course). Only mixed reviews kept me away from his follow-up until now. After reading both, I can say that is a more ambitious novel, but that The ArcheologistPrague is the more satisfying and successful.

The History of Love

So much for the lazy summer days (post-Nationals, at least) of my youth. Summer of '06 has had a whirlwind quality to it thus far. While I've been reading steadily, I've been posting practically not at all. But I'm here today, the last of my vacation, catching up.

Last month's book club selection was Nicole Krauss' The History of Love. I can't mention it without the aside that she is married to Jonathan Safran Foer and they are an obnoxiously talented and successful young couple. Hmph. But I can't be too grudging about it, because they are both lovely and soulful writers who have truly touched me.

The History of Love is a little too complicated to explain, but as a rough outline it follows the tale of a book "The History of Love," and its impact on its elderly author and the teenage namesake of its heroine. Plus assorted other characters. There are enough twists to keep you guessing, and while I'm pretty sure I've figured it all out by now, I am apt to agree with my librarian Adele, who claims that the novel reveals new insights upon further readings.

I found the two main characters, Leo and Alma (the younger), utterly heartbreaking and charming. Their idiosyncracies made them recognizable and above all human. And while all the characters live to various extents in worlds of their own making, their attempts to bridge distances and create connections are both funny and touching. The note Leo wears on his lapel when he goes out is just one example.

The night I finished reading, I found myself lying in bed weeping, not of our sorrow, but because of an overabundance of emotion. Krauss, like her husband, is expert at probing emotional soft spots, and manipulating them in ways that aren't overbearing, but leave lasting marks.